John Calipari was hired as Kentucky’s head basketball coach in 2009 and won the SEC conference tournament 6 times in his first 9 seasons. He also appeared in the elite eight 7 times, the final four 4 times, and won the national championship once with 31 total NCAA tournament wins: more than any other coach during this 13 season stretch. 

As impressive as this is, recent struggles in the NCAA tournament have begun to overshadow Calipari’s initial success at Kentucky. In their last 4 seasons, Kentucky is 0-3 in the NCAA tournament with 2 of those losses to 14 seeds or lower and failed to qualify in the 2020-2021 season. Kentucky won only 1 SEC championship in the last 5 years and has underperformed against ranked opponents with a 15-19 record against the AP top 25.

With the lack of recent success and embarrassing endings each season, should Kentucky consider moving on from John Calipari?

A few weeks ago, I questioned in one of my articles if Calipari is still an elite coach. I said that he was in terms of his ability to recruit and develop individual talent. That said, his model of reloading year in and year out with star studded but freshmen led teams does not work, and it is time for the Wildcats to move on.

I have no question that the expectation each and every year for the Kentucky program, including its fans, is to win both conference and national championships. However, I feel like Calipari believes that the success he has had establishing Kentucky as a pipeline for NBA talent offsets the lack of tournament success.

Compare Kentucky to other bluebloods like Duke, Kansas, and UNC where there is no shortage of NBA talent, but the standard they have for themselves is championship or bust. Kentucky fans deserve better than this.

After Kentucky’s loss to Oakland in the opening round of this year’s NCAA tournament, Jay Wright shared his thoughts on Cal’s approach to the game: 

“I think he did a phenomenal job with these guys all year. You can see, they're playing against grown men. The guys on Kentucky will be far better pros than any of these guys on Oakland or any of these guys in the tournament. But they're not as good college basketball players. At this point in their careers, they're not as disciplined yet as the guys for Oakland. It's not Cal's fault. It's they're 18 years old and they're in this era where everyone is telling them how great they are. Just show up in college and you're going to win. It doesn't happen that way. And the more guys stay in college because of NIL, it's going to be tougher for young teams like this to be successful.”

I think this quote sheds an immense amount of light into what is most important to Calipari. If it were truly about winning championships, he wouldn’t rely solely on 1-and-dones as they are not as good of a college basketball player as the guys who have been in college for a few years. The fact that he is unwilling to change his approach seems to indicate that he cares more about sending more talent to the NBA than he does winning championships. 

This 1-and-done model is broken, and honestly never really worked. Kentucky has been heavily reliant on this model since 2009 with only 1 championship to show for it. The only other program to rely on the 1-and-done players (somewhat) as heavily as Kentucky is Duke who has shifted to this approach for roughly the last 12 years with only 1 championship as well.

But look at the teams who win the championship every year and you’ll find a team with experienced players. That’s not to say that teams can’t rely on 1 or 2 freshmen, but both conference and NCAA tournaments are unkind to teams that are made entirely of freshmen

I don’t think Coach Cal will change; he will forever out recruit every other program while chasing the outlier that was his 2012 class. Winning a championship in the process is just the icing on the cake. The problem is the Kentucky defense, not the offense. I don’t think freshmen play defense well coming out of high school and the way they play defense now is even worse than it was back in 2012 when Cal last won a championship.

Recently, defense has been the downfall of each Kentucky team and will continue to be until a change is made. This past season, Kentucky was ranked outside the top 100 in defensive efficiency, and the irony to this whole situation is they never found a way to stop a former 0 star high school athlete from hitting 10 3s against them.

Defense and experience win championships- under Cal, Kentucky will never have either which is why the Wildcats must move on.