Barnhart, Calipari discuss future of Kentucky basketball. ‘Both of us want to exit well.’
A day after the confirmation that John Calipari will return to lead the Kentucky men’s basketball team next season, the embattled head coach and longtime UK athletics director Mitch Barnhart formed a united front in a special television show looking ahead at the future of the program.
Barnhart and Calipari appeared on Wednesday night’s episode of ”BBN Tonight” — a production of WLEX, the official TV partner of UK Athletics — and the duo looked forward to next season.
Early in the first segment, Barnhart moved to clear up what he called “misinformation” about the relationship between the two longtime UK sports figures, a dynamic that has been painted as frosty, especially over the past few years.
“He’s been married 40-plus years. I’ve been married 40-plus years,” Barnhart said. “We know how to manage relationships. And we’ve been together for 15, so we’re sort of like semi-married.”
Calipari cut him off: “You ever had an argument with your wife?”
“Just occasionally,” Barnhart replied. “I think you and I have, too.”
“Do you always agree?” Calipari asked.
“No, we don’t always agree. … That’s part of this deal,” Barnhart said of his dealings with Calipari. “This notion that we have no relationship and stuff like that is garbage. And, you know, the way we’ve gotten through 15 years has been pretty good. And we’ve had our highs and lows, and we’ve had some things that haven’t gone exactly the way we wanted to. But by and large, I’m sitting next to a guy that I brought here 15 years ago. And we’ve been together just fine.
“I’m not a guy who gets in Coach’s business — in any of my coaches’ (business), and they’ll all tell you that. We let them do their work and try and stay out of their way. Do I wish I could be around more? Yeah, and I’ll work at that. That’s on me. But at the end of the day, I trust him to do his job. And we always want to make adjustments to get better. So let’s put the notion of ‘no relationship’ out the door.”
Barnhart talks about ‘standard’ of Kentucky basketball
Calipari, who turned 65 years old last month, was hired as Kentucky’s basketball coach following the 2008-09 season. Barnhart, who turns 65 in August, has been UK’s athletics director since 2002.
Following Kentucky’s 80-76 loss to 14-seeded Oakland in the first round of the NCAA Tournament last week, Barnhart was under immense pressure from a vocal segment of UK’s fan base that wanted to see Calipari gone, despite the Hall of Fame coach having five seasons remaining on a 10-year contract extension signed in 2019. As part of that deal, UK would have owed Calipari a buyout of $33.4 million if it parted ways with him this offseason.
There was never any indication behind the scenes that Barnhart was considering firing Calipari in the wake of the Oakland loss — the Cats’ second major upset defeat in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in the past three seasons — and there was no mention of Calipari’s job being in jeopardy during the 30-minute show Wednesday night.
Barnhart and Calipari met in the UK locker room following the coach’s postgame press conference after the loss to Oakland, and Calipari appeared on his weekly radio show Monday night, as scheduled. Barnhart and Calipari held their annual, end-of-season meeting Tuesday afternoon.
A few hours later, Barnhart released a statement confirming Calipari would return as Kentucky’s head coach for the 2024-25 season.
During the joint TV appearance Wednesday night — with Barnhart and Calipari sitting side by side in front of the camera — the UK athletics director said both men want the program to do better moving forward.
“Our fans know what the standard is. We know what the standard is,” Barnhart said. “And that’s part of it. The mantle we’ve been entrusted with is critically important to both of us.”
Kentucky has not advanced beyond the first week of March Madness since 2019, and the Wildcats have won just one game in the past four NCAA tournaments. They haven’t been to the Final Four since 2015, and the Cats haven’t won a national championship since 2012, the program’s lone NCAA title during Calipari’s tenure.
On Wednesday night, Calipari reiterated many of the talking points from his one-hour radio show two days earlier. He said he knows his team needs to improve its defense and physicality next season, and he expects his roster to “get older” following a 2023-24 campaign that featured eight freshmen and two sophomores among the program’s 12 scholarship players. Barnhart and Calipari both said the next UK team would also need more vocal leadership.
Calipari said UK would achieve that boost in experience through the transfer portal and, he hopes, the return of some of his current players. He said he will have individual meetings with each of the UK players later this week to figure out what they plan to do next.
Like he stressed Monday night, Calipari said he knows the “standard” of Kentucky basketball is winning championships and hanging banners in Rupp Arena. He said those program goals did not have to be independent of his “players first” approach.
“Everybody knows I care about the kids. They know how I am with that,” Calipari said. “But it’s not a contest. ‘Does he care about the program?’ C’mon now. This program — I’ve put my heart and soul in this program. So, yes, I care. What we do is a reflection of how we are and how much we care.”
The future of Kentucky basketball beyond Calipari
Barnhart made it clear that he has faith in Calipari to get Kentucky back to its winning ways in March, saying he has been the best in college basketball at adapting to changes in the sport’s landscape over the course of his career.
He said the emergence of the transfer portal in recent years has made it particularly difficult for a program like UK, which always has five-star recruits joining the team, in addition to the possibility of current players returning after they go through the NBA draft process.
That clashes with the timeline of players in the transfer portal, and can negatively affect Kentucky’s chances with those targets, who might choose another school while UK is still waiting to see who might come back.
“Our (situation) is unique. And for no one to recognize that is baffling to me,” Barnhart said. “… If there’s someone that can figure out how to adapt to that, he will figure that out.”
At one point in the interview, Barnhart listed off Calipari’s accolades at Kentucky — including four Final Fours in his first six seasons (but none since) and seven trips to the Elite Eight — to illustrate that he thinks UK’s current coach can get the program back to that level.
“It’s not that we don’t know how to get there. We’ve hit a patch where we haven’t,” Barnhart said. “And that is not lost on us. He and I are a little bit competitive. We certainly like to win. That has been in our DNA from the beginning of his career, and mine. We didn’t come to this program to sit here and say, ‘Hey, let’s just see if we can casually walk through this thing and sashay all the way to the end of the deal.’ I want to win.”
Both men have contracts with the university through the 2028-29 academic year, which would mean five more seasons if they see out those deals until the end.
Barnhart implied that he and Calipari discussed that fact in Tuesday’s meeting, looking at how they want to end their time at UK.
“Whatever we do in our careers, both of us want to exit well. Not a lot of people in our industry — in our enterprise of college athletics — get to exit the way you want to exit. And I want us to be able to exit well. And be able to say, ‘We left it in a really good spot for the people that came behind us.’ What ends up happening a lot of times is it gets left on the side of the track in a heap and a mess. And you say, ‘Good luck,’ to the next guy.
“That’s not what either one of us wants. We want to be good caretakers for the program. And we want to leave it in the right spot for the next person.”
This story was originally published March 27, 2024 at 8:52 PM.
