John Calipari has owned Louisville since arriving at Kentucky in 2009. For the sake of his Lexington legacy, he needs that trend to continue.
No one seems to have a clearcut answer when the topic of how many more years John Calipari plans to spend in Lexington is brought up.
Some will tell you that when his son, walk-on guard Brad Calipari, graduates from the program in 2021, his dad is gone too. Others say the familial aspect is overblown, and that Cal won’t entertain the thought of leaving UK until he wins his second national championship. A few will tell you that Calipari is simply waiting for the perfect situation in the NBA to open up, and that whenever it does, that’s when he’ll close the door on his college career.
Regardless of what the accurate answer is — or if there even is one at this point — it would seem far more likely than not that Calipari is on the downslope of his journey at Kentucky. When that’s the case, it’s natural to start thinking about things like legacy and what you’re going to be remembered for and how you’re going to stand up when compared to the other coaches who previously guided one of college basketball’s ultimate superpowers.
For those comparisons to be favorable, the primary task at hand for Calipari is fairly straightforward: He needs at least one more national championship.
Cal’s other numbers sparkle unlike any other’s over the past decade. He has brought in the nation’s No. 1 or No. 2 recruiting classes in all 10 recruiting cycles he’s been a part of while Kentucky’s head coach. His Wildcat teams have been preseason top five in every season but two, and have been the preseason favorite to win the national title three times. He’s been to four Final Fours in nine seasons, and in 2014-15, he became the first head coach to begin a season 38-0. He’s had multiple players selected in the lottery portion of the NBA Draft in six of the last nine years, and has produced 19 lottery picks total, easily the most of any college basketball coach over that span.
As impressive as they are, here’s the other thing about all those numbers: The further away we get from 2012, the more those numbers gel together to accentuate the fact that they haven’t brought more than one national title banner back to Lexington.
Whether he admits it or not, Calipari knows this. He knows he’s no longer the unquestioned king of recruiting. He knows that Mike Krzyzewski and now Penny Hardaway have cut into his turf significantly. He knows he blew a golden opportunity last March when the South Region went haywire but his team couldn’t find a way to beat ninth-seeded Kansas State in the Sweet 16. He knows that memories of the 38-0 start in 2014-15 are always going to walk hand-in-hand with memories of the Final Four loss to Wisconsin. He knows that being a coach with multiple national championships alleviates all of this.
This brings us to the present, and what feels like a paramount moment for the final leg of the John Calipari era at Kentucky.
Heading into 2018-19, the Wildcats appeared to check as many of the requisite boxes as any other team in the country. They had the standard crop of elite freshmen, but this time that element was coupled with a handful of key returnees and the No. 1 graduate transfer in America in big man Reid Travis. Kentucky began the season ranked No. 2 in both major polls, a lofty perch that would be short-lived thanks to an embarrassing 34-point loss to Duke on opening night. In the weeks that followed, UK was beaten by unranked Seton Hall on a neutral court, pushed harder than they should have been by multiple overmatched opponents, and lost out on its top two targets in the 2019 recruiting class, James Wiseman and Vernon Carey.
Calipari’s message in response was a familiar one: Don’t panic. This isn’t the first time Kentucky has failed to play up to its preseason ranking in November and December, and in most of those past instances, the team has wound up hitting its stride in March.
“I’m not panicked,” Calipari said after the Seton Hall loss. “Sounds like some people are panicked. I am not. I love this. If they don’t play well, then it’s my job to get them to play well and if they play well, some of you in this room will say, ‘There he goes again. This guy gets it. He gets them going.’ Probably not, but you have a chance to say that.”
The first piece of evidence that Cal might be doing more than blowing smoke came last Saturday. Kentucky traveled to Chicago to face ninth-ranked North Carolina in the CBS Sports Classic, and controlled the game from start to finish, running away with an 80-72 victory. Keldon Johnson and Reid Travis played the way stars are supposed to play in big games, and Ashton Hagans seemed to answer a number of questions about the team’s point guard play by providing a steady hand on offense and tying a school record with eight steals on the other end of the floor.
Still, the questions linger.
How much of a corner was really turned?
Was that more about North Carolina than it was Kentucky?
Is this team eventually going to be good enough to win six straight games in March?
Enter college basketball’s most contentious rivalry.
The composition of a superior rivalry is always at least somewhat in the eye of the beholder. Kentucky-Louisville takes a backseat to no rivalry, college or professional, when it comes to pure vitriol, disdain, and culture clashes between the two fan bases in question.
