John Calipari was sitting in his hotel room in Phoenix on Friday when close friend John H. Tyson reached out to discuss an important decision. Tyson, the billionaire chairman of Tyson Foods Inc. and a longtime major donor to the University of Arkansas, wants to take a pick in Arkansas’ coaching search after Eric Musselman leaves for the USC job, people familiar with the matter said. The brains of this Kentucky basketball coach. . Tyson told the Hall of Fame coach that Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek was also in Phoenix, and soon the two were meeting in Calipari’s room.
On the eve of the Final Four, Yurachek and Calipari discussed potential candidates to replace Musselman for nearly an hour. Arkansas wants a big-money hire and is prepared to spend heavily on salary, zero interest and other basketball program support. As the two men left the room, Yurachek concluded that perhaps the perfect candidate was right in front of him.
“Why not you? Why aren’t you interested?” Yurachek asked Calipari, according to Arkansas sources.
“Well, I didn’t take a lot of time, but we can talk,” Calipari said.
Calipari left the meeting and continued talking to Tyson.
“Last time, we didn’t get it done,” Tyson told Calipari, referring to the Razorbacks pursuing him when Calipari was in Memphis some 17 years ago. “Do you want this? Let’s get this done.”
Soon Calipari was contacted about the job by his attorney, Tom Mars, who attended Arkansas State Law School. Full court press. By Saturday morning, a formal term sheet had been sent to Calipari. As negotiations continue, Calipari works to wrap up a 15-year run at Kentucky that included an NCAA championship and three more Final Four berths. Calipari is one of the few coaches to lead his team to four Final Fours in five years (2011-2015).
“He has one flaw: He’s a very loyal guy,” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said in a phone interview Tuesday. “Kentucky is not an on-again, off-again job. What it means to be a Kentucky coach and Kentucky basketball… John has filled those holes in a way that I guarantee you: One day, Kentucky will look back and say We need a John Calipari flag.”
By the end of the weekend, Calipari and Arkansas were close to an agreement on his arrival, which would represent a sea change in college basketball. Calipari had a one-and-done era with a revolving door of NBA stars in Lexington, but now another program has piqued his interest in the right place and at the right time. Sources close to Calipari say he still regrets turning down the UCLA job in 2019. He now privately admits that it was time to leave. But Kentucky paid him a 10-year, $86 million deal to keep him in Lexington, and the Bruins couldn’t match that.
Now? Arkansas prepared a huge package, and so did Calipari.
Industry sources familiar with the terms said Competitor Calipari signed a five-year, $38.5 million contract with the University of Arkansas that could be extended to seven years and nearly $60 million based on an NCAA tournament appearance. The deal includes a $1 million signing bonus and other annual bonuses, sources said. An industry source said the new partnership would include an NIL fund worth “at least” $5-7 million, and Arkansas officials said the depth of their wallets would not limit Calipari’s NIL needs.
deeper
Tucker: John Calipari won Kentucky over basketball.then arkansas
Sources on both sides said contact between Calipari and Kentucky officials has been very limited and there have been no negotiations between the two sides. Once Arkansas got involved with him, there was no turning back. Kentucky officials are believed to be working on plans for a training facility and NIL, raising questions about where those intentions will go now that Calipari is at the helm.
Suddenly, Arkansas is on the map in a significant way again, combining a hungry Calipari, all the star power and top-notch recruiting class he’ll bring with him, and the desire to return to the Final Four for the first time since. plan. the year 1995.
“I’ve done this a few times in my career, and the most important thing I wanted to create was a love story between this program and the campus,” Calipari told Competitor. “This program, Northwest Arkansas, the whole state, you’re trying to create a love. That means the kids we’re recruiting are good kids who want to be involved in the community. That means as a coach, don’t cheat on the position, stay in Watch the video inside. Get involved in philanthropic efforts to assist the entire campus and the entire state.
“The other thing that needs to change is figuring out our roster, you have to go in now and have your NIL ready, the school will do that. I don’t have to go out and do that anymore. I have to be at Kentucky. Here we are now Building a team. Since I have to coach a new team every year, it doesn’t bother me, but they have to be good kids. If they only cared about themselves, we wouldn’t recruit them and they wouldn’t be here.
“What keeps me going is chasing titles and putting my team in the best position at the end of the year to keep going. Let’s do this together.”
The question everyone has asked over the past 72 hours: Why? Why did Calipari leave Kentucky after 15 seasons? Why go to Arkansas? The terms of his contract provide some answers, but they go far beyond that.
