John Calipari reveals why he refuses to negotiate with players seeking more money

Every offseason, bidding wars between programs ensue in an attempt to nab the best talent from that cycle’s transfer portal. Even the best recruiters miss out on star players if the money doesn’t match.

For Arkansas head coach John Calipari, he isn’t interested in taking on an athlete who doesn’t want to play for the right reasons. Considered one of the best recruiters in college basketball, Calipari won’t fight for a kid who won’t fight for his program, or one who is there solely for the paycheck.

“We had four guys return. If you lie to kids, they’re not coming back. If it’s all about money, they won’t stay with us,” Calipari said on Wednesday during Golic & Golic on FanDuel Sports Network. “If it’s about money, I’m not going to, ‘Well, I’ll pay you more.’ I got a locker room. I can’t have one guy making three times what everybody else in the locker room does. We’re not going to do that to any of these kids.

“But we still have a good team and a good group of guys. Four of them returned because they wanted to be back. Four freshmen wanted to be with us. Two transfers wanted to be with us. And that’s what I’m looking at.”

Malique Ewin and Nick Pringle committed to Arkansas out of the transfer portal earlier this offseason. Darius Acuff, Meleek Thomas, Isaiah Sealy and Karim Rtail are the incoming freshmen. Trevon Brazile, Karter Knox, DJ Wagner and Billy Richmond are all returning for year two (in Wagner’s case, year three) in Calipari’s season.

Recruiting multiple high-profile true freshmen is something Calipari has done for most of his career. Keeping that trend going in 2025, perhaps the Razorbacks headman is trying to curb the trend of players staying in college well-past the average four or five year maximum eligibility that was previously maintained.

“There were 26-, 27-year-old players playing against 18-year-olds. I look at a kid, he’s waving to his wife and their kids in the stands. And it was the second wife. He was using the NIL for alimony for the first one.

“I mean, what in the world? What are we doing? And we can’t cure that? The transfer portal. We can’t say, academically, you can’t transfer four times and graduate. We can’t allow it. … If you transfer once, maybe twice, without penalty, that’s fine. Coach leaves, that’s fine, but you can’t be 28.”

Calipari noted that most of these players wouldn’t be able to earn as much money if they were to turn pro. The G League or international route is a little bit less luxurious than what they’re able to earn through NIL.

However, now that the COVID era players with extra eligibility are being filtered out of the college game, Calipari expects to average age of college athletes to dip back to where it was before the pandemic, and before NIL and the transfer portal were a major piece of college athletics.