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John Calipari is 0-3 in SEC play in Year 1 at Arkansas.

Arkansas Razorbacks

The Last Corleone? So far, John Calipari at Arkansas is Godfather 3: A disaster we don’t talk about

Neil Blackmon

By Neil Blackmon

Published:


Do it all college basketball scribe Jon Rothstein’s tweet for a John Calipari win reads like this:

Rothstein hasn’t sent that tweet yet for Calipari’s Arkansas in SEC play, as the Razorbacks fell to 0-3 in the league after Saturday’s 71-63 loss to Florida. Until Saturday night, no Calipari team had started league play 0-3 since 1988. That’s when Calipari’s first team at UMass, 1 of 3 programs the Hall-of-Famer has led to a Final Four, pulled the ignominious feat.

The Florida loss was the second in a week for Arkansas at Bud Walton Arena, typically one of the loudest, most fearsome venues in college basketball. No. 23 Ole Miss won there last Wednesday night.

Which gets us back to Calipari as Corleone.

With all due respect to the greatest story ever told on film, if Calipari is a Corleone of any variety, right now he’s Godfather 3, which is up there with Rocky V in the pantheon of “disastrous films we try so hard not to talk about it so it’s like they don’t actually exist.”

Calipari’s Kentucky career slept with the fishes like Luca Brasi after Jack Gohlke’s best Steph Curry impression in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament last March.

But Calipari’s departure from Big Blue to Arkansas was supposed to be a clean reset for all parties.

Kentucky flirted with Billy Donovan and Jay Wright before “settling” on favorite son Mark Pope.

The decision has paid off. Pope has infused the Kentucky program with innovative offense for the first time in over a decade. It’s “fun” to watch Kentucky play again. And while Kentucky lacks the NBA lottery picks that dotted Calipari’s rosters for years, Pope meticulously constructed a veteran roster filled with winners like Lamont Butler, who made one of the biggest shots in the history of the Final Four while at San Diego State, or Jaxson Robinson, the high IQ guard Pope brought with him from BYU who hit 7 3-point shots in Kentucky’s 95-90 win Saturday night at No. 14 Mississippi State. The Wildcats are 13-3 under Pope at the midpoint of the season, with wins over national title contending Duke and Florida in that mix.

Arkansas?

What a mess.

Calipari insisted he’d “answered every question about Kentucky” and “only wants to talk Arkansas basketball” at SEC Media Days, even if he spent the better part of his opening monologue rattling off the roster of NBA players he’d coached in Lexington, a not-so-subtle insinuation that they’d come to Kentucky to play for Cal, not some infatuation with the Rupp rafters and the Big Blue logo.

Even if Calipari feels like he’s answered every question about his departure from Lexington, his first Arkansas team is plagued with the same questions that slowly pushed him out of favor with BBN in the first place.

The Hogs can’t score (78.4 ppg, 13th in the SEC), thanks in part to an offense that doesn’t space the floor well and is too reliant on—check me if you’ve heard this before — guards winning isolation battles on the perimeter. Freshman Boogie Fland and sophomore DJ Wagner, the latest NBA-bound 5-star guards on Calipari’s lengthy list — have won a few such battles, but not enough.

“Arkansas has great athletes. Kentucky under John had great athletes. But it’s as easy a scout as there is in our league. They have to get into the paint with their guards. They don’t do anything off the ball to stress your defense. It’s archaic what they do offensively,” an SEC assistant told SDS late last week, asking for anonymity to speak freely about Calipari-led offenses.

Two other problems make the lack of offensive identity worse.

First, Arkansas doesn’t offensive rebound at the prolific rate so many of Calipari’s Kentucky teams did, which eliminates a key way his teams offset the bland scheme that makes them easy to guard in the halfcourt. Arkansas rebounds just 27.8% of its misses, which ranks 248th in college basketball. Three of Calipari’s final 5 Kentucky teams ranked in the top 10 nationally in offensive rebounding. Second-chance possessions matter, and helped Calipari field 3 Top 25 offenses in that span, despite schematic issues. There’s no such efficiency reprieve for Arkansas in 2024-25.

Making matters worse, senior FAU transfer Johnell Davis, the No. 1 player in the transfer portal last spring, has suffered through a nightmarish start. A preseason All-SEC selection who appeared on plenty of All-American lists, Davis is shooting just 33% from deep on high volume. At FAU, Davis shot an average of 39% over the past 2 seasons, leading the Owls to the Final Four in 2023. Davis’ effective field goal percentage of 51.7% this season is a career low, and his turnover rate of 20.7% is a career high, per KenPom. On Saturday against Florida, Davis went 0-8 from the floor with 3 turnovers, locked up by his former FAU backcourt mate Alijah Martin. Davis watched the final few minutes of the game from the bench, wearing a towel over his head to shield his eyes, shoulders slumped.

The lack of confidence from a player whose big smile and gregarious personality and swagger seemed a perfect fit for a Calipari team speaks to the larger sense of disarray plaguing Calipari’s first year in Fayetteville.

Calipari himself seemed to lack answers in his postgame press conference Saturday night.

He wants more emotion from his guys, but outside of Wagner, there aren’t many options. He lamented injuries throughout fall camp that prevented Arkansas from scrimmaging with its full roster, but the Hogs were healthy enough to whip preseason No. 1 Kansas in an open exhibition game in late October. He asked if the Hogs are playing the right people, too, pointing specifically to the way they can’t seem to compete on the glass.

Calipari controls lineup decisions. If he thinks the team needs size so they don’t get outrebounded by 10 against Florida at home, he can make those changes. It isn’t as if this Arkansas roster isn’t deep. Trevon Brazile, a former starter at Missouri, played a season high 27 minutes against the Gators, scoring 7 points, grabbing 6 rebounds and blocking 2 shots. Why has he been buried on the bench? What has Calipari actually seen in Karter Knox (4-for-13 shooting, 4 turnovers in SEC play) that justifies the 20 minutes a game he’s getting? On a team that can’t shoot (33.7% from beyond the arc and 21% in SEC play), why is Zvonimir Ivišić, a 44% 3-point shooter, playing just 6.3 minutes per game in league play?

Things are spiraling fast for the Hogs.

It’s not quite the massacre of Sonny Corleone by Emilio Barzini’s men on the Jones Beach Causeway, but it’s getting ugly and fast.

The schedule softens this week, with road trips to LSU and Missouri presenting seemingly winnable games.

There will be no shortage of opportunities in the SEC, but what Arkansas can’t afford to do is drop games against teams with lesser talent. That’s been a Calipari staple this decade, and it needs to stop if Arkansas hopes to salvage Cal’s first season.

Can Calipari turn this around? Perhaps.

But many people watched 2 hours of Godfather 3 hoping the film would return to the immaculate form of Godfather I and Godfather II. Needless to say, Godfather III never returned to the old brilliance of the original films. The moment had passed.

Has Calipari’s?

Neil Blackmon

Neil Blackmon covers Florida football and the SEC for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.

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