Kentucky's John Calipari is under fire in Lexington, but No. 1 recruiting class awaits

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It did not last long, but the message sent was indelible. Security guards at Rupp Arena asked the fan holding aloft a sign that said, “Please Go to Texas” to depart the Kentucky Wildcats’ game against South Carolina, but those four words and all that was contained within them could not be unseen. Especially when pictures of it were posted all over the internet.

That placard was not an advertisement for the Texas tourism bureau. It was a suggestion from a particular Kentucky fan that John Calipari pack up his Hall of Fame plaque and his Coach of the Year trophies and the memorabilia associated with the 2012 NCAA Championship, the three other Final Fours he reached at UK and the 377 wins gathered since he became Wildcats coach in 2009 and ship it all in a U-haul to any other willing program that has a vacancy for a head men’s basketball coach.

At least the wording was printable in a family publication!

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“I’ve been here 13 years now, and it’s unlike any place I’ve ever been in terms of college basketball,” Lexington sports talk host Matthew Laurance told The Sporting News. “The amount of scrutiny is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced with a sports team. Except maybe the Yankees. Those of us who are Yankees fans, sometimes we get like that.”

Understand, Laurance moved to Kentucky after living in North Carolina’s Research Triangle area for more than a decade and serving as part of the Duke basketball radio team. So it’s not like he’s never been around people crazy about college basketball.

The past few years have reminded us, though, Kentucky is different, from the reaction to the team’s substantial failure during the 2020-21 season impacted by COVID, to the first-ever first-round upset under John Calipari by Saint Peter’s in 2022, to the early struggles of the current Wildcats to the complete dismissal of the Cats Who Never Were, the 2019-20 team that finished 25-6, won the Southeastern Conference by three games but never got the chance to see how they’d fare in the NCAAs because of the cancellation of March Madness.

We have been reminded it has been nearly 1,400 days since Calipari’s Kentucky won an NCAA Tournament game, but left unexplained in that inflammatory factoid is that when the 2021 edition of March Madness began, it had been 719 days since anyone had won an NCAA Tournament game.

Wobbly Wildcats
Year Record SEC record NCAA result
2022-23 12-6 3-3 TBD
2021-22 26-8 14-4 Lost in first round
2020-21 9-16 8-9 Missed tournament
2019-20 25-6 15-3 Projected as No. 2 seed*

* - Tournament cancelled

This season began with the Wildcats, led by unanimous national player of the year Oscar Tshiebwe, ranked in the top 5 of the Associated Press poll and picked No. 1 by The Sporting News. Nothing that’s occurred since has suggested they’re that sort of team.

“We were all right in thinking: You have the most dominant player in the game coming back, and we just all kind of jumped on the numbers of the leading returning assist guy, and then you have a healthy C.J. Frederick who two years ago was the best shooter coming out of the portal, we heard about the progress Jacob Toppin made – and it just kind of felt like this was the year Kentucky had all the pieces you’re looking for,” ESPN and SEC Network analyst Jimmy Dykes told TSN.

“But we can’t always project. How good is Cason Wallace going to be? He’s solid, but he’s not John Wall or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Chris Livingston’s a good freshman; he’s not an elite freshman. So we kind of missed.”

It wasn’t exactly a smooth ride into the season for the Wildcats. Tshiebwe, upon whom UK was almost wholly reliant to function on defense last season, injured his knee in early October, required a surgical procedure to repair it and missed the first two games. Time developing chemistry within the team was lost, and there wasn’t enough talent to supersede that.

The flaws in the assembled players – 5-9 point guard Sahvir Wheeler’s defensive drawbacks, Toppin’s aversion to contact at power forward, Frederick’s search for confidence after a year lost to injury, the same for Antonio Reeves after moving up from a mid-major – have been exploited by opponents more than their strengths have been accentuated. They stood 10-6 after a stunning, almost calamitous home loss to South Carolina in early January.

“I’ve never seen, since I’ve been here, the level of vitriol directed at – mostly at Cal,” Laurance said. “So that part of it was very surprising. In a lot of ways, as someone who talks about them every day, I was frustrated, too. Because we weren’t seeing any kind of progression. People talked about: We don’t know what we’re doing on offense. And we didn’t. And then South Carolina happened, and I was afraid to get up the next morning and look at Twitter or any of the websites.”

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Because so many of Calipari’s Kentucky teams have been dominated by freshmen, it has taken a while for some of them to coalesce. The most famous example of that was in 2013-14, when the squad led by Julius Randle lost three of its final four regular-season games to hit 22-9 but were invigorated when single-elimination play began and lost by just a point to top-ranked Florida in the SEC title game and by six in the NCAA Championship game.

This is a more experienced team, with only Wallace and Livingston cracking the rotation as freshmen, but it has had difficulty finding a winning formula. Even with consecutive victories over a top-5 Tennessee squad and a Georgia team that arrived at Rupp Arena with six wins in seven games and a 3-1 SEC record, there’s no reason to believe all problems have been solved.

