John Calipari and the Razor-Thin Margins of Legacy
The battle for the soul of college basketball is won and done. So where does that leave Coach Cal?
They are dressed in blue and ready for blood, thousands of them, pouring through downtown Lexington, Kentucky, on a Saturday night in February, layered, liquored up, and ready to scream. “My guess is I’m going to get booed,” John Calipari said earlier in the week about his return to the place where he’d won more than 400 games, where he’d coached 50 future NBA draft picks and nine future All-NBA players, and where he’d paved the way for the transformation of an entire sport. His guess was right.
Calipari doesn’t emerge during warm-ups, forcing the crowd to slowly work its way into a lather, but when he’s finally introduced, they erupt. Some Kentucky fans will later point out to me that the student section is responsible for most of the bile—older fans are mostly more measured—and this is true. I talked with a few students before the game, every conversation brief and venomous, the phrases “Cats by 90” and “Fuck Cal” and “No way we lose” all uttered before they returned to heckling the Arkansas players who were warming up.
On press row, I sit next to The Ringer’s J. Kyle Mann, himself a Kentuckian and a scholar of all things Wildcats, and he tells me the hype surrounding this game is unlike anything he’s seen at Rupp. When Kentucky starts the game by hitting its first four 3s to take an early lead, my ears seem to shut off, as if in self-protection, and my vision blurs.
It must be strange for Calipari. He has the second-most wins in Kentucky basketball history, trailing only the man whose name is on the arena, Adolph Rupp. But when he left last spring for Fayetteville, it wasn’t necessarily because he was dying to move to Northwest Arkansas. Rather, a large contingent of Cats fans just wanted him gone. After yet another NCAA tournament disappointment, Cal’s program seemed to be in decline. “Everybody wanted him to leave,” says Lexington Herald-Leader columnist Mark Story, “and he left. So why are you booing him?”
Down on the court, listening to the chorus, there is Calipari, arguably the defining figure of college basketball in the 21st century. Not just because he won—plenty of coaches win, and if you ask many Cats fans, they’ll say Calipari didn’t win enough—but because of how he did it. This is a man who never apologized for recruiting players he knew would spend only a year on campus, who seemed as interested in his players’ financial futures as in his team’s win-loss record, who once called the day when five Wildcats were drafted in the first round “the biggest day in the history of Kentucky’s program.” A man who long preached that players should be compensated and given the freedom to seek the best situations for themselves, even if it meant transferring. A man who has since seen his once-unpopular practices become the law of the land. And the man who, as the sport he loves has remade itself in his image, has begun to see his grip on excellence slip away.
It’s unclear where, exactly, the 66-year-old Calipari now stands in the pecking order of college basketball royalty. Unlike coaching titans Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams, he’s never cemented his greatness with multiple national titles. And unlike UConn’s Dan Hurley, Auburn’s Bruce Pearl, or Alabama’s Nate Oats, he doesn’t seem to have mastered what it takes to win big in this era. On this night in Lexington, though, he displays some of the magic that has long made him an icon in the sport. The five-star prospects he recruited out of high school mesh well with the five-star prospects he recruited to come with him from Kentucky. His team’s defense is swarming, their shots are falling, and by midway through the second half, the arena feels less like a cauldron than a library. When the final buzzer sounds on an 89-79 win for his Razorbacks, Calipari moves quickly through the handshake line before he turns around and gallops off the court, back to the visitors locker room.
In the postgame presser, he doesn’t gloat. He’s been around far too long to take that particular bait. He credits his players and praises new Kentucky coach Mark Pope. And he acknowledges just how surreal the whole night feels. “I looked up a couple times,” he says, “and I thought we were losing. Because I kept looking at Kentucky instead of Arkansas.”
If you go back and read the transcript of Calipari’s introductory press conference at Kentucky when he was hired in 2009, it seems like a relic of a bygone era. He speaks of Kentucky as a job he’d dreamed of since his first visit to Lexington in 1992. He references a conversation with Rick Pitino, the former Kentucky coach turned enemy when he took the head-coaching job at Louisville. A reporter shames Calipari for going back on his word, days after declaring on camera that he wouldn’t leave the University of Memphis. At one point, he utters the sentence “I’m just a regular guy, folks.” Another reporter references Pitino, who, like Tubby Smith and Joe B. Hall before him, won exactly one national championship in Lexington. “Since your buddy Pitino has one of those banners,” the reporter says, “you have to win two, correct?”
