Breaking down how Kentucky fans should feel about John Calipari divorce, Arkansas move

The college basketball world got a shock when Kentucky head coach John Calipari decided to leave the program for Arkansas. It was a massive move that left many fans unsure of how to feel.

Things had gotten tense between Calipari and Kentucky fans amid his recent struggles in the NCAA Tournament and some even wanted him fired. Because of that, as Andy Staples said to James Fletcher on Andy Staples On3, it seems like fans should be happy about the divorce.

“It is wild,” Andy Staples said. “I listened to the Twitter spaces that Matt Jones from Kentucky Sports Radio did earlier on Sunday night, and it was interesting hearing Kentucky fans talk about it because they sounded somewhat like angry at Calipari for leaving. I got the sense two weeks ago they wanted him to leave. Like, shouldn’t they be thanking him for saving them $33 million and allowing them to go find another coach because it seemed like Cal’s welcome had worn thin there?”

For his part, Fletcher sees a major issue that is upsetting Kentucky fans. It’s that Calipari left them for another SEC job and they didn’t have the chance to be the ones to move on from him.

“It is embarrassing though. You don’t want to be the one that’s told, ‘You didn’t fire me. I left.’ They wanted the firing. They wanted to be able to take the victory lap around and say, ‘Look, you did not live up to expectations at Kentucky.’ Instead, John Calipari can go to Arkansas and say, ‘I left Kentucky for this opportunity for all of the great things that are here,'” Fletcher said.

“And if you’re a Kentucky fan that’s going to hurt every time he says it and you know he’s gonna say it because you’re going to look at it, saying, ‘Hold up, now. You didn’t live up to our expectations and now you can go pitch to these recruits at Arkansas, to the donors at Arkansas, to the fans at Arkansas, that you left this situation in order to be in that situation. It’s just got to sting to be left like that, even if they wanted him to leave under different circumstances.”

At that point, Staples pointed out that this has happened to Kentucky before. Tubby Smith chose to leave for the Minnesota job when things could have been going better at Kentucky. At that time, people were happy with his choice.

“I just feel like you don’t let that sting because it’s happened to Kentucky before. They wanted to get rid of Tubby Smith and he takes the Minnesota job. I was actually talking to a neighbor of mine yesterday who grew up near Lexington and he was talking about his mother-in-law happened to be on the plane when Tubby Smith got on to leave Lexington. Everybody was saying, ‘Thank you, coach. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for everything you’ve done.’ And she’s like, ‘Should I know who you are?’ And he was probably like, ‘Oh, thank God you don’t know me. I can go to Minnesota in peace now.’ That’s what this is.”

When Tubby Smith left Kentucky, he had won a national championship but the team hadn’t gotten out of the round of 32 for two straight seasons. Similarly, Calipari has a championship early in his Kentucky tenure but has recently struggled in the early rounds of the NCAA Tournament.

Andy Staples compared the John Calipari exit to Jimbo Fisher

Andy Staples went on to make an interesting comparison between John Calipari leaving Kentucky and Jimbo Fisher leaving Florida State.

“This is, to put it in football terms, this is Jimbo Fisher to Texas A&M from Florida State where Florida State fans were pretty mad at him, not for leaving but being mad at him for the way things were going, and he’s going to a place where the money is great, the resources are there, the expectations are high,” Staples said.

“Now, I will say, the one difference between Fisher going to A&M in football and Calipari going to Arkansas in basketball is Arkansas basketball has gotten it done before. Like, this is not a pipe dream. We’ve seen it happen before.”

Despite all of that, Fletcher did see issues with the comparison to Tubby Smith and Jimbo Fisher. It’s the programs that they left for. Texas A&M did not have the same recent success that Arkansas basketball has had. Minnesota basketball, meanwhile, isn’t on the same level as Kentucky.

“That’s the big difference between both of those, especially the Tubby Smith one that you mentioned there. It’s that when Tubby Smith leaves for Minnesota, there’s this kind of thought that thank you for getting out of the way so that we can hire the next guy and become what we believe we should be. With John Calipari, this is not Minnesota. With all due respect to that program, they’ve had some success throughout their history,” Fletcher said.

“Arkansas, is a pretty storied and historic program, a program that’s so big that at the start of this coaching search the names that were floated out there were some of the top coaches in the profession and such a big school that they’re in the mix for John Calipari. So, this Arkansas job is not as much of a downward move that some fans would like it to be if they’re going to let Calipari off the hook for making that move, and I think the other thing is that he’s got to come back. You’ve got to play. Tubby Smith was out of sight out of mind…with John Calipari going to Arkansas, you’re going to play two, three, four times a year.”