John Calipari to Arkansas is the basketball version of Jimbo Fisher to Texas A&M

It’s easy to find a comparison to a big-name coach agreeing late at night to take a job at Arkansas. Who can forget the image of Bobby Petrino — who had bailed on the Atlanta Falcons on the Monday of a game week — looking slightly confused as the people around him enthusiastically called the hogs near midnight in 2007?

It’s not so easy to find a comparison for what John Calipari just did in deciding to leave Kentucky for Arkansas. In fact, there probably is only one. And Petrino figures into that coach’s story as well.

Tubby Smith left Kentucky for Minnesota after Big Blue Nation soured on him, but that move isn’t analogous because Minnesota didn’t have the same expectations or history as Arkansas. Shaka Smart left Texas for Marquette, but that felt more like a coach understanding he worked better at a different kind of place. In football, we saw Dennis Franchione run from sky-high expectations at Alabama to the (then slightly less intense) expectations at Texas A&M. But Fran wasn’t successful at Alabama the way Calipari was at Kentucky. Only one move feels similar.

This is the basketball version of Jimbo Fisher leaving Florida State’s football program to take over at Texas A&M. It’s up to Calipari to make sure it doesn’t end for him the way it ended for Fisher in College Station. And it’s up to Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart to make sure he doesn’t stumble the way Florida State’s leadership did immediately after Fisher left.

Unfortunately, Calipari did not get a deal done with Arkansas in time for a midnight Woo Pig Sooie as Sunday turned to Monday. A deal appears imminent, though. Coach Cal will call those hogs, and then he’ll start calling recruits who probably will want to listen thanks to an NIL war chest full of Tyson chicken money. 

Meanwhile, Kentucky will begin the search for a new coach in a drastically different place than it would have been two weeks ago, when Barnhart seriously considered firing Calipari after the Wildcats got bounced by Oakland in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Firing Calipari meant paying a $33 million buyout over the next five years. That number would have dropped had Calipari taken another job, but it’s still a massive financial commitment. It might have limited the amount Kentucky could pay in a buyout to hire away a sitting college head coach. 

Now? Calipari gets to work with a group of people excited by him instead of tired of him. And Kentucky gets to hire a coach who might be better equipped — or simply willing — to build a roster the way it needs to be built in this era of college basketball. Calipari did Kentucky a massive favor. It remains to be seen whether he did himself one.

This is where Calipari’s story can diverge from Fisher’s. Right now, Calipari is a coach with one national title on his resume who — through the prism of hindsight — might have won that one because of one very special player. (Anthony Davis for Calipari, Jameis Winston for Fisher.) Like Fisher in Tallahassee, Calipari’s record was good but unsatisfying following the national title. Calipari did better than Fisher post-title, reaching the national title game in 2014 and the Final Four in 2015, but he ultimately fell below the line of what the Kentucky fanbase considers acceptable.

The Wildcats haven’t advanced past the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament since 2019. They missed the tournament in 2021 and got bounced by No. 15 seed St. Peters in 2022 and No. 14 seed Oakland this year.

Here’s an intriguing list: Bam Adebayo, Malik Monk, D’Aaron Fox, Tyler Herro, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Tyrese Maxey. Yes, that’s a list of some of the most fun young players in the NBA. It’s also a list of Kentucky players who never made a Final Four. 

Asked after the Oakland loss if he’d consider using the transfer portal more to build an older roster rather than relying on so many freshmen, Calipari offered an answer that further enraged the Kentucky fanbase. 

“I’ve done this with young teams my whole career, and it’s going to be hard for me to change that,” Calipari said. “Because we’ve helped so many young people and their families that I don’t see myself just saying, ‘Okay, we’re not going to recruit freshmen.’ I mean, the thing that we’ve been blessed with is families bring their sons to us and we do what we’re supposed to do to help them prepare for the rest of their lives.”

At Arkansas, Calipari needs to understand that his job is to win the most championships, not to produce the most first-rounders. Yes, those things do go hand-in-hand sometimes. But they don’t always dovetail.

Sometimes, a team might only need to start one NBA-bound freshman and a veteran core. Take, for example, the starting five that will take the floor for UConn on Monday against Purdue. The Huskies are trying to become the first repeat national champ since Florida in 2007. The only potential one-and-done player who starts for Dan Hurley’s team is 6-6 wing Stephon Castle. The other backcourt players are a senior who transferred from East Carolina before last season (Tristen Newton) and a senior who transferred from Rutgers before this season (Cam Spencer). In the front court, Alex Karaban is a redshirt sophomore and 7-2 Donovan Clingan is a second-year local product (Bristol, Conn.) who clearly benefitted from playing behind Adam Sanago last year.

That might be the model starting five for the NIL/transfer portal era of college basketball. But that’s not the kind of lineup Calipari was putting on the floor, and most Kentucky fans would argue that Calipari didn’t usually start his best five this past season. It will be up to Calipari to evolve.

Fisher didn’t do that at Texas A&M. He went from a place at Florida State where they were about to start demanding changes to a place where everyone worshipped him at the outset. Now unchallenged, he felt no pressure to evolve offensively. The result was a team helmed by an offensive-minded head coach that ran a boring, predictable offense. Fisher brought in Petrino as his offensive coordinator for the 2023 season, but it was either a bad mix or too little too late. Because once starting quarterback Conner Weigman went down, the Aggies could barely move the ball at all.

The upshot of that was Texas A&M paying $77 million for Fisher to not work. Kentucky officials pondered paying Calipari a princely sum to not work, but Calipari bailed them out by going elsewhere.

Now Kentucky has plenty of cash to go hire the best possible coach for the current era of college basketball. Calipari was ideal for the dawn of the one-and-done era, but the world changed and he didn’t. Whether he changes now is of no consequence to Kentucky. To continue torturing our Jimbo Fisher analogy, the Wildcats must make sure they skip their Willie Taggart and go straight to their Mike Norvell.

Taggart, Fisher’s immediate replacement at Florida State, was a disaster. He seemed like an perfectly fine hire in the moment, but he wasn’t equipped to succeed at a place that expects conference and national titles. Norvell, meanwhile, has used the changes in the rules to accelerate the Seminoles’ ascent from a mess when he took over to one of the top programs in the sport. 

Kentucky needs to find a coach who can embrace how college basketball works in 2024 and who is willing to evolve as the sport changes — because it will. The current structure is a stopgap, and it will change again as the people in charge of college sports try to create a new economic model in response to a flurry of federal lawsuits. 

When it changes, the game will change. The Wildcats have plenty of money and plenty of cachet. But they need to make sure they hire a coach willing to adapt. 

Meanwhile, Arkansas had better hope its new coach learned from the past few years at Kentucky and wants to adapt as well. If not, we already know how the story ends.