PORTLAND — John Calipari is at peace, and who knew tranquility could be so loud? He’s talking, and people are listening. He’s still talking, and people are still listening. He’s joking, and people are laughing.
The man probably narrated his own birth. His coaching career has been a noisy, zany, messy success, and he has the personality to handle it all. You had reason to question that two years ago, when he fled from Kentucky after 15 years of pressure too intense for a national title, 410 victories and a .769 winning percentage to alleviate. But at Arkansas, he’s Coach Cal again: a brilliant oddball challenging for the throne rather than trying to look comfortable occupying it.
He’s not different, but he seems fresh. He had grown stale at Kentucky, a high-maintenance basketball paradise. It wasn’t like he forgot how to coach. He just couldn’t feed that beast anymore. And it’s not like he has reached unprecedented heights with the Razorbacks so far. But he’s building something special again, not maintaining something precious.
His player-first sermons sound like a refreshing cultural disruption again, not just a sales pitch from a slick recruiter.
“You want to win, but it’s the name on the back that I’m in the business for,” Calipari said after Arkansas won its first SEC tournament title since 2000 last week. “Now, I’ve kind of been that way and done all right at every school I’ve been at. So you could say it’s wrong, or you can live with it. You can be P’d off or P’d on. I really don’t care.”
Oh, he cares. He cares too much. But let Calipari flex a little. In his first season, the Razorbacks made the Sweet 16 as a No. 10 seed a year ago, with Calipari winning coaching duels against Bill Self and Rick Pitino to advance that far. Arkansas enters this NCAA Tournament as a No. 4 seed playing a stylistically gorgeous brand of basketball. The Razorbacks average 89.9 points per game. They break defenses with their efficiency. Freshman guard Darius Acuff Jr. is an attacking lead guard who flows effortlessly with the game.
Acuff, who averages 22.9 points and 6.5 assists, is both a projected 2026 NBA draft lottery pick and the most productive guard of Calipari’s 903-win collegiate career. But the coach is more effusive about his grit. Between games, he has worn a boot because of a nagging ankle injury. In February, he scored 49 points in a double-overtime loss to Alabama, and despite playing 50 minutes in that game, he refused to rest.
“I said, ‘Why don’t you sit out the next game?’” Calipari recalled. “He looked at me and said, ‘We lost. I’m not sitting out.’”
Calipari was prepping the audience for a longer story. In a 15-minute interview Wednesday, he had several tales. About former NBA star Rod Strickland, now a coach who just led Long Island University to the tournament. About Terrence Jones out of Portland, and having to wear a wool hat during an indoor practice because “I could see my breath in the gym. In the gym!” About Chris Douglas-Roberts, a former Memphis All-American, texting him recently, “Thanks for letting me rock out.”
But to praise Acuff, Calipari added an NBA dig. He talked about making Acuff sit out of the team’s regular-season finale against Missouri. The rest may have contributed to a record-setting SEC tournament for Acuff, who averaged 30.3 points over three games.
“I took a chance,” Calipari said. “We did the NBA load management: ‘Sit back, let us try to win a game without you.’ But if he’s hurt, you won’t know because he doesn’t do that. I looked at him. He said, ‘Don’t look over here. I’m fine.’”
Calipari probably held a media availability after his baptism.
He’s most comfortable when he can play the crazy uncle who somehow makes fun of himself and acts like he gets no respect. It’s a bit of an underdog shtick. The character didn’t work near the end at Kentucky, where his final four seasons included a losing campaign followed by three straight early Big Dance exits.
It was the roughest patch of his 34 seasons in college, a stretch in which expectation finally swallowed his performance. When the Wildcats finished 9-16 in 2020-21, it was Calipari’s first losing record since his first year at Massachusetts. Even though it was an aberration, Calipari didn’t redeem himself because of the ensuing March letdowns.
“We lost a couple of tough NCAA Tournament games, and people started acting like he never won anything,” said Bruiser Flint, the Arkansas special assistant to the head coach who has worked with Calipari at three schools. “Everybody goes through it when they start talking about, ‘Did he lose it? Is he not as good as he used to be?’ But sometimes you lose a couple of tough games and you move on. It just didn’t happen there.”
It’s mostly a matter of perception. Calipari is 48-22 at Arkansas, a .685 winning percentage. It’s a small sample, but he won at a higher rate at UMass, Memphis and Kentucky. But when he replaced Eric Musselman at Arkansas, he rebuilt a roster that featured just one holdover scholarship player. Then he dropped his first five SEC games last year.
He seemed washed. Now, people are saying he’s back.
Actually, he’s just Cal.
Moving to Arkansas didn’t change Calipari. It just changed the way he’s heard.
“He has stayed the course, in terms of how he coaches, how he teaches,” Flint said. “It was just a tough time at Kentucky at the end, but in terms of what he’s doing differently now, I don’t think he changed at all.”
There have been subtle adaptations. More than forcing a strategy, Calipari has always adjusted to the talent he recruits. His best teams grasp his defensive schemes, but his offensive system is tailored to the personnel. He has been criticized for being everything from too loose to too outdated. As this Acuff-led squad is showing, the 67-year-old coach still has some tricks.
Asked about how he’s evolved, Calipari joked of his former players: “They say I got soft. They look at me and say, ‘You. Are. SOFT.”
He probably brushes his teeth with a microphone.
Calipari is at peace. And somehow, it’s louder than ever.