The expectation was that he would. Cal, at 50 years old, was in the prime of his coaching career. He’d already taken a UMass team, led by Marcus Camby, to a Final Four in 1996. And he’d just taken another smaller program, Memphis, to an overtime loss in the national title game, coaching a team led by future NBA MVP Derrick Rose. Cal had spent years proving that he could lure elite talent to under-resourced programs. Now he was taking the reins of the bluest blue blood in the land. “You know what?” Calipari said. “We’re going to chase.”
And for 15 years, that was what they did. He and his teams chased still more banners, trying to add to the seven that had been hung before his arrival. They chased Final Fours, reaching four during his tenure. And they chased the most talented high school basketball players in the country, with Calipari running his program in a way that challenged the status quo of NCAA basketball. He delivered a simple message to recruits: Every other coach is looking out for themselves. I’m looking out for you. Players spoke of postseason meetings in which Calipari told them they had to go pro. The money was too great, the chance to change their family’s station too important to risk staying another year. And, quite frankly, sometimes they had to go because Cal had already recruited their replacement, an even more talented high school hooper who would take their spot if they decided to stick around.
Calipari’s first recruiting class in Lexington brought future NBA All-Stars John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins to campus, along with longtime pro Eric Bledsoe. Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist followed two years later, leading the Wildcats to the 2012 national title and going first and second in the draft, the only time in NBA history the top two picks came from the same school. Julius Randle and the famed Harrison twins followed a couple of years later, Karl-Anthony Towns and Devin Booker in the same class a year after that. In 2024, more than 25 percent of the NBA’s All-Stars (seven out of 26) had played for Calipari at Kentucky: Davis, Randle, Towns, Booker, Tyrese Maxey, Bam Adebayo, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. As Calipari pointed out at the time, that didn’t even include De’Aaron Fox, who was named an All-Star in 2023.
None of this made Calipari very popular. Before he even got to Kentucky, he’d had two Final Four appearances vacated—one because Camby, the star of his 1996 UMass team, had taken money from agents, and another because Rose reportedly had someone else take the SAT for him. Writing for Slate in 2010, Charles P. Pierce (who was later a colleague of mine and many other Ringer employees at Grantland) wrote a piece on Calipari with the headline “The Sleaziest Coach in a Sleazy Game.” That same year, a piece on SB Nation’s Texas blog called him “a caricature of sleaze.” In 2018, Bleacher Report built an entire package around Cal’s supposed ethical shortcomings: “John Calipari and the 16 Scummiest Coaches in College Basketball.” The case was straightforward. Cal’s players had broken NCAA rules at UMass and Memphis. Surely, when armed with Kentucky’s resources, they would find even more audacious ways to exploit the system.
Now, of course, these arguments feel archaic. Today, college athletes are widely viewed as Calipari insisted they should be. Players are paid for their name, image, and likeness, and they’re on their way to being paid a share of their program’s revenue. Seemingly everyone, even the most staunch traditionalists of college sports, including Nick Saban and Mike Krzyzewski, believes that players deserve to be paid. (How those payments are regulated is another matter, but everyone seems to blame the NCAA for that chaos—not individual players or coaches.) Cal long believed that players should have the autonomy to make the best decisions for themselves—now, they’re able to transfer for more playing time, a better chance at winning, or even a higher paycheck, whenever they’d like.
Besides, Calipari’s players have always shown deep loyalty to him, even long after leaving his program. In 2018, I wrote a piece for The Ringer calling Calipari the “most accomplished recruiter” in the history of college basketball. Former players described the way he spoke plainly to the reality of their lives as young men with enormous demands on their time and attention, on the precipice of dreams fulfilled and millions of dollars earned, with no clue whom they should listen to or trust. “You just know,” former no. 1 recruit Nerlens Noel told me, “this is a guy that’s never gonna bullshit you.” Kidd-Gilchrist pointed to his experience as a top-five recruit, surrounded by people he felt he couldn’t trust. “Cal wasn’t like that at all,” he said. “I remember he watched me play once in high school and said, ‘I was really disappointed in what I saw today.’ He would tell me stuff I didn’t want to hear. But something about that makes you realize you can trust him.”