"There’s a lot of issues with Kentucky. Every team has issues. At the time of the South Carolina game, they were the worst defensive team in the league, points per possession and all of those things,” Dykes said. “Their offense can be stagnant. You can criticize Cal for still running a lot of the same stuff as 12 years ago – well, a lot of coaches are still doing that. But the issue for them has been defense.”

Dykes pointed to Tshiebwe’s issues defending ball screens and Wheeler’s struggle in that same situation.

In some ways, if UK was going to stop its slide and gain some confidence – and quiet its many critics – Tennessee was an ideal opponent. It would take an extraordinary performance to beat the Vols, no doubt, but they are just the type of great team against which these Wildcats have a chance.

“Tennessee is not a heavy ball screen team. They are a pass-and-screen team – pass, pass, pass, jumpshot or pass, pass, pass and throw it inside. Kentucky is built defensively to defend the pass this year better than the bounce,” Dykes said. “It was kind of the perfect storm for them to go in there, play a bigger lineup, shrink the court a little bit, guard the passes … It’s a Tennessee team that as good as they are, they can still struggle to score. It matched perfect to where Kentucky was to get right.”

There also was the matter of Wheeler’s absence from that game because of a shoulder injury, which forced Calipari to play Wallace at point guard and led him to play Frederick and Reeves together more often on the wings. It appeared to solve many of the Wildcats’ problems on defense and didn’t hurt the offense, so this became the primary lineup in the home victory over Georgia. It’s becoming harder to see Wheeler regaining his starting job.

And there was one other element of that UGa win: The day before, Calipari told reporters he was, in so many words, disappointed in the amount of time Tshiebwe was investing in improving his game. Oscar responded with an Academy Award-worthy performance: 37 points, 24 rebounds, 3 steals. Kentucky will at least have a chance in every game he dominates like that.

And when he does not, well, we have seen what can happen. People bring signs to games.

Those who expect Calipari to retreat because of the pressure have not been watching him coach for the past four decades. At 63, he is as tenacious as ever. He also has what has been described as a “lifetime contract,” with a buyout north of $40 million. Those who know him well will tell you he’s not the sort to quit competing, and certainly not to walk away from that much money.

And neither is he one who would be comfortable being anyone’s supporting act. Remember the silliness from last summer when so many became exasperated that Calipari, in campaigning for a new practice facility for Wildcats basketball, accurately described UK as a “basketball school” as opposed to football schools Alabama and Georgia? Well, Texas is most certainly a football school.

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The strangest thing is those Kentucky fans pushing the “Cal out” agenda – there are four GoFundMe accounts to raise money toward the buyout; they’ve collected a combined $10 to date – are wishing away their future because they are angry about the past. And we mean the recent past. Through the 2010s decade, Calipari’s Wildcats four times reached the Final Four, three more the Elite Eight and won more NCAA Tournament games than any other program. They rolled through All-Americans from John Wall to Anthony Davis to Karl-Anthony Towns to Tyler Ulis to P.J. Washington.

DaJuan Wagner
(Rivals.com)

And though these past three seasons have not been dreamy, Kentucky has gathered the No. 1 recruiting class in college basketball – three of the top four prospects in the 2023 class, including celebrated guard DJ Wagner (above) – in advance of next season. To beg Calipari to take some other school’s job is to, as well, ask him to take along all that elite talent.

“It’s a very impatient fan base, at times, but it’s also what makes Kentucky one of the top two or three jobs in college ball,” Dykes said. “Because they hold that program to an elite, high standard, year after year after year.

“To me, the talks of Cal going to Texas were really hot last week, so all that momentum started going: He’s lost his swagger as a coach, the game’s passed him by, and then they go and beat Tennessee and think: Hey, wait a minute. Do we really want this separation, of a guy that’s got the No. 1 recruiting class coming in, he’s just went to Tennessee and beat Rick Barnes? The brakes got pumped on that really hard by 90 percent of the fan base that was ready to get rid of him.”

Barnes is convenient to this discussion because the contention when Texas pushed him out in 2015 was, well, that the game had passed him by. After Tennessee was wise enough to hire him, the Vols won the SEC regular season in his third year. In his fourth year, they won 31 games and reached the Sweet 16. In 2022, they won the SEC Tournament.

It’s just as ludicrous to suggest Calipari hasn’t kept up with the game. Every coach has a rough cycle. Remember Duke and VCU? Remember the P.J. Hairston years at North Carolina? It’s not pleasant for the fans, perhaps even less so for the coaches.

It can be good for talk show hosts, though.

“The most boring year I ever had was the year they went 38-0. All I did, every show and every pre- and postgame show was say: Is this the best team ever? That’s all you talked about,” Laurance said. “So for me, it’s been really – it hasn’t been fun -- but it’s been really interesting as this goes day to day and see what’s going to happen.

“There’s all this other stuff that kind of goes along with being a Kentucky fan, and that’s what makes it so different than anyplace else.”

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Mike DeCourcy is a Senior Writer at The Sporting News