Without delving too much into the issues, there is a concrete disconnect between the city of Louisville and the state of Kentucky that the citizens of Jefferson County and the citizens of the other 119 counties both agree on. That disconnect might be best exemplified through the basketball rivalry.
The Cardinals rose to prominence thanks in large part to homegrown talent from the state’s “big city” —players like Westley Unseld and Darrell Griffith. The latter wound up leading U of L’s high-flying “Doctors of Dunk” to the program’s first national championship in 1980.
The rest of the state still idolizes Wallace “Wah Wah” Jones, Jeff Sheppard, and “The Unforgettables,” a group of four seniors — three of whom just happened to be Kentucky boys — who stuck with the program through its probation years in the early ‘90s. The popularity of the group remained so high that one of the players, Corbin-born Richie Farmer, wound up being elected Agriculture Commissioner.
The easiest (and the most common) way for a Louisville fan to work a Big Blue Nation member into a tizzy is to insinuate that Adolph Rupp was a racist. Regardless of what Rupp’s actual beliefs were, there’s no question that, for a period of time, race played a huge factor in the strained relationship between the state’s university and the university of its biggest city. Louisville fans still take pride in being just the second program to start five black players and make it to the Final Four. The first? The famous 1965-66 Texas Western squad that stunned Rupp’s Wildcats in the national championship game.
One weakness of the series compared to a competitor like Duke-North Carolina or Alabama-Auburn in football has been that, historically, the most successful periods of time for Kentucky and Louisville have not overlapped.
Louisville dominated the 1980s while Kentucky was saddled with underachieving teams and eventually trouble with the NCAA. The script was flipped in the next decade, where Rick Pitino returned the Wildcats to national prominence while the Cardinals lost a step or five in the final seasons of the Denny Crum era. Both programs had their moments in the 2000s, but neither won a national title or attained the national standing their fan bases expect.
The past decade has been different. Kentucky’s achievements were noted earlier. Louisville’s, though tainted by asterisks in the NCAA record book, include four trips to the Elite Eight, a pair of runs to the Final Four and the 2013 national championship.
What should have been a golden era for the rivalry — one which included some glorious back-and-forth shots between Calipari and Pitino on the court — was tainted by the one-sidedness of the actual games.
A healthy chunk of Calipari’s final years at Kentucky are certain to be defined by his attempt to solidify his legacy with at least one more national championship. Another aspect, however, is going to revolve around his ability to hang onto a status he’s already solidified: Card killer.
Calipari is 9-2 against Louisville since being hired at UK in 2009. Eight of those victories came against Pitino, and two came in the NCAA tournament — a Final Four win in 2012, and an upset two years later in the Sweet 16 that cemented Cal as U of L’s ultimate foil of the modern era. Few things about the Calipari era have brought Big Blue Nation more joy than his domination of their most hated annual opponent.
Now the rivalry welcomes a new face.
Chris Mack is no stranger to bad blood. He grew up in Cincinnati and played and coached at Xavier, whose rivalry with the UC Bearcats might be the only one in college basketball that approaches Louisville-Kentucky when you’re talking about pure disdain.
In nine seasons as Xavier’s head coach, Mack went 6-3 in the “Crosstown Shootout,” three times defeating Cincinnati teams that were nationally ranked. He was also at the helm of the Musketeers for perhaps the most infamous moment in the history of the rivalry, the 2011 brawl.
From a personality standpoint, Mack serves as the antithesis to Pitino, a label which also inherently illustrated the differences between he and Calipari. For nearly a decade, the rivalry has been defined by two men likely to spend their Saturday nights in a reserved booth at a four-star restaurant. Now one of the key figures is a man who’d rather swap stories with approaching fans while eating average chicken wings and downing beer at a chain restaurant.
The change in approach, both on the court and off it, has yielded positive results so far for Louisville. A team next to no one expected to make the NCAA tournament two months ago finds itself at 9-3 with quality wins over Michigan State and Seton Hall, and competitive losses to Tennessee, Indiana and Marquette.
None of this is an ideal setup for Calipari, whose two losses to Louisville have both come in games where Kentucky was playing in a true road environment for the first time. Saturday will be the first true road test of 2018-19 for UK, a fact which only adds to the feeling that Calipari is, for the first time in a long time, the head coach with more on the line heading into this rivalry game.
Win, and the “corner turning” talk will continue as Kentucky wraps up its non-conference slate and prepares to tackle the SEC. Lose, and not only do the old questions about the 2018-19 season and the overall direction of the program resurface, but talk of a “new era” for the Battle of the Bluegrass suddenly takes over the state.
There’s always a significant amount on the line when Kentucky and Louisville take the court to face one another. For John Calipari, this year feels especially loaded.