Mitch Barnhart addresses 'misinformation' regarding relationship with John Calipari
Every marriage has goes through its rough patches — as was the case for Kentucky coach John Calipari and athletic director Mitch Barnhart. Fans across Big Blue Nation believed (and in some cases, hoped) divorce was imminent.
Now that it’s came out that Calipari will return for his 16th season, Barnhart wanted to put to bed the rumors that he and his basketball coach don’t work well together. The two went in-depth on the in’s and out’s of their relationship during a joint interview on LEX18’s BBN Tonight.
“He’s going his way 200 days a year. I’m going my way 200 days a year, so it’s and that’s a little bit of the misinformation,” Barnhart told BBN Tonight’s Keith Farmer on Wednesday. “I mean, I say this jokingly, but seriously, he’s been married 40 plus years I’ve been married 40 plus years. We know how to manage relationships, and I think we’ve been together for 15 [years]. So we’re sort of semi-married at the end of the day.”
Calipari says they agree to disagree. Barnhart did not object.
“To [Calipari’s] point, that’s part of this deal,” Barnhart continued. “This notion that we have no relationship and stuff like that is garbage. The way we’ve gotten through 15 years has been pretty good.
“We’ve had our highs and lows and we’ve had some things that haven’t gone exactly the way we want it to, but I’m sitting next to a guy that I brought here 15 years ago and we’ve been together just fine. I’m not a guy who gets in a coach’s business, any of my coaches and they’ll all tell you that. So we let them do their work and try and stay out of the way. I’ll work on that, that’s on me. But at the end of the day, I trust him to do his job. We always want to make adjustments to get better. So let’s put the notion of no relationship out the door.”
A decade has been removed since Kentucky’s last trip to the Final Four, and the world endured an entire pandemic since its last taste of the Sweet 16. While it’s been a rough go-around over the last five years for BBN (to say the least) Calipari and Barnhart believe its possible for Kentucky to regain its postseason prominence that the fanbase was spoiled with to begin his tenure.
“There are so many things out there that aren’t accurate,” Calipari agreed. “You can’t defend all this stuff. And hopefully, people [logically] look at it and say, ‘Look, they’ve done a lot of good together.’ And like [Barnhart] said, there’s been some really high highs and there have been some low lows. But that’s part of athletics and dealing with that and trying to get better.”
The returned excitement that Kentucky’s high-scoring squad brought to the city this year gave fans a false hope that the ‘Cats were back. Instead, it took all of 40 minutes of in-game action to have fans go from booking Final Four rooms to booking Calipari on the next flight out of Lexington.
Now that the dust has settled the two have hugged it out — which has set the scene for one of the most crucial years of the Hall of Fame head coach’s career.