When John Calipari strolls onto the court at Rupp Arena on Feb. 1 leading Arkansas into a road battle with Kentucky, it will make for an unforgettable moment in the career of a coach who has been the face of SEC basketball. Calipari led UK for 15 seasons, starting out in the 2009-10 season, when the conference featured just 12 teams and sent only four to the NCAA Tournament.
Now, as Calipari embarks on the second chapter of his SEC coaching odyssey, the league features 16 teams, including nine who reached last season’s NCAA Tournament. The conference has made significant strides on the hardwood amid the emergence of programs like Auburn, Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee, all of whom have reached the Elite Eight or deeper in recent years.
Against that backdrop, Calipari’s jump from one proud SEC program to another is particularly fascinating. When he arrived at UK in 2009 fresh off a prolific run of success at Memphis, Calipari waved a magic wand and turned the Wildcats from an NIT team into a 35-3 squad that earned a No. 1 seed for the NCAA Tournament with the help of an elite freshman class.
Such a remarkable turnaround is impractical nowadays, in part because of how much better the SEC competition has become. College basketball is also an upperclassman’s sport now, and that reality will test Arkansas in 2024-25 as Calipari deploys a few freshmen in his first Razorbacks rotation. Meanwhile, at Kentucky, former Wildcats player and BYU coach Mark Pope has stepped in with a roster full of veteran transfers. His first team couldn’t be any more different than Calipari’s first team was at UK 15 years ago. But between the transfer portal, NIL and the improvement of SEC hoops, not much is the same as it was then.
We’ll be reminded of that reality on Feb. 1, when Calipari is stomping up and down the Rupp Arena sideline wearing Razorback red while coaching against the program that he once led to…
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