This Arkansas basketball team isn’t only failing to live up to expectations, it’s failing to even meet what most people imagined would be the team’s worst-case scenario.
If you’d have asked before the season, I would have probably said that worst-case result would be missing the NCAA Tournament. The way January has gone, Arkansas fans are wondering if the team will win another game, much less win enough to qualify for anything. The Razorbacks are 0-5 in the SEC following Saturday’s loss at Missouri, a game in which the Hogs were down double digits nearly the entire time.
The problems are obvious and they are extensive. Too many scoring droughts. Too many defensive lapses. Too much lazy rebounding. In SEC play, Arkansas’ free throw rate is worst in the league, and the Hogs are at the bottom of the league in shooting only 66.7% from the stripe. Through five SEC games, the Razorbacks are 14th out of 16 teams in both two-point and three-point shooting percentage. In short, there is no easy shot for the Razorbacks. Every offensive possession feels difficult. There’s nothing you can point to as a reliable offensive option. It’s often painful to watch. It feels like this is going to be the worst season since John Pelphrey went 2-14 in the league in 2010.
So far, most of the heralded transfer class hasn’t panned out. John Calipari signed three five-star freshmen, but only Boogie Fland has made a significant impact in the first half of the season (and he may be out for a while after Calipari announced after the Missouri game that Fland’s hand was injured). Johnell Davis, Jonas Aidoo and Zvonimir Ivisic have all dealt with injuries. Some of the team’s issues are probably bad luck. Some are coaching. Some of it’s on the players. There are enough problems to go around, even if the buck stops with Calipari.
Lost Season for Arkansas Basketball?
It doesn’t help things that this was a highly-anticipated team. Fans were looking forward to it as they suffered through another disappointing football year. Now it feels like a lost season and there are still weeks to go before baseball even starts.
Adding to the despair is a sense of, “What else can we do?” Arkansas’ NIL funds are supposedly among the nation’s best. It’s not like football, where we’re repeatedly told that other schools are outspending the Hogs. The school also made a huge investment in Calipari. Fans have been buying tickets (and, at least recently, mostly showing up). It’s worth wondering how many fans and donors will make the same commitment next year and further in the future if wins don’t start coming soon.
It’s harder to make the claim that we need to raise the most money possible to pay for the best players and coaches we can get when the money is there and we get a losing season out of it. The flip side, of course, is that if there is less money, the team won’t get the best players possible, and we’ll just have to hope they can come together better than this year’s team has. If nothing else, it certainly feeds into questions about how this generation of players – the first college players to receive hundreds of thousands, if not a million dollars or more for a season – is able to handle the sudden change in lifestyle. In professional sports, players are more insulated around the professional organization. It’s less so for college players. It’s still very much a new world.
The first three weeks of SEC play have been so bad that fans and media have gone from debating if this season can be salvaged to debating if the entire Calipari experiment in Fayetteville – no matter how long it may last – is doomed.
Calipari’s best seasons were the years when his teams were led by the best freshmen in the country. Players that became lottery picks and sometimes the top overall draft pick. Winning that way is much harder to do in 2025 than it was in 2015, when Calipari’s Wildcats went 38-1. Now, some top high school players skip college altogether and go to the G-League, as Ron Holland did when he spurned the Hogs a couple of years ago.
Further, in the NIL/transfer portal era, many good players are staying in college longer instead of leaving early to go play overseas, meaning there are more talented, experienced players competing against the top freshmen in today’s game than there were 10 years ago. Calipari is not going to be able to out-talent his way to a deep run in March doing things the same way he did in his first years at Kentucky.
Go down the rosters of most other SEC teams and you will see them filled with the kinds of strong, savvy veterans who have hurt Arkansas so far – guys like Chaz Lanier and Zakai Zigler at Tennessee or Missouri’s Caleb Grill or Florida’s Alijah Martin.
“You’ve got guys that are 23 years old that are good enough to play in the NBA at some point that are probably going to have long careers overseas going up against a bunch of 18 and 19 to 20 year olds that aren’t really being coached the way they need to be coached,” Field of 68’s Rob Dauster said on a Sunday episode of After Dark. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”
Given how hyper-competitive the SEC has become, it’s becoming more and more obvious that a “normal” collection of four- and five-star talent isn’t going to be able to thrive in today’s league. It would essentially take once-in-a-decade type talents like Anthony Davis/Michael Kidd-Gilchrist or John Wall/DeMarcus Cousins in order to help Arkansas right out of the gates in this version of the SEC.
