Rick Barnes offers advice to John Calipari as he coaches freshmen-heavy roster

With a returning starting backcourt and a slew of seniors and super-seniors throughout the roster, Tennessee’s Rick Barnes has the opposite roster of John Calipari at Kentucky.

Barnes comes into this season with certainly across the roster and returners at nearly every position. Even the transfers he did bring in are all mostly older players, dudes in their own fourth or fifth seasons, to join a bunch of other veterans already on the roster. Meanwhile, John Calipari is turning the clock back to what worked for him in the 2010s: elite freshmen, eight in total, along with just a few returners and veterans on the 2023-24 Kentucky roster.

When asked about that stark contrast between the two teams at SEC Media Day, Barnes admitted he simply likes to have older rosters and thinks they’re especially valuable in an age where there are so many graduate students still playing ball.

“Getting old, staying old, I think is really important,” says Barnes. “You look at our league this year, this is an old league. It’s tough. It really is. Like again, I’ve got a great coaching staff, but I’ve got five guys that know what we’re trying to get done. But when you don’t have that, it does make things a little bit tougher.”

Instead of hitting the pavement running, Barnes expects Coach Cal will have to calm down and work through some kinks early on before this squad is ready to make a deep run in the tournament.

“The word that John probably doesn’t like is patience — which, you have to be really patient when you have that many young guys. It’s really because you wanna see them get better every day.”

Per Barnes, every day is a roller-coaster when trying to develop young players.

“Most young guys, they’ll have a really good day, and then the next day, not so much. And if you tell them they’ve had a guy day, you can almost bet it’s not going to be as good the next day. So, he’s got to balance a lot of different things. Any time you’re coaching young guys, knowing you just got to get them to do a couple things well early and build on it as they get older and improve.”

As frustrating and painstaking as coaching true freshman can be — especially since the sport has grown much older in the last couple years — Rick Barnes still admits that every coach in the country would love to have the level of talent that Kentucky has brought in.

“We all will tell you that, you know, talent is a good thing to have. He certainly has that and he’s a terrific coach, and our league’s got 12 good coaches.”

Barnes and Calipari are old friends and have some similar tendencies as coaches. However, in 2024, the two elite SEC coaches will be trying to take home the conference crown with completely different rosters.