Years before that piece, in 2012, when I was a young reporter fresh out of J-school, another publication assigned me to write a story with a very specific angle: “Why Everyone Hates Coach Cal.” This seemed easy enough, given the tenor of the headlines about him at the time. The piece never ran, though, in part because I kept calling people who had every reason to hate him, only for them to tell me that they actually liked the guy instead. Including Matt Pilgrim, one of the players Cal had supposedly run off when he got to Kentucky. “It was heartbreaking,” Pilgrim told me of his transfer to Oklahoma State, after Calipari told him he didn’t have a place for him on the roster. “But during the time I spent around him, he did nothing but try to help me.”
Calipari’s mantra was simple: His Kentucky program would always be players first. And it worked. He became the second-winningest coach in program history, took the Wildcats to four Final Fours. His 2014-15 team would have gone down as one of the greatest in the history of the sport if not for one loss—to Wisconsin, in the national semifinal, which ended the Cats’ undefeated season. But eventually, the entire sport became players first. Other elite coaches started courting one-and-done players, and still other elite coaches realized that they didn’t have to recruit the best high school players when they could just scour the transfer portal instead. Calipari continued to recruit elite talents, but suddenly, his teams weren’t winning. Calipari helped bring NCAA basketball into the 21st century. But did the sport have any room for him anymore?
That night in Lexington in February, with Calipari stalking the visiting sideline, the Wildcats faithful erupted when another former coach walked onto the court: Tubby Smith. The contrast was something to behold. Smith coached the Cats from 1997 to 2007; he won a national title in ’98 but never returned to another Final Four. Like Cal, he left Kentucky for another job, with Minnesota. But on this night, he was shown on the jumbotron to wild conflagrations of applause.
Someday, years from now, Calipari will likely get the same response in Lexington. (“Once Kentucky and Calipari are no longer competing with each other,” Story says, “I think it will be very easy for UK fans to remember the good times he provided here.”) But Cal and Smith share something else. By the end of each of their tenures, Cats fans weren’t particularly sad to see them go. Neither was fired, but on several mornings during his last year in Lexington, Smith woke up to For Sale signs in his front yard. Calipari seemed to have stalled out after going four consecutive seasons without a trip to the Sweet 16 and nearly a decade since his last trip to the Final Four. The 15 years he spent in Lexington gave him the second-longest tenure of any Kentucky coach, behind only Rupp. The amount of high-level talent he sent to the NBA over that period has no modern precedent. But in the end, he never won another national title after cutting down the nets with Davis and Kidd-Gilchrist in 2012. And at Kentucky, winning exactly one national championship doesn’t make a coach particularly special at all.
Possible reasons for the low title count abound. Some fans long criticized him for a lack of in-game adjustments. When analytics pushed coaches to rely largely on layups and 3s, Calipari’s teams often seemed content with midrange jumpers. And by the end of the 2010s, Cal had lost his stranglehold on recruiting. Kentucky’s classes were still elite but were no longer overwhelming enough to make up for the lack of veteran leadership inherent to a program built on one-and-dones. During that same decade, Coach K shifted from his earlier refusal to recruit players he knew would be gone after a single season. Duke started landing recruits like Jabari Parker, Jayson Tatum, and Zion Williamson, the kinds of prospects who had seemed to always end up in Lexington in the early years of Cal’s time in town. “When Duke went full-scale into the one-and-dones, that sort of split the talent pool,” says Story. You could win with freshmen when you had all the best freshmen. But losing even a few of them slid Kentucky from its perch.
