John Calipari blames youth for Kentucky's loss but wants to stick with youth

After dabbling heavily in the transfer portal for a few seasons, John Calipari returned to his favorite recipe for year 15 at Kentucky. Calipari brought in eight freshmen, most of them the highly-touted creme de la creme on which he built his early success. The best of the bunch was actually a four-star, Reed Sheppard, who skyrocketed to the top of draft boards and popularity in the state with a legacy story too good to be true. Elite, young talent paired with proven veterans and a Kentucky kid to boot. From the start, Calipari built his narrative that this team was “Built for March,” too good to fail.

But they weren’t. Kentucky’s season came to an end with the 80-76 loss to Oakland, the Cats’ second first-round exit in three years. Less than a week after falling in the SEC Tournament quarterfinals — a tight, error-ridden performance — Kentucky stumbled again, looking wildly out of sync and juice, unable to match Oakland’s energy. In so many ways, it felt like an encore performance of the game in Nashville, except, instead of Wade Taylor IV and Tyrece Radford lighting the Cats up, it was Jack Gohlke, who hit a record 10 threes and is now the face of March Madness.

When asked where it all went wrong, Calipari blamed youth. With a roster he built, thirty-three games into the season, and ten months after most of the players arrived on campus, he pinned it on youth.

“We made some critical mistakes at critical times again today. I mean we had our chances. As good as they played and as many shots as they made, we still had our chances. And both on defense and offense. And when you have a really young team and you look at where did the mistakes come from, they were freshmen.”

Calipari said the fact that Kentucky had pulled off some impressive road upsets gave him confidence they could do it in the postseason when the stakes were high. Instead, the Cats once again looked like a shadow of themselves, despite the fact that the staff did everything they could to keep the team loose in the days leading up to the game, even going bowling on Selection Sunday.

“I don’t know,” Calipari said when asked if he felt the players were tight. “You’d have to ask them, but I thought they were anxious, and when you’re anxious, you get really tired really fast. So we had a couple of guys that started the game and were exhausted within a minute and a half, two minutes. So I think they were a little anxious.”

In the second half, every time Kentucky was on the precipice of a run, they either shot themselves in the foot or Oakland hit another big shot. Although the score was close in the final minutes, the decision felt in hand well before.

“But I’ll tell you, at halftime, you know, we’re down a bucket and these guys are in there, and you know, we make our run and you think, okay, we got this, and, you know, there were three — we miss a dunk. We miss a lay-up. We miss another play and all of a sudden it becomes anybody’s ballgame, and they were playing with house money and they made shots and we didn’t.”

“I was just trying to encourage, and we can do this, and you know, trying to push some buttons to get the right combinations out there. But they’re freshmen! We don’t know how they’re going to respond in this stuff.”

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Calipari on whether he’ll change his philosophy

Kentucky lost in the first round of the 2022 NCAA Tournament with National Player of the Year Oscar Tshiebwe and other integral pieces from the transfer portal like Davion Mintz, Kellan Grady, CJ Fredrick, and Jacob Toppin. Tonight, they lost with a roster built mostly of freshmen. When asked if he’ll rethink his philosophy moving forward, he paused.

“It’s a good question. Like, I’ve done this with young teams my whole career, and it’s going to be hard for me to change that, 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.”

“But I’ve taken some older guys, and we’ve done it. I like what we were doing offensively. How do we get tougher? How do we get more physical? My teams defensively in rebounding have all been better than this, but we’ve never been like this offensively. I kind of like coaching the way I did this year.”

The chatter over Calipari’s future in Lexington is deafening. His $33.4 million buyout is staggering. Athletics director Mitch Barnhart was asked for comment after the loss and declined. For what it’s worth, Calipari is already looking ahead to next season.

“We’ve gotta figure out who’s coming back and who’s not. We got this transfer stuff going on. We may not need it. We have an unbelievable group coming in that I feel really good about. We add some guys and they stay.”

“I’ll look at other ways that we can do stuff, but, you know, there’s — this thing here, it’s a different animal. We’ve been able to help so many kids and win so many games and Final Fours, national titles and all this stuff, win league championships with young guys. It’s changed on us. All of a sudden it’s gotten really old. So we’re playing teams that our average age is 19. Their average age is 24 and 25. So do I change because of that? Maybe add a couple of older guys to supplement. But that’s what these two did. And if Tre doesn’t get hurt, it’s a little bit different, but…”

Unfortunately, we all know the end of that sentence. What comes next is the real unknown.