New school, new year, same John Calipari. The legendary coach made a big splash Friday by landing a commitment from five-star point guard Darius Acuff Jr., who is rated as high as No. 4 overall in the 2025 class by 247 Sports.
Acuff’s opting of Arkansas over the Kansas and Michigan basketball programs has made the Hogs the talk of the town once again in the college basketball world, and it represents a great start to the next recruiting cycle for Coach Cal and the Hogs. It’s an early start, to boot.
Looking at 247 Sports’ national rankings, the Detroit native is by far the highest prospect on the board making his decision at this point. He’s the only five-star prospect to have pledged to a school so far – all the other heavy hitters are still in play.
That gives Calipari a chance to build on the momentum of landing Acuff to start a domino effect for the rest of the class. We’ve seen it time and time again: good players want to play with other good players. It remains to be seen what the gravitational pull of the nation’s top point guard can pull into Fayetteville, but it can only mean good things moving forward.
The commitment gives Arkansas the sort of ball-dominant, physical lead guard who has been the staple of many of Calipari’s best teams throughout his illustrious career – think back to Derrick Rose at Memphis or De’Aaron Fox and John Wall at Kentucky.
Arkansas Basketball Dominates the Headlines Again
Acuff’s commitment is the sort of landmark event you expect when John Calipari is leading the program. It’s hard to quantify the impact he has on the program’s brand. At Kentucky, the Wildcats were the talk of college basketball for over a decade under his watch. Landing a prospect of Acuff’s caliber shows Cal and his reputation as the sport’s best recruiter aren’t going anywhere.
The upward spiral into which this has pulled Arkansas basketball is evident in an article ESPN put out Friday in honor of the 100-day mark until the start of the college basketball season with a full breakdown of what’s to come, including the biggest headlines and players going into the campaign.
It didn’t take long for Calipari’s name to come up – no less than the second paragraph as a notable coach with a new home. Coach Cal at Arkansas is also listed as one of the “best storylines” of the year, only below UConn’s quest for a three-peat. The Head Hog gets a mention in the section on “new coaches to watch,” alongside his Kentucky successor Mark Pope.
FAU transfer guard Johnell Davis also made the list of “transfers to watch,” a fitting slot for a player widely regarded as one of the top portal entrants of the offseason.
ESPN Snubs Arkansas’ Date with Michigan Basketball
Arkansas’ notable exclusion from the article comes in the category of “best non-conference matchups.” The games listed are North Carolina vs. Kansas, Duke vs. Kentucky, Houston vs. Alabama, Baylor vs. UConn and Auburn vs. Purdue.
The first two make sense, as blue-blood bouts are always going to be appointment television. The red-blooded heavyweight matchup between Houston and Alabama also fits right in, and you couldn’t make the list without throwing in one of the back-to-back champion Huskies’ games.
The last one though…seriously? For the first time in what feels like a decade, Zach Edey is not in college anymore. Purdue’s bland style of basketball without the eight-foot tall giant won’t provide much entertainment and, as much as Auburn fans want to claim otherwise, the Tigers are not a blue blood.
The game is also being played at a neutral site in Birmingham, Ala., hardly a destination venue. Fortunately, there’s a high-caliber neutral-site matchup that it can be swapped out for to fix that list – Arkansas vs. Michigan in Madison Square Garden on Dec. 10 as part of the Jimmy V Classic.
Sure, both teams posted losing records last year. But the two programs have each undergone major renovations in the offseason, spearheaded by landmark coaching changes. FAU’s Final Four hero Dusty May made the move to Ann Arbor, and Arkansas hired a Naismith Hall of Famer as its head coach.
While Eric Musselman getting into a sideline fist-fight with Juwan Howard certainly would have been hilarious – especially with the height differential – May vs. Calipari is the more enticing on-court matchup.
Aside from the upgrades in the coaching department, there’s also some low-hanging fruit for a newsworthy headline in the fact that Arkansas’ highest-profile addition, Johnell Davis, used to play for May at FAU. It was May on the sidelines as Davis led the charge for the Owls on their Cinderella run in March. Pitting those two against each other, after Davis opted for Arkansas over Michigan, is enticing enough.
Acuff’s recent decision also adds a bit more spice into the recipe given the Detroit area native chose Arkansas over Kansas and Michigan, his home-state school. While Acuff won’t be featuring in the game as he completes his high school career, the narrative of the five-star guard snubbing the Wolverines for the Hogs will certainly be in the back of May’s mind – not to mention the Michigan basketball fans angry about missing out on the state’s best prospect.
The fact the matchup takes place in the Big Apple just makes it all the more fun. Two historic programs that were dominant in the 1990s – Arkansas with its “40 Minutes of Hell” style under head coach Nolan Richardson and Michigan with its iconic “Fab Five.”
The two schools were trendsetters in that time period: Arkansas for its relentless full-court press and Michigan for its cultural impact on the game. Slam’s Jared Ebanks wrote that “in December of ‘91, a cultural revolution of baggy shorts, bald heads and black socks stormed onto the collegiate basketball scene,” referencing Michigan’s talented squad.
Arkansas defeated the Wolverines in the 1994 Elite Eight en route to the program’s first national title. By the time the two faced off, the Razorbacks had also adopted the baggy-shorts trend, which made for a clash that simply must have led the nation in inseam length and obnoxious polyester.
Michigan got some revenge a few years later in the NIT Championship Game, albeit a far lower-stakes affair. Auburn and Purdue, of course, don’t have anywhere near that level of precedent against each other.
Add all this history for Arkansas and Michigan basketball to the mix with these new coaches, and that’s one hell of a non-conference matchup.
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See our latest here:
Watch Darius Acuff Jr. light up the Nike EYBL circuit:
Relive the baggy-shorted glory of Arkansas’ 1994 triumph over Michigan:
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