Multiple sources who witnessed the situation say the relationship between Calipari and athletic director Mitch Barnhart – who recently appeared on local TV together – said they get along well and are committed to working together Going forward is essentially a dog and pony show. In August 2022, while Calipari and his team were touring the Bahamas, the relationship was fractured beyond repair. He has been pressuring Barnhart for a new training facility, even raising millions of dollars from his former NBA players to help fund the facility. But Barnhart refused to budge, insisting that the then-15-year-old Joe Craft Center only needed to be renovated, not replaced.
So one afternoon during that trip, Calipari gathered a few reporters into his hotel suite and relaxed. He said after Kentucky has invested heavily in other sports, now it’s basketball’s turn. Then, a line from the athletic department exploded like a stick of dynamite: “This is a basketball school.”
Football coach Mark Stoops was upset publicly and privately, and Barnhart stood by his football coach — at least in Calipari’s mind and still is. While Calipari was still in the Bahamas and told not to make any further public statements on the matter, not even an elaborate apology, Stoops and Barnhart held a joint press conference in Lexington, Cal. Lipari’s boss didn’t hesitate.
“We’re going to make sure we don’t have rights,” Barnhart said at one point. There will always be support for basketball, he said, adding pointedly: “If that’s not good enough, you know, coaching has changed a lot in today’s world.”
That’s when Calipari knew the marriage — a metaphor Barnhart often used — was doomed.
There is fundamental disagreement over what constitutes sufficient support for the plan. Between conflicts with facilities and feeling constrained in an NIL space where the coach felt like he was on his own to raise money, Calipari began to wonder if Kentucky was truly “future proof.”
“I know for a fact that Coach Carr didn’t feel supported, I didn’t feel like he had the support of the school,” former Wildcat star DeMarcus Cousins said. Competitor. “There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, adjusting to the modern era of college basketball. Even more so at the top level, I just feel like there wasn’t support there. The situation could have been handled more gracefully, especially considering everything he’s done for them. Thinking about the people who lived through it, I would say these were the golden years of modern Kentucky basketball.”
“Cal is the perfect coach for any job, especially Kentucky,” MSU coach Tom Izzo told Athletic team. “You’ve got to have thicker skin than a whale. I’m sad about what happened; in all organizations it starts from the top down. Carl was taken for granted. We’re talking about a bad year. For him A bad year is, for most people, the worst year in their lives.
“I don’t care if it’s MSU, Kentucky or Duke. When you’re not aligned, it makes the job harder. There’s a disconnect. There are always two sides to every divorce. This new opportunity will allow Carl to get back together Rejuvenated.”
In 2009, Cousins and John Wall started the Calipari era, and subsequently many current NBA superstars emerged, such as Devin Booker, Karl-Anthony Towns, Julius Randle, Bam ·Adebayo and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Calipari believes a lot has changed from when he first attended Big Blue Madness 15 years ago. Sources involved in the program, for example, say Calipari and some of his star alumni were privately exasperated by the sharp decline in resources available to Blue Madness, to the point of a veritable atrophy.
From Kentucky’s perspective, the obvious headwind: Diminishing returns are now coming for the coach, who hasn’t been to the Final Four since 2015 and hasn’t made it to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament since 2019. Calipari and Barnhart found themselves in something cold. During the war, the coaching staff believed they needed more support to win big, and Barnhart wanted to make his initial (massive) investment before committing more money to the program under Calipari’s watch. There will be greater rewards.
By the end, more and more fans were starting to think like Barnhart. Many believe that instead of spending big money on a training facility, he should have paid Calipari his $33 million buyout after his first-round exit from the NCAA tournament last month. Barnhart refused to throw away that much money, so their conflict would continue for at least another year. Next season will be incredibly embarrassing in Lexington.
But then an old friend called him and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: Come to Arkansas and feel loved again, feel supported again, feel like anything was possible again.
deeper
There are no limits to the wins that Kentucky’s next coach can win. So who are the candidates?
“The negotiations took 15 minutes, and I looked at it and said, it needs to be like this, it can be like this,” Calipari said. “It was just: Do we want this? That’s what happened. This happened over a total of three days.”
So on Tuesday, Calipari recorded a heartfelt farewell video from his home, where someone planted a “Thank You Carl” sign in his yard. A few days ago, someone put up a sign with Calipari and Barnhart’s faces on it that read: A MAN NEEDS TO GO!
“What we’ve come to realize over the past few weeks,” Calipari said in the video, “is that this program may need to hear another voice.”
More importantly, Calipari realized he needed another show eager to hear him.
“John brings what he brings everywhere: a winner, a competitor,” Barnes said. “He gets them in the fight and then he’s going to build. He’s as fast as anyone who’s ever coached this sport.”
(Photo illustration: John Bradford/ Competitor; Photo: Jared C. Tilton/Getty)
