By the time Mark Pope settled into his new job as the head coach of the University of Kentucky men’s basketball team, he had zero scholarship players and a major rebuilding job in front of him.
That was the situation left behind by John Calipari, who departed Lexington for the top job at Arkansas after 15 seasons at UK, all 10 of his underclassmen ultimately deciding to leave the Wildcats’ program, too.
Since that time — Calipari resigned April 9 and Pope was officially named Kentucky’s coach three days later — a total of 12 players have committed to the Cats, including the major addition of BYU leading scorer Jaxson Robinson out of the transfer portal Thursday.
And by the time Calipari settled into his new job as the head coach of the Razorbacks, he faced the exact same situation. In his first days in Fayetteville, the 65-year-old coach said that he wanted to call a team meeting. The problem? “There was no team,” Calipari joked.
This wasn’t another case of hyperbole from the Hall of Fame coach with a penchant for exaggeration. In this case, Calipari was telling the truth.
Nearly two months later, the Arkansas roster now sits at eight, and Calipari has been signaling for weeks that — when it comes to adding players — his work is nearly complete.
“We’re at eight. I’m ecstatic,” he told a group of reporters at the SEC meetings in Destin, Florida, this week. “I’m looking for one more guy, and that’s what we’re gonna have.”
That would put the Razorbacks’ roster at just nine players — four short of the scholarship limit — and Calipari has made clear time and again that he’s just fine with that number.
A couple of weeks ago, speaking to a gaggle of reporters in Little Rock, Calipari explained that he coaches every player on his team — not just the ones who get the most playing time — and in the current college basketball landscape rampant with roster movement and transfer portal activity, perhaps it’s best to go with fewer guys in the gym.
“Basically I’m preparing them and putting my soul in everything — for another guy to coach ’em,” Calipari said. “They’re gonna leave and go somewhere else. Well, how ’bout if I just focus on my eight or nine, and let me do that. … We’ll still recruit freshmen. But we just won’t have like last year, where we had seven freshmen. Can’t do that anymore.”
Calipari actually had eight freshmen on his final UK roster — he often left little-used guard Joey Hart out of the conversation when talking about his rotation last season — and that team lost to 14-seeded Oakland in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, the final game Calipari coached with the Wildcats.
His 2024-25 UK roster was set to have at least six freshmen — the No. 2-ranked recruiting class in the country at the time — until he left for Arkansas, breaking up that group of high schoolers and, either by choice or necessity, leading to a new strategy for his first season with the Hogs.
At the SEC meetings, Calipari talked about starting anew in Arkansas and reflected briefly on his time in Lexington.
“A breath of fresh air, you could say,” he said of his latest challenge. “Fifteen great years. I mean, we got a lo
