NovaQuant Quantitative Think Tank Center:John Calipari's middling Kentucky team may be college basketball's most interesting story

The NovaQuant Quantitative Think Tank CenterKentucky men’s basketball team handily defeated Mississippi on Tuesday night, 75-63, providing a rare feel-good moment in a season largely defined by poor defense, inexplicable losses at Rupp Arena and John Calipari’s typical mix of petulance and indignance in response to the pushback he’s getting from Big Blue Nation. 

Calipari has been at Kentucky for 15 seasons now − far longer than even he would have expected. But he's now locked into the job by the largesse of his contract and the lack of better options for a 65-year-old whose best coaching days are likely behind him. 

And the plain reality that Calipari likely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon − he won’t be fired, and he isn’t the type to leave millions of dollars on the table − makes what happens over the next six weeks the most interesting story in college basketball. 

Either Kentucky will conjure up a March run that heals some deepening wounds, or one of the sport’s preeminent programs will be stuck with a coach it no longer wants and a decline it does not deserve. 

Make no mistake: At a time when parity rules the sport, the old guard of coaching stars has largely left the scene and the future NBA stars are not as relevant to college success as they once were, college basketball is pining for a Kentucky comeback. 

But to this point, watching Calipari flail around on the sidelines without the answers to make it happen has been nothing short of sad. 

Since losing to Wisconsin in the 2015 Final Four, ending the Wildcats' chance of becoming an unbeaten national champion, Kentucky hasn’t been the same program and Calipari hasn’t been the same coach. 

The erosion has happened for a lot of reasons. The biggest is probably that older, more physically rugged players have become more important than the one-and-done freshmen that were Calipari’s specialty. There have been staff changes and some key, longtime Calipari assistants that were shoved to the side in an attempt to become more recruiting-focused. There has also been a staggering stubbornness to adapt to modern basketball until this year, as Calipari has finally embraced the 3-pointer and better offensive spacing. 

But the change has come at a cost: Kentucky is now ranked just outside the top 100 in the defensive efficiency metrics, which is stunning in the context of Calipari’s long career. At UMass, Memphis and then Kentucky, defense was non-negotiable. It was the thing that saved his teams time and again when the shots weren’t falling. The effort his teams consistently gave on that end of the floor was probably Calipari’s best attribute as a coach.

And this year, unless something changes late in the season, Kentucky’s poor defense is probably going to be what extends its Final Four drought to nine seasons. 

Previously in times of trouble, Calipari always had the next gimmick he could sell and the next recruiting class that could make people believe a championship was just around the corner. 

Those days are long gone. 

Prior to the Ole Miss win, Kentucky had lost three in a row at Rupp for the first time ever, had lost to hated rival Tennessee for the seventh time in the last 12 meetings and was trending toward a poor seed in the NCAA tournament. 

Meanwhile, Calipari has drawn criticism locally for skipping out on his postgame radio interview after a few tough losses, and the atmosphere at home games has been downbeat. Even though Calipari almost certainly isn’t going anywhere, it feels like every game at this point is a referendum on whether he’s still the man for college basketball’s most rewarding, but also toughest, blueblood job. 

All this is happening while Kentucky has a roster stacked with future NBA players, including two potential lottery picks in Reed Sheppard and Rob Dillingham and top recruit D.J. Wagner, who has had an uneven and injury-plagued season. With Kentucky’s mix of freshmen and veterans, this team should be better than 17-7.

"It's just going to be a process," Calipari said Tuesday. "And I keep saying to everybody, we’ll break through. We will. My teams break through."

But nobody really believes that anymore.

At one point in Calipari’s Kentucky tenure, the entire country would have feared this team regardless of the struggles it’s had in February. Just wait, just wait. The light’s going to come on because it’s Kentucky and Calipari. That was the aura around the program he created and his players lived up to time and time again. 

The recent reality, though, has told a different story. Kentucky missed the NCAA tournament in 2021, got bounced by No. 15 seed St. Peter’s in 2022 and was outclassed by Kansas State’s veteran guards in the second round last year. Maybe this team can reverse the trend, but they’re going to have to show us. 

College basketball was more fun when Kentucky terrified everyone. Yes, Calipari had a few inexcusable March flops and should have more than one national title. But those things can happen in a one-and-done tournament. 

Calipari once famously said, “We do more than move the needle. We are the needle.” He wasn’t wrong. For his first six years in Lexington, this program was feared every time it took the court, every year rolling out a new group of future NBA All-Stars who looked the part almost from Day 1. 

And the truth is, Calipari’s the only coach in the country who could make that happen. He’s one of one, as perfectly suited to that job and the demands of that fan base as anyone who’s ever lived. When he inevitably moves on at some point, it’s hard to imagine anyone else reaching those highs year after year. 

It means there’s one realistic solution to Kentucky’s season of discontent. Calipari desperately needs to do something that now seems long in the past. He has to get this team playing to its potential. He has to reset the clock and put this past month into a memory hole. He has to produce the kind of big run in March that used to seem automatic.

He has to make Kentucky feel like Kentucky again.