Well thankfully his reign of incompetence is ending. Whether or not we are stuck with one of his cronies is the question now .
Arkansas Billy Richmond to the draft.
- Thread starter Anon200440
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Are they?
Even though he has had a little more ncaa tournament success than his last 5 years here, his teams overall rankings,season records , and seeding haven’t been as good as most teams he had here in his last 5 years.
His 2 years at Arkansas are very close to Popes 2 years here and he’s had a much easier schedule.
2025 - UK and Arkansas both made sweet 16
2026 - UK lost in round of 32 (and a miracle shot at buzzer for force OT vs. Santa Clara)....then demolished vs. wounded Iowa St in next round
Arkansas went to sweet 16 and lost to Arizona
I'll grant 2025...Pope had a slightly overall better year than Cal even though they both got to same round in NCAA.....but last year....Arkansas was clearly the superior squad.
Not saying I want Cal back at UK....but he is keeping kids like Wagner, Thiero, Wagner, etc... who are all solid player but not slam dunk NBA guys (heck Wagner is a below avg collegiate guard).....and getting this has made Cal a better college coach than what he was doing at UK the past 5 seasons.
LMFAO ! 2026 - Bottom line is , Arkansas made it one game farther than Kentucky. And that was mostly because they had to only beat inferior double digit seeds . And Kentucky beat that “clearly superior team” at their house.
Go look at Arkansas best wins last year and get back to me . They had very few good wins away from home and not that many at home either.
The first step in getting back to competing for championships was getting rid of Cal .
Step one was completed .
The second step was to hire a coach capable of coaching and recruiting well enough to compete for championships.
It appears that step two has not been completed .
Going back to Cal is moving backwards, not forwards .
Well, you guessed wrong on both. You might want to keep your predictions to yourself.
yea i asked A.I. so probably are wrong... but if Cal's buyout would be equal to Popes buyout at this point then I think you choose sticking with Cal instead of Pope risk experiment in this hypothetical. Of course we could have just hired a more fit coach lol. But maybe pope makes an elite 8 this year and finishes top 2 in the SEC and proves us all wrong hopefully.
yea I don't think anybody is saying we should go back to Cal ... hahaha, atleast i hope not. Just a bunch of hypotheticals, if we Knew Mitch was going to be so incompetent and hire an unqualified coach with a sub 60% win rate and 10 years of history to prove so... we would have rather just kept Cal for couple more years till his buyout was manageable and let new AD make the right hire. In that meantime we would have had those Cal nba type players to entertain us and possibly win that sec championship at UK, but who knows he could have done worse than Pope at UK since he had lost the fans, lost the boosters support and so on .... ahhh it's a Push and they both suck lol
Hope Pope proves us wrong gets to elite 8 and top 2 sec finish... but if he does that he better keep stepping it up and not just be a reason to keep him 3 more years of mediocrity like what happened to UNC after Hubert Davis lucked into that title game his first year.
Agree with some of this . I don’t believe there’s a chance that Cal would have won the sec this year at Kentucky because of our schedule.
And there is no scenario where keeping Cal was the right thing to do,imo.
Some of you guys had a lot more fun watching future nba players fail at Kentucky and then reach their potential in the nba than I did .
Are you taking into account Pope’s buyout percentage decreases with the new AD?
I am not really sure about escalators either so who knows anymore. But basically, yeah it would have been roughly the same results and buyout if Calipari had stayed.
To be fair to Barnhart, I think he had planned to stay with Calipari, probably because of the weak coaching market, but Cal ended it early so we are essentially in the same place with Pope as we probably would've been.