Mitch Barnhart, John Calipari on future exit: 'Both of us want to exit well'
John Calipari’s 16th season at Kentucky has been confirmed after the Wildcats’ first-round exit from the NCAA Tournament for the second time in three seasons.
Many questioned whether or not athletic director Mitch Barnhart would keep Calipari around amid the program’s recent decline. As it turns out, the hesitancy for Barnhart to let go of his longtime men’s basketball coach might actually stem from something as simple as not wanting Calipari to exit with a bad taste in fan’s mouths.
“I told him and I will share this — I hope [Calipari] doesn’t mind me sharing this. Whatever we do in our careers, both of us want to exit well,” Barnhart told BBN Tonight’s Keith Farmer, via KSR’s Jack Pilgrim. “Whatever you do, not a lot of people in our industry, in our enterprise of college athletics, get to exit the way you want to exit. And I want us to be able to exit well and be able to say we left it in a really good spot for the people that came behind us.”
“What ends up happening a lot of times is it gets left on the side of the track in a heap, in a mess. And you say good luck to the next guy,” Barnhart said. “That’s not what either one of us wants. We want to be good caretakers for the program and we want to leave it in the right spot for the next person.”
Calipari said that the plan was to “future-proof” the program so that everything is in order for his successor to coach and recruit successfully.
Other ‘blue-blooded’ college basketball programs like Duke and North Carolina have said goodbye to their longtime successful head coaches in Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams, respectively, in recent years. Both teams are currently set to compete in the Sweet 16 later this weekend. When those coaches left, Jon Scheyer and Hubert Davis have been able to pick up where their predecessors left off and keep their standard alive.
Calipari is looking to do the same in Lexington — but not before taking his shot at hanging another banner inside Rupp Arena.
“There’s no one that has missed the standard, we understand that,” Barnhart said. “We’ve won six SEC Tournaments with Cal, we’ve won six regular-season titles, we’ve been to four Final Fours, seven Elite Eights. It’s not that we don’t know how to get there. We’ve hit a patch where we haven’t, and that is not lost on us. He and I are a little bit competitive, we certainly like to win.
“That has been in our DNA from the beginning of his career and mine. We didn’t come to this program to sit here and say, ‘Hey, let’s just see if we can casually walk through this thing and in sashay all the way to the end of the deal.’ I want to win.”
Expectations are higher than ever for Calipari in Lexington next season. Kentucky will be under a microscope even more than usual as year 16 has the potential to be the year that defines his legacy as UK head coach.