Why doesn’t Kentucky just pay the $33 million it would take to make John Calipari go away?

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Anything short of a trip to the Final Four, and the calls were bound to come.

Following Kentucky’s ouster from the NCAA Tournament in the first round on Thursday night — an 80-76 loss to 14-seeded Oakland, another embarrassing upset for the Wildcats on college basketball’s biggest stage — those calls came, and they were deafening: UK should pay John Calipari the $33 million and change it will take to make him go away.

To some Kentucky fans, that scenario remains too much, given what Calipari has done for the program in his 15 seasons as head coach. To other UK fans, it’s an idea that’s already overdue, taking into account the Wildcats’ postseason struggles in recent years.

Whatever your opinion, that outcome is an unrealistic one.

The decision-makers at the University of Kentucky — a public university — are simply not going to pay Calipari that much money to not coach the Wildcats, knowing full well they would need to turn around and guarantee whoever comes next a lengthy and lucrative deal to replace him.

College athletics is big business, but just because there are millions of dollars flowing through athletics departments the size of UK’s doesn’t mean there are millions of dollars just sitting around, unaccounted for. Certainly not the $33,375,000 — that’s Calipari’s buyout number following this season, per the terms of his contract — it would take to make him go away.

Calipari agreed to a 10-year contract extension following the 2018-19 season after leading the Wildcats to the Elite Eight, where they lost to Auburn in overtime. At that point, Calipari was 10 years into his tenure as Kentucky’s coach. And to that point, he had led UK to one national title, four Final Fours and seven Elite Eights over those 10 years.

In the five seasons since, Kentucky has won one NCAA Tournament game and failed to advance past the first week of March Madness.

There were calls for Calipari’s job even before Thursday night’s loss to Oakland. In the time since that extension was signed, UK has had one NCAA Tournament canceled due to a pandemic — the Cats were projected as a 3 seed that year — endured a 9-16 season (the worst in the modern history of the program), lost in the first round of March Madness as a 2 seed to 15-seeded Saint Peter’s, lost to Kansas State in the second round as a 6 seed last year, and then the result against Oakland on Thursday night.

Though the Wildcats have ended the regular season ranked in the top 10 in three of those five seasons, it’s NCAA Tournament results that matter in Lexington, and they’ve fallen well short of their perennial goal in the last half-decade under Calipari.

That kind of run at a place like Kentucky would probably be enough to get anyone fired in just about any other situation. This is not any other situation.

UK president Eli Capilouto and athletics director Mitch Barnhart — the two men whose signatures are underneath Calipari’s on that 2019 contract extension — don’t have more than $33 million to pay him not to coach.

If they did, the UK men’s basketball program — the self-described “gold standard” of the sport — wouldn’t have started a glorified GoFundMe campaign on the eve of the NCAA Tournament asking fans to raise money for name, image and likeness payouts to players. The stated goal of that initiative was $1 million, by the way. That’s more than $32 million short of what it would take to pay Calipari. As of noon Friday, less than $50,000 had been pledged, even with mega-fan favorite Reed Sheppard among those making the public pitch.

How the Calipari situation differs from Jimbo Fisher at Texas A&M

The Kentucky fans who want Calipari gone the most will point to the more than $76 million that Texas A&M paid Jimbo Fisher to walk away from his job leading the Aggies football program last year, the most extreme example of a public university ponying up to get rid of an embattled coach.

The circumstances are different, in more ways than one.

Texas A&M was on its way to a third consecutive season — and the fourth in five years — finishing outside of the Top 25 in the final Associated Press poll, a proud program that had fallen completely out of the national spotlight and was seemingly heading into even darker territory if no changes were made.

Kentucky’s basketball team spent eight weeks in the top 10 of the AP poll this season, and — it might look foolish now — but the Wildcats were a trendy pick to make it to the Final Four when the NCAA Tournament tipped off Thursday. Two seasons ago, the Cats were possibly an SEC Tournament run away from a 1 seed in March Madness.

No one wants to hear it anymore, but Calipari still has the nation’s No. 2 recruiting class coming in next season, the possibility of some key players returning, and enough name-brand value to be a player in the transfer portal.

Things haven’t been going well lately, by UK standards, but they also haven’t reached the depths of the situation that led to Fisher’s departure.

And, for as big as everyone around here thinks Kentucky basketball is, college football — especially in the SEC, and especially in Texas — is always going to be a bigger business.

