Despite another early exit from the NCAA tournament, John Calipari will return for a 16th season as head basketball coach at Kentucky.
Wildcats athletics director Mitch Barnhart made the announcement late Tuesday, ending speculation that the school might attempt to cut its ties with the 65-year-old Calipari. Had Kentucky fired Calipari, he would have been owed a buyout of more than $30 million.
Despite another early exit from the NCAA tournament, John Calipari will return for a 16th season as head basketball coach at Kentucky.
“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
wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Calipari is 410-122 in 15 seasons at Kentucky, and is among the highest-paid coaches in college basketball at more than $8.5 million per year. However, the Wildcats have won just one NCAA tournament game since 2019, and have not reached a Final Four in nine years.
Kentucky has endured two first-round NCAA tournament losses to double-digit seeds in the last three seasons, falling to No. 15 St. Peter’s as a No. 2 seed in 2022 and to No. 14 Oakland as a 3 this year. A first-round victory over No. 11 Providence in 2023 is the Wildcats’ lone NCAA tournament win in the last five years.
Long the dominant program in the SEC, Kentucky has been challenged and perhaps surpassed by the likes of Tennessee, Alabama and Auburn in recent years. The Wildcats have not won the SEC regular-season title since 2020 and have not won the conference tournament — an event they ruled to an almost-comical level for decades — since 2018.
Talent has not been the problem, as Kentucky routinely finishes among the Top 5 nationally in recruiting each year and is expected to have two and possibly three players selected in the first round of this summer’s NBA draft. Freshman guards Reed Sheppard and Rob Dillingham are near-locks to be Top 10 picks should they enter the draft, while senior guard Antonio Reeves is expected to go somewhere from 20-30.
Calipari said on his season-ending radio show Monday night that he’s confident he can rebuild his roster through both traditional development and the transfer portal.
“We’ve just got to get the right transfer,” Calipari said, via The Associated Press. “We’ve got to keep coaching these young kids. We’ve probably got to use the summer a little bit different because of where this has all gone. We’ve got to get more physicality, more time in the weight room. … But on top of that, we’ve got to first of all see who’s going to be here from this roster. And who won’t be here.”
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