‘He will return.’ Barnhart confirms Calipari will be back as Kentucky coach next season.
As expected, John Calipari will return as Kentucky’s basketball coach next season.
Calipari and athletics director Mitch Barnhart had their end-of-season meeting Tuesday afternoon, and UK confirmed Tuesday night that the Hall of Fame coach will remain with the Wildcats.
“As we normally do at the end of every season, Coach Calipari and I have had conversations about the direction of our men’s basketball program and I can confirm that he will return for his 16th season as our head coach,” Barnhart said in a statement.
On his weekly radio show Monday night — four days after another upset loss in the NCAA Tournament — Calipari made it clear that he fully intended to be back at Kentucky for the 2024-25 season.
Calipari wrapped up his 15th season as UK’s head coach last week with a loss to 14-seeded Oakland in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, marking the second time in the past three postseasons that the Wildcats have suffered an upset loss to a heavy underdog in their opening game of March Madness.
The loss to Oakland came two years after 15-seeded Saint Peter’s beat Kentucky in the first round of the 2022 tournament. UK has not advanced past the first week of the NCAA Tournament since 2019, and the Cats have not made it to the Final Four since 2015.
This recent run of postseason futility led a vocal segment of the Kentucky fan base to call for the removal of Calipari, who still has five years and $44.5 million remaining on a 10-year deal signed in 2019, following his 10th season in charge of the program. If Barnhart and other decision-makers at the university had opted to fire Calipari, the 65-year-old coach would have been owed more than $33 million, paid over the next five years.
Calipari’s buyout would still be $27 million following the 2024-25 season.
There was never an indication behind the scenes that Barnhart seriously considered firing Calipari, however, even as fans called for the coach’s ouster in the wake of another early exit from the NCAA Tournament. Barnhart sat courtside for the loss to Oakland in Pittsburgh on Thursday night, then spoke with Calipari in the UK locker room following his postgame press conference.
If there was any realistic chance of Calipari being let go this offseason, it’s highly unlikely he would have appeared on his UK radio show Monday night. Barnhart obviously is hoping for better results in Calipari’s 16th season on the job, and Calipari said Monday that he was looking forward to meeting with the UK AD.
“Every year we share thoughts with each other,” he said. “… And I look forward to hearing his thoughts. How we can be better.”
Calipari was hired away from Memphis in 2009 and quickly turned the program around after two years with zero NCAA Tournament victories under his predecessor, Billy Gillispie.
Calipari re-energized the UK fan base in his first season on the job, leading the Wildcats to a 35-3 record and an appearance in the Elite Eight — the program’s first trip beyond the opening week of the NCAA Tournament in five years — with the help of one-and-done freshmen John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins and Eric Bledsoe.
That team ushered in a new era of Kentucky basketball, with Calipari’s five-star recruits often getting the headlines instead of upperclassmen. After that first season, UK went to four Final Fours in the next five years, an unprecedented run for the winningest program in the sport. That stretch included the 2012 national championship and a 2014-15 season that ended two victories shy of a perfect record, with those Wildcats finishing 38-1 after a Final Four loss to Wisconsin.
Just days after that defeat, it was announced that Calipari had been voted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Kentucky has not been to the Final Four since.
The Wildcats advanced to the Elite Eight in 2017 and 2019 — losing to North Carolina and Auburn, respectively, in close games each time — and it was revealed that Calipari had agreed to his 10-year contract extension immediately following the 2019 defeat, amid interest from UCLA, which had a head coaching vacancy at the time.
Calipari’s current deal runs through the end of the 2028-29 season. He has a record of 410-123 with the Wildcats.
On Monday night’s radio show, Calipari said he was still coming to grips with the NCAA Tournament loss to Oakland as he looks forward to next season, using the word “standard” several times throughout the hourlong program to describe the expectation that Kentucky should be competing for national championships every year. He said that’s also his personal expectation for as long as he’s coaching the Wildcats.
“I’m telling you — I’m hurting. I’m sick,” Calipari said. “I know what my standard (is). I’m not worried about what anybody else is saying. I’m talking about my standard.”
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