SEC Sports Blog

If you were John Calipari, you had to go to Kentucky.

The opportunity may have never come around again. At 50 years of age and with success accrued between his stops at Massachusetts and of course, at Memphis, there just wasn’t going to be a better time to do this.

Calipari’s list of accomplishments speak for themselves:

• A career record of 446-140 (.761)
• Two Final Four appearances, Massachusetts in 1996 — although that was later vacated by the NCAA because of rules violations — and Memphis in 2008 when the Tigers lost the national championship game in overtime to Kansas.
• Four consecutive Sweet 16 appearances at Memphis and seven overall between UMass and Memphis.
• 11 NCAA tournament appearances.

And you can include the list of quality NBA players who have come through his programs including Marcus Camby, Derrick Rose and Chris Douglas-Roberts.

This was indeed, a big decision. Calipari said coming to Kentucky was the easy part. But leaving Memphis was the hard part. If he was sincere with those remarks, then he knows he had built something pretty special in that city. He had more power than the mayor and likely the CEO at Federal Express, which is where that company is based.

The thinking in today’s world is more of settling than aspiring for a new challenge. Many pundits kept stating that Calipari had everything at Memphis. Why leave?

Why not leave? In any industry, a person knows that as successful as he or she has been, he or she wants a different challenge to see if they can do it. Or least they should.

Don’t be afraid to fail. Be excited to have a chance to succeed.

You can only take Calipari at his word. But when he talked about coming down to Lexington with his UMass team in the early 1990s and how he realized he wanted to coach there because of what he encountered, then he would have been foolish not to pursue this.

Plus, it’s Kentucky, one of the six best coaching jobs in the country with UCLA, North Carolina, Duke, Indiana and Kansas. When you think of college basketball, those schools first come to mind.
The baggage connected to Calipari is that his recruiting tactics are questionable in terms of who he deals with. Nothing has ever been proven with ironclad results. If there was a paper trail at Memphis, Calipari gave people nine years to try and uncover it.

Others will argue Kentucky was desperate because the two-year ride with Billy Gillispie turned into a disaster and the program was teetering. That may be true, but consider that AD Mitch Barnhart had timing on his side, even though it was a small window of time. With Memphis knocked out in the Sweet 16 by Missouri, Barnhart moved in to see what he could do to lure Calipari.
If you don’t take the chance, then you’ll never know. You can speculate what Plan B or Plan C was. Quite frankly, that’s irrelevant. Barnhart knew it was a gamble.

Selling Kentucky turned out to be the least of Barnhart’s problems. When this program has won 7 National Championships and 13 Final Four appearances and a history of great coaches and players and a passionate fan base, what more is there to sell? The money turned out to be great at 8 years, $31.65 million. But that just comes with this kind of job.

Really, it was Calipari’s ability to walk away from Memphis. He did. Kentucky got the coach it wanted.

It’s time to start a new chapter in this program’s history.