Among Kentucky fans I talked to, the most popular opinion was that Cal’s methods of roster building may have been effective for bolstering his résumé as a producer of NBA talent but were woefully ill-suited to the task of winning championships. “I think the whole fan base wanted someone to come in and build something where the players are growing and you’re growing with them,” says Brett, a 33-year-old Wildcat fan I met in Nashville, where he was for the SEC tournament last week. “But with Cal’s method, you never really got that.” Brett is sitting with his father, Ron, who’s 61. “I don’t think the players had time to adjust to playing for the school,” Ron says. “They were getting ready for what came next from the moment they got to Kentucky.”
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Now, of course, that could describe almost the entire college basketball landscape. Rosters are rebuilt on the fly, year after year, largely through the transfer portal. “As the transfer rules got more liberal,” says Story, “the really good older players congregated on fewer teams.” Recruiting elite high school talent still matters, but the end of the rule that forced transfers to sit out a year before playing at their new school changed the equation. Today’s contenders aren’t built by recruiting teenaged athletic marvels who are bound for the lottery after a few months on campus, but by scouring the nation for experienced high-level college basketball players, guys approaching their mid-20s who may or may not have NBA futures but could earn a nice living from NIL deals before going pro overseas. Cal had some success in the portal, most notably with 2022 National Player of the Year Oscar Tshiebwe. “He did try to change,” says Story. But several SEC rivals—at traditional football schools, no less—proved more successful at finding hidden gems. Rick Barnes at Tennessee, Pearl at Auburn, and Oats at Alabama have competed with one another for conference supremacy this decade, with Calipari’s Kentucky teams at least a rung or two below.
By the time Kentucky got upset in the first round of the 2024 NCAA tournament by 14th seed Oakland, carried by an outrageous display of shooting by Jack Gohlke, who hit 10 3s over the feebly outstretched arms of Kentucky defenders, it felt clear: This couldn’t continue. The possibility of Kentucky firing Cal felt unthinkable. For one, they would have owed him a reported $35 million buyout. But several media outlets at least raised the question of whether they should do it anyway.
Instead, Cal left on his own. Even after all the speculation that his time in Kentucky had neared its end, the move to Arkansas still landed as a shock. “It never seemed like a real possibility,” says Doc Harper, a Razorbacks fan and columnist for Best of Arkansas Sports, “until hours before it was actually announced.” Hog fans had been through their own tribulations. Arkansas has long existed as a lowercase-b blue blood, a program with six Final Fours and a national championship of its own, won in 1994 by Nolan Richardson and his iconic Forty Minutes of Hell–style team, who pressed full-court from tip-off to the final buzzer. After wandering through the college hoops wilderness for much of this century, the Razorbacks had found relevance again under coach Eric Musselman, who started at the program in 2019 and won at least 20 games in each of his first four seasons, reaching two Elite Eights and another Sweet 16.
Hog fans never imagined that Musselman would stick around forever, though. He’s long been a basketball vagabond, someone with one of the most eclectic résumés in the sport, with stints coaching the Golden State Warriors and the Continental Basketball Association’s Florida Beach Dogs, the University of Nevada–Reno Wolfpack and the G League’s Reno Bighorns. “Five years is about as long as he’d ever been anywhere,” Harper says. “It felt like things were starting to come to a natural end.” Musselman grew up in Southern California. Arkansas fans had long feared that they might lose him to UCLA. Instead, USC swooped in and lured him away. When the Calipari hire was announced, Harper says, “a lot of people were skeptical. I felt like he had probably peaked already.” Still, Calipari offered a guarantee of access to recruits and relevance in the national conversation, the knowledge, Harper says, “that we’re not gonna disappear.”
From the moment Calipari arrived in Fayetteville, he’s been followed by a Vice TV camera crew documenting his first season at Arkansas. The resulting series, called Calipari: Razor’s Edge, is a rich text. We see Calipari praying at a Catholic church in Manhattan, declaring himself “a poor, miserable sinner.” We see John Wall showing up to hang out with Cal and his Arkansas players, and we see Cal running into former Kentucky player Darius Miller, who spent six years in the NBA, and asking him, “Did you save your money?” (Miller says that he did and that if he learned anything from Cal, it was how to be cheap.)