Dauster’s “After Dark” co-host Randolph Childress played with such a talent in Tim Duncan at Wake Forest, where he developed into a second team All-American. Childress means no disrespect to Boogie Fland, Karter Knox and Billy Richmond when he said that, collectively, they aren’t at the kind of level that can play leading roles in winning games for Arkansas.
Cooper Flagg Is Not Walking Through Those Doors
“When you’re relying on an 18-year-old in today’s times and his name ain’t Cooper Flag, you’re going to struggle,” said Childress, alluding to Duke’s superstar 6-foot-9 freshman who had recently risen to the top of of KenPom’s statistical player of the year standings – with the third-highest kPOY rating in his database’s history.
It’s isn’t like Calipari was unaware his teams needed to get older. He discussed it as an issue when he was hired at Arkansas and he was talking about his recent upsets in the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament. That’s why he brought in Davis and Aidoo and Adou Theiro. At Kentucky, Calipari brought in Oscar Tschibwe as a transfer and he turned into a national player of the year.
Calipari’s staff is maybe an underrated point of criticism. Some have pointed to the loss of John Welch from last season’s Kentucky staff. Many credited Welch with developing Kentucky’s offensive system. Welch was an 18-year NBA assistant coach and “had the reputation as a premier player development coach in the NBA,” but he did not join Calipari in Fayetteville. Arkansas’ current assistant coach responsible for on-court player development is Brad Calipari, John’s son. Brad Calipari had the same role at two other schools prior to joining his father in Fayetteville and may prove to be an excellent coach, but he does not have the experience that Welch had. It’s the kind of hire you can make in a honeymoon period and no one will care.
But when things start going bad, it will raise some eyebrows.
Jeff Goodman’s Quasi Hit Piece
Jeff Goodman’s Hoops HQ piece over the weekend sure didn’t help along these lines. The long-time college basketball analyst talked to a few SEC coaches who had a field day criticizing Calipari and his staff. “They don’t have anyone innovative, they are outdated in how they do things,” one SEC assistant said.
“There’s just no fear now when I see him on the sideline,” another coach told Hoops HQ. “The game has changed and he’s becoming archaic.”
On Tuesday, a member of the Arkansas basketball staff addressed the long-time college basketball reporter’s piece publicly for the first time when assistant Chin Coleman said the charge that Calipari’s becoming archaic is “absolutely, definitely not true. He’s one of the most innovative coaches to ever coach. To say he’s ‘archaic’, you’re fishing, in my opinion, but everybody’s entitled to their opinion.”
He continued: “I’m blessed to work for a Hall of Fame coach. The best coach in the business. I don’t have any social media, so I don’t read any of that stuff. Don’t know any of that world, I just know how great Coach Cal is and how much he cares about these players. I know we’re in a little bit of a bad pass right now, but we’re going to try our hardest to get out of it, and we’ve got the best man for the job.”
Despite pieces like Goodman’s among other suggestions Calipari has lost his fastball, there are plenty of reasons to side with Coleman in thinking Calipari still has the ability to win. Despite the recent upsets in the NCAA Tournament, his last three Kentucky teams won 23, 22 and 26 games. They were a 2-seed in 2022 and a 3-seed just last year. Further, an occasional disappointing year isn’t new for Calipari. He followed up his national championship in 2012 with a first-round NIT loss in 2013. In 2021, his Wildcats went 9-16 (that can have an asterisk since it was the COVID season, but that’s the year Eric Musselman took Arkansas to the Elite Eight, so it definitely counts).
Despite the lopsided record, the Hogs haven’t appeared to have fully given up. They had early leads in the first four games but each time allowed a major run (or two or three) to put the game out of reach. Many of the players who have been disappointing overall have had good stretches at times in different games. As long as the team is fighting, if the team can figure out how to produce consistently, there’s a chance they could put something together to salvage the season to some extent. How will the team perform if DJ Wagner takes over as the primary point guard while Fland’s hand is injured?
Until anything gets better – if it ever does – this will feel like one of the most inexplicably disappointing seasons in the history of the program and a horrible first impression to the Calipari Era for Razorback fans.
***
Check out our in-depth preview of Arkansas vs Georgia, including who stands to gain the most in Boogie Fland’s potential absence:
***
Wondering why Jeff Goodman seems to have it out for Calipari? Check this out:
More on Arkansas basketball from BoAS:
