Mark Stoops fired back at John Calipari, but was the war of words worth it for Kentucky's football coach?

Mark Stoops has been cast the victor in his war of words with John Calipari over the weekend, but as the dust has settled on a silly Kentucky-on-Kentucky kerfuffle, I think it’s fair to ask if furthering igniting the public spat was really worth it for the Wildcats’ head football coach?

For those in the dark: In a long-ranging interview with The Athletic late last week, Calipari publicly demanded a new basketball practice facility. The longtime Wildcats’ head basketball coach said “the state deserves it,” and he highlighted all the other athletic facility investments the school had made in recent years.

“This is a basketball school. It’s always been that,” Calipari said.

“Alabama is a football school. So is Georgia. I mean, they are. No disrespect to our football team. I hope they win 10 games and go to bowls. At the end of the day, that makes my job easier and it makes the job of all of us easier. But this is a basketball school. And so we need to keep moving in that direction and keep doing what we’re doing.”

There’s not one thing that John Calipari said in that quote that’s untrue. History is on his side here. It was, however, absolutely stupid for him to be publicly dismissive of Stoops’ football program. The second he offered that “no disrespect” salvo, Calipari set himself up to get B-B-Q’d.  

Mark Stoops has worked too hard to transform Kentucky’s once cellar-dweller program into a solid SEC football team to deserve such blindside barbs. He’s won 10 games with the Wildcats in two of the last four seasons, including four straight bowl victories, so Calipari’s quote naturally set him off.

He immediately responded with some Kentucky fried spice on Twitter:

Basketball school? I thought we competed in the SEC? #4straightpostseasonwins https://t.co/xUoKmUeonH

— Mark Stoops (@UKCoachStoops) August 11, 2022

The #4straightpostseasonwins officially translates to “I didn’t lose to St. Peter’s in the NCAA Tournament.” The second line in his tweet is essentially: The Blue Grass State may love its hoops, but Kentucky is cashing huge athletic checks because it plays football in the SEC. 

Only Stoops wasn’t done, either. 

With Twitter almost unanimously behind him all weekend, Mark Stoops decided not to deescalate the feud on Saturday, choosing to sideswipe his colleague by saying, “This program wasn’t born on third base. Some may, but I can promise you this football team didn’t wake up on third base. We did a lot of work. We did a lot of work.”

“I don’t care what anybody says about their program. That’s not my business. That’s not my lane, but when you start talking about my program and others that we compete against — me? I don’t do that. I stay in my lane. That’s in defense of my players and the work that we’ve done,” Stoops continued. 

‘Believe me, we want to continue to push, but don’t demean or distract from the hard work, dedication and commitment that so many people have done to get to this point. I don’t need to apologize for that, and I won’t. But we want more.”

This is where I think it’s fair to ask if the juice was really worth the squeeze here for Mark Stoops.

He publicly burned Calipari and ardently defended his program — mainly to combat future negative recruiting — but now that it’s over, what all did he gain exactly?

Mark Stoops already had more job security than John Calipari. 

Before and after this spat.

His contract is already among the best in sports, with an auto-renewal every time he wins seven games plus a fresh new extension this offseason. Even with raised expectations in Lexington, Stoops could lose to Louisville this year and not feel the blowback or pressure Calipari faces every March. Every season Calipari doesn’t have the Wildcats competing for a national title makes Stoops’ job better. Easier, even. 

It’s not a pejorative to say that Kentucky football isn’t Alabama or Georgia. It’s won just 10 games four times in over 100 years. Stoops’ transformation of the program has been remarkable and deserves lauding, but in his defense, he actually highlighted exactly what Calipari was talking about. 

Stoops was positioned unfairly, but he probably would’ve been best served simply letting his initial Tweet suffice. 

Pushback with some shade and slowly slide back into the shadows, which is where he’s thrived for the last seven years. 

Instead, he further ignited an unnecessary distraction just weeks before the 2022 season. He said he’s done talking about it, but now what happens if the Wildcats enter November with three or four losses right as Kentucky basketball gets going? 

You don’t think these comments will resurface and be reexamined?

Mark Stoops has rewritten the narrative around Kentucky football. It was embarrassing that his own coworker would not-so-implicitly point out his team’s ceiling compared to some of its SEC brethren, but by continuing the back-and-forth mudslinging, Stoops actually legitimized much of what Calipari was disrespectfully suggesting. If Stoops wants to be mentioned in the same breath as Alabama and Georgia, then his suddenly his job description looks a lot like Calipari’s.