We also see Cal adjusting to life in Fayetteville. “When I took the job,” he says in the first episode, “I said, ‘Can I see the team?’ There was no team.” So it goes in this era of college basketball. Twelve of the 13 players on last season’s roster either ran out of eligibility or entered the transfer portal. The 13th, Trevon Brazile, declared for the NBA draft before ultimately deciding to return as the team’s lone holdover.
Reading back over the coverage of Calipari’s move from Memphis to Kentucky, I was reminded of how coaches’ departures once felt like such devastating betrayals of the players who’d committed to spend the next four years under their tutelage. Now, of course, those players can just follow the coach wherever he goes next. Calipari brought three players with him from Kentucky, all former elite recruits. “I read the news,” Zvonimir Ivisic says in the documentary, “and I knew, I’m going to Arkansas. Immediately. I came to Kentucky because of John Calipari.” On-screen, he shrugs his shoulders. “Of course I’m going to leave with him.”
Early in the season, it seemed like that might have been a mistake. While Pope arrived at Kentucky and immediately established the Wildcats as an elite offensive team with firepower up and down the roster, Cal’s Razorbacks headed for disaster, starting 0-5 in conference play until beating Georgia for their first SEC win. “We broke Champagne when we beat Georgia,” Calipari told me in a postgame press conference later in the season, “because I knew we weren’t going to go 0-19.” But after that night, the Hogs went on a run, going 8-5 over their last 13 regular-season games despite six of those contests coming against ranked teams, and nearly upsetting both no. 3 Alabama and no. 1 Auburn. In a conference that Calipari has called perhaps the best in the history of college basketball—14 SEC teams made the tournament, shattering the previous record of 11—the Razorbacks finished 8-10. Now the no. 10 seed in the West region, the Razorbacks will play no. 7 seed Kansas, another team that fell short of lofty preseason expectations, on Thursday evening in Providence.
In early March, I went to see the Razorbacks play at Vanderbilt. The game was a must-win for the Razorbacks to stay on the good side of the bubble but also a tough challenge, on the road against an NCAA tournament team. Arkansas was down to just seven rotation players after losing Adou Thiero, the team’s leading scorer, and freshman Boogie Fland, a projected first-round pick. (Calipari has said that their potential return for the tournament “depends on how far we advance.”) But behind a big night from FAU transfer Johnell Davis and a 14-point second half from D.J. Wagner, the Razorbacks ran away to a 90-77 win, nearly assuring themselves a place in the tournament. Afterward, Calipari sits in a tiny meeting room tucked away in a far corner of Vanderbilt’s Memorial Gymnasium. Here, there is none of the frenzy that surrounded him in Lexington. Instead there is one Arkansas reporter, a few undergraduate student reporters covering the Commodores, a couple of cameras, and me.
Even here, even now, in an anonymous room on a Tuesday night in March, with barely any of the pomp and circumstance that have followed Cal from stop to stop throughout his entire career, he holds court. He talks about the struggles of his team and the upgrades to Vandy’s facilities. He name-checks old friends and lavishes praise on the other teams in his conference. He makes eye contact with every reporter, working to command this tiny room the same way he commands sold-out arenas.
He talks about his team. “We started 0-5, and everybody’s like, ‘It’s over. The team stinks. You can’t coach, they can’t play.’” He then starts pointing around the room. “He stinks, he stinks, that kid stinks.” He shrugs his shoulders. “There were bazooka shots at some of these kids. And they withstood it. They persevered. And I kept telling them, ‘When you get through this, you’re going to be so much stronger, mentally tougher, that there will be things later in life that happen to you that won’t faze you, that would have knocked you on your back if you hadn’t gone through this.’”
Within a sentence or two, he starts spinning it forward, looking ahead to next year and beyond, a 66-year-old man electrified by what might be next. “We got some good kids coming in,” he says, referring to the recruits who have committed to come to Fayetteville, including McDonald’s All-Americans Darius Acuff Jr. and Meleek Thomas, and a third, Nate Ament, potentially set to join them. “You’ll see who’s staying, go get some others.” No matter how the sport changes or what program he coaches, how many grays are in his hair or what seed is next to his team’s name, Cal maintains the same magnetism that has drawn talent into his orbit. “And I just want, again, Arkansas to be that team. Where the kids want to play.”