Fisher’s buyout remains an extreme outlier even in that context. The largest previous buyout paid to a college football coach by a public university was the $21.7 million that Auburn gave Gus Malzahn to leave four years ago. In college basketball, nothing has even come close to that.

If the university can’t pay Calipari to leave, why not the athletics department’s biggest donors? Why wouldn’t, say, coal magnate Joe Craft, who was sitting courtside in Pittsburgh on Thursday night, and his wife Kelly write a check for $33 million to see change within the program?

Multiple people familiar with the situation told the Herald-Leader in the immediate aftermath of Kentucky’s loss to Oakland that there’s no way Craft, specifically, would do such a thing. Others with direct knowledge of the situation said later Friday afternoon that there have been preliminary talks exploring the possibility of a buyout involving the Crafts.

But even if he had an extra $30-plus million to give to UK Athletics, Barnhart would surely want to make better use of that money to further the department’s overall goals. Joe and Kelly Craft have been generous donors to several different UK Athletics initiatives over the years, and they have a close, working relationship with Barnhart.

Everyone involved knows there are more logical ways to spend that kind of cash.

And Capilouto is currently dealing with multiple high-profile headaches, the debate over the faculty senate’s role and the possible impact of DEI legislation at the state level among them. Is the president of a public university with that much on his plate really going to wade into the PR disaster that would come with paying a Hall of Fame basketball coach $33 million to sit at home? All while promising the next guy even more than that to do the job?

According to UK’s most recent NCAA financial report, the athletics department was responsible for $1.2 million in severance payments during the 2022-23 fiscal year. That means if the university did fire Calipari, whose buyout would be paid in monthly installments, it would be responsible for more than five times that amount next year.

That leaves the ball in Calipari’s court.

This is a highly competitive man with a chip on his shoulder who has made a career of setting out to prove other people wrong, always confident that he will win out in the end. There’s the “ambassador” clause that would pay him a little less than $1 million annually over the next five years to step down as head coach and be a representative of the athletics department. Calipari is not going to do that.

There’s the possibility that — if Calipari has had enough — he, Barnhart and Capilouto could sit down and negotiate a number that is more reasonable to the university. Anyone who’s spent much time around Calipari knows that’s a non-starter, too. As someone who knows the coach well told the Herald-Leader late Thursday night: “John doesn’t walk away from money.”

Calipari is going to want every penny owed if UK wants him gone. That’s what was agreed to five years ago, and he’s in a position to demand it.

Would Calipari leave for a different job?

Barring an unforeseen shift in thinking by one of the major players involved in this situation — or the Crafts and perhaps other deep-pocketed donors supplying tens of millions of dollars — the only realistic scenario in which Calipari is not the head coach at Kentucky to start the 2024-25 season is if he accepts a job to become the head coach somewhere else.

And, according to conversations over the past several days, this, too, is a long shot.

The Michigan job is open, and it’s the one that makes the most sense on paper. It’s been a week since Juwan Howard was let go — his buyout was $3 million, by the way — and the Wolverines have publicly made little progress on his replacement, surely waiting for coaches currently in the NCAA Tournament to see their seasons end before making a final move.

Would Calipari be a fit there? Possibly. But that doesn’t seem to be the most logical outcome. Calipari would still surely demand something close to his current salary at Kentucky, and such a deal would come with a guaranteed length of several years.

Michigan is a football school. Its biggest rival is Ohio State. Just days ago, OSU gave interim men’s basketball head coach Jake Diebler a deal worth $2.5 million annually to take the job on a permanent basis. Before that, the Buckeyes were publicly linked to more high-profile coaching candidates that would have certainly commanded much higher salaries.

Whatever Ohio State athletics can save on its basketball program can be spent on football. Knowing that, is Michigan going to make a splashy, expensive hire? And would Calipari really go to a football school and finish his Hall of Fame career playing second fiddle, having to scrape even more for the money and attention he’d surely want for his basketball program? Seems unlikely.

Other high-profile jobs might — and probably will — open up in the coming days and weeks. Rumors of potential departures are running rampant in college basketball circles at the moment. Some might look like fits on paper. None will be Kentucky, the place where Calipari has always strived to be.

Calipari isn’t walking away from the kind of money he’s promised here. And UK, on its own, isn’t in a position to pay him what it would take to leave. That’s the reality of Kentucky basketball as this offseason begins.

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