Mitch Barnhart Compares Relationship with John Calipari to a Marriage

The Kentucky basketball program has spent the last week weathering rocky waters and on Wednesday night it reached what appears to be its final destination. Following an early NCAA Tournament exit and days of speculating about John Calipari’s future, the Kentucky head coach joined Mitch Barnhart for a 30-minute conversation on BBN Tonight, the in-house media arm of UK Athletics.

Keith Farmer began the conversation by remarking on something we were all thinking. “First off, this is unique to see the two of you together in the same place,” remarked the long-time local sports anchor. “That doesn’t happen often.”

“He’s going his way 200 days a year. I’m going my way 200 days a year,” said Calipari.

“That’s a little bit of misinformation,” added Barnhart. “I say this jokingly, but seriously: he’s been married 40+ years and I’ve been married 40+ years. We know how to manage relationships, and I think we’ve been together for 15 years, so we’re sort of like semi-married.”

The Kentucky head basketball coach noted that every marriage has its fair share of arguments. Spouses don’t always agree on everything.

“And that’s part of this deal, this notion that we have no relationship and stuff like that is garbage,” said Barnhart. “The way we’ve gotten through 15 years — it’s been pretty good. We’ve had our highs and lows, and we’ve had some things that haven’t gone exactly the way we wanted to, but by and large, I’m sitting next to a guy that I brought here 15 years ago and we’ve been together just fine.”

Interestingly, Barnhart compared his relationship with Calipari to a marriage, because earlier this week some analogized their relationship to a broken marriage.

The UK director of athletics reiterated that the two parties are on the same page. “I’m not a guy that gets in any of my coaches’ business, and they’ll all tell you that. We let them do their work and try to stay out of their way. Do I wish I could be around more? Yeah, and I’ll work at that. That’s on me. But at the end of the day, I trust him to do his job and we always want to make adjustments to get better. Let’s put the notion of no relationship out the door.”

Calipari added, “There are so many things out there that aren’t accurate. You can’t defend all the stuff. You just have to let it go and hopefully people (use) logic, look at it and say, ‘Look, they’ve done a lot of good together.’ And like you said, there’s been some really high highs, and there have been some low lows, but that’s part of athletics.”

The Kentucky head coach shared one of his biggest takeaways from the highly-anticipated meeting between the parties, which also included Rock Oliver and Marc Hill.

“One of the things that I’ve said about the meeting was Mitch saying, ‘How can I help you? What can we do to help you get where you’re trying to get this thing?’ We talked about three or four things, but when you’re coaching, that’s important stuff.”

You can watch the entire interview with BBN Tonight on replay at Lex18.com.