Mitch Barnhart, John Calipari talk exit strategy at Kentucky: "We want to leave it in the right spot for the next person."

Mitch Barnhart and John Calipari will not be at Kentucky forever — some thought the latter could have been out this past weekend following another early exit in the NCAA Tournament. The former decided, though, there wasn’t a better man for the job at this stage.

When addressing and assessing the program’s future, Barnhart looked at the Hall of Fame coach’s history in Lexington and what the two have accomplished together. He knew Calipari’s competitive fire, something they share together, and felt he could get Kentucky basketball back where it needed to be.

At the end of the day, they both want to win and no one has won more here, Barnhart acknowledging Calipari has averaged 27 wins per season with the Wildcats. They want to return to that level again, together.

“There’s no one that has missed the standard, we understand that,” Barnhart said in an exclusive interview with BBN Tonight’s Keith Farmer. “We’ve won six SEC Tournaments with Cal, we’ve won six regular-season titles, we’ve been to four Final Fours, seven Elite Eights. It’s not that we don’t know how to get there. We’ve hit a patch where we haven’t, and that is not lost on us. He and I are a little bit competitive, we certainly like to win.

“That has been in our DNA from the beginning of his career and mine. We didn’t come to this program to sit here and say, ‘Hey, let’s just see if we can casually walk through this thing and in sashay all the way to the end of the deal.’ I want to win.”

For the first time maybe ever, they both discussed their exit strategies here and what they hope it looks like in an ideal world. Barnhart talked about the value of going out on their own say-so and how many in this profession don’t get that opportunity.

That’s important to both of them.

“I told him and I will share this — I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing this. Whatever we do in our careers, both of us want to exit well,” Barnhart said. “Whatever you do, not a lot of people in our industry, in our enterprise of college athletics, get to exit the way you want to exit. And I want us to be able to exit well and be able to say we left it in a really good spot for the people that came behind us.”

He wants them both to go out on a high note and leave the program better than they found it — Barnhart for the entire department. Things aren’t where they need to be right now with men’s basketball, but there’s a clear passion between the two to get there.

“What ends up happening a lot of times is it gets left on the side of the track in a heap, in a mess. And you say good luck to the next guy,” Barnhart said. “That’s not what either one of us wants. We want to be good caretakers for the program and we want to leave it in the right spot for the next person.”

“Make it futureproof that everything’s in order,” Calipari added. “Come in and coach and recruit, you’ve got what you need here.”

They hope to accomplish that together in year 16 for Coach Cal.