Kentucky basketball’s trap: UK can’t fire John Calipari, but the coach’s way isn’t working

Bill Parcells, the venerable NFL head coach, famously summed up the ethos of competitive sports in eight words:

You are what your record says you are.

With Kentucky men’s basketball’s latest postseason disappointment — Thursday night’s 80-76 loss to the Oakland Golden Grizzlies in the NCAA Tournament round of 64 — factored in, this is the last four seasons of UK hoops:

2020-21: 9-16 regular-season record.

2021-22: Lost to No. 15 seed Saint Peter’s in the NCAA tourney round of 64.

2022-23: Lost as a No. 6 seed in the NCAA round of 32.

2023-24: Lost to No. 14 seed Oakland in the round of 64.

That is a long, long way from the traditional standard of Kentucky men’s basketball — which is excellence.

Done in by the scintillating, 10-of-20 3-point shooting by Oakland’s Jack Gohlke (32 points) and a double-double (17 points and 12 rebounds) from Horizon League Player of the Year Trey Townsend, Kentucky (23-10) continued its recent trend of postseason flame-outs.

“This one hit me hard for (the UK players),” Kentucky coach John Calipari said afterward, “because, again, I just thought I had a team that could do some stuff.”

Calipari’s frequent claim throughout an up-and-down Kentucky regular season that the Wildcats “were built for March” turned out to be empty.

Taking stock of where Kentucky men’s basketball is now and where it needs to go, it’s hard not to see UK in a trap of its own making.

Though a large segment of the Wildcats fan base is pleading for a coaching change, Kentucky is not in position to do that.

That is only partly due to the generous 10-year contract extension — mistakenly labeled in the media as a “lifetime” deal — that UK granted Calipari in 2019 when the coach was perceived to be flirting with leaving to become the UCLA head man.

Due to the massive buyouts contained in that deal, it would cost the University of Kentucky just under $34 million to dismiss Calipari without cause — in other words, for not winning enough — this offseason.

Simply put, that is a prohibitive cost to pay someone “not to coach.”

So that is the trap within which Kentucky has ensnared itself.

Yet even if there were no massively expensive buyout, could UK really fire a coach who has led it to an NCAA title, four Final Fours and, off-the-court, has raised untold millions of dollars for Kentuckians in need from one end of the commonwealth to the other?

From the outside, what would seem best for UK and for Calipari would be if the coach executed a maneuver one might call “the Tubby exit.”

In 2007, Tubby Smith — his overall successful tenure as Kentucky men’s hoops head man having gone stale — shocked the basketball world by decamping from Lexington for the head coaching job at Minnesota.

Calipari, 65, so far has shown no signs of seeking an off ramp.

In a sense, the coach is also in a self-constructed trap.

Calipari created his early success at UK, the four Final Fours between 2011 and 2015, the 2012 NCAA title, on highly talented rosters built around one-and-done stars such as John Wall, Anthony Davis and Karl-Anthony Towns.

As various factors including the transfer portal and the “free COVID” year have allowed the overall world of college hoops “to get older,” Calipari has seemed indecisive on how to counter.

The 2021-22 UK team that lost to Saint Peter’s started a super-senior, three juniors — including that season’s national player of the year, Oscar Tshiebwe — and a freshman.

Yet it went out to a No. 15 seed.

This year, Calipari returned to his bread-and-butter with a roster more reliant on star freshmen.

Yet the Cats went out to a No. 14 seed with its freshman backcourt stars, Reed Sheppard (three points), Rob Dillingham (10 points but 2-of-9 shooting) and D.J. Wagner (0-of-5 shooting), especially struggling.

It was UK’s only two experienced players, super-seniors Antonio Reeves (27 points) and Tre Mitchell (14 points and 13 rebounds) who kept Kentucky in the game.

“It’s all changed on us,” Calipari said of college basketball overall. “All of a sudden, it’s gotten really old. So we’re playing teams, our average age is 19, (and) their average age is 24 or 25. So do I change because of that?”

So what now?

As Calipari conducted his postgame news conference, a glum-looking Mitch Barnhart stood in the back, listening.

Afterward, I asked the UK athletics director what he would say to Kentucky fans about the current state of UK’s historically regal men’s hoops program.

“I don’t have time. I’m going to talk to our team,” Barnhart said.

Employing the Parcells standard, what Kentucky basketball in recent years has been is a fallen giant.

It is now five years (2019) since UK made it out of the NCAA tourney’s first weekend.

Yet Kentucky and Calipari seem caught in a trap from which neither seems to have a viable way to escape.

John Calipari has five more years remaining on his Kentucky contract. The heat will be on.

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