REPORT: Kentucky Basketball Assistants Out of the Scouting Picture

It feels like nothing is going right for the Kentucky basketball program. When everything is off, finding one problem to solve can be difficult. Kyle Tucker believes some of these problems stem back to coaching, and not necessarily the head basketball coach.

Following the Wildcats’ 9-16 season John Calipari flipped his coaching staff. After swinging and missing on several high-profile recruits, he brought back one of his best recruiters, Orlando Antigua. The Cats also picked up Chicago connections with Chin Coleman, and this offseason he hired KT Turner to cultivate UK’s Texas recruiting ties. All are well-known as great recruiters, but who is helping these recruits develop and preparing them for their next opponent? According to Tucker, that buck has been passed off to low-level staffers.

“Meantime, I would be demanding that the full-time assistants be watching film or working out players pretty much around the clock, if I were Calipari,” Tucker answered in The Athletic mailbag. “My understanding is that right now, assistant video director Andrew Ortelli and graduate assistant Riley Welch are doing most of the actual scouting work.”

The role once filled by John Robic has been passed off to inexperienced hands. The evidence in the Cats’ shortcoming in this department has been shared in postgame press conferences from the head coaches that just beat Kentucky.

[The Athletic: What’s gone wrong for Kentucky basketball and John Calipari, and what happens now?]

There’s a Schism Between Calipari and Barnhart

John Calipari and Mitch Barnhart have never been the best of friends. Their working relationship has been strained over the years and now it’s an all-time low. The schism started when the two lost their intermediary, Dewayne Peevy, and it reached a new low this summer during the Basketball vs. Football School Saga.

To be candid, I feel like most of the following information was covered at the time and became public knowledge. However, that week was a blur. My memory is fogged by the unprecedented hour-by-hour chaos. KSR can confirm what Kyle is sharing about the facilities feud is true.

Which brings us to that question of athletic director culpability, and absolutely some of this lands at Barnhart’s feet. For whatever reason, he and Calipari no longer have a relationship of any significance. They don’t speak to each other, Barnhart attends fewer games and he hasn’t been to a Kentucky basketball practice in ages. His response to Calipari’s regrettable “basketball school” comments this summer was bizarre at best. Calipari wanted to immediately publicly apologize and was told by Barnhart to keep his mouth shut. Barnhart then joined football coach Mark Stoops for a stunning press conference that felt like an hour-long clapback at Calipari. How in the world was fanning those flames productive?

The bottom line here is that Barnhart signed Calipari to the crazy contract that means they are married to each other, like it or not, for the foreseeable future. So he’d better start talking to his basketball coach and work with him to try to fix this thing. The whole “basketball school” comment came during a Calipari rant about needing a new practice facility to keep up with the Joneses the way Georgia and Alabama football do, even if their current facilities are still fine. Calipari has already secured pledges of about $30 million in private funding — mostly from his former players in the NBA — but Barnhart refuses to let him proceed with planning a facility. He has balked at any request by Calipari to add support staff for basketball (UK’s staff is small compared to other top programs) while handing the football program a blank check.

Kyle Tucker, The Athletic

Mitch Barnhart has been juggling the needs of all of his coaches while trying to renovate every athletic facility on campus. Mark Stoops was promised a new football indoor facility in February of last year. Three programs are getting kicked out of Memorial Coliseum for a year-long renovation next year. Barnhart doesn’t want Calipari to cut the line, even if he’s personally raised all the money for his own new basketball facility.

In summary, it’s a mess at the Joe Craft Center and there’s not a broom big enough to clean it up.