Well, it looks like the schedule for the first Arkansas basketball season of the John Calipari era is complete.
So much of this first Calipari offseason has been defined by big, bold moves that move the needle on a national scale, from Calipari’s seismic arrival to Fayetteville itself, to announcements around each of the former blue-chip players and the trumpet blaring around non-conference games against the likes of Baylor, Michigan and Illinois.
The final piece of the puzzle, however, comes in silent as the night.
Indeed, there is not yet any sign of it on the Razorback website, which currently leaves its 2024-25 season page blank:
Until today, there was speculation that the Hogs’ 31st game was going to be another marquee matchup, but that was put to rest when lowly UT-San Antonio announced on “X” that it had included Arkansas as its Dec. 7 opponent in Fayetteville among others on its non-conference slate.
This is a bit of a let-down as Arkansas has wiped out UTSA the previous six times the teams have played and the Roadrunners don’t appear to have any clear ties to Calipari or the Razorback program.
However, their first-year head coach absolutely has a tie to two of the Razorbacks’ rivals in the Alabama and Kentucky basketball programs.
Alabama Basketball Ties
UTSA’s Austin Claunch, like Arkansas State’s Bryan Hodgson, comes from the coaching tree of Nate Oats. Arkansas basketball fans don’t need to be reminded about how much they loath what Oats has cooking down in Tuscaloosa as the Crimson Tide’s head coach. Indeed, Arkansas vs Alabama has become one of the SEC’s top rivalries of the last few years given the success of both sides.
Sometimes, Oats gets the benefit of enabling highly suspect star players, but luckily for Claunch he didn’t get stained from the drama of the 2022-23 campaign. He coached at Alabama for only this past season.
Claunch was announced as UTSA’s head coach in early April, not long after Calipari moved to Arkansas and left the Kentucky job vacant. For a hot minute, many Kentucky basketball fans wished the Wildcats would hire Nate Oats away to take over the ship.
That didn’t happen, of course, and in his introductory press conference Austin Claunch had some fun ruining the hopes of so many Big Blue Nation.
The 34-year-old thanked Oats for helping him rise in the profession and said that at Alabama he’s got “something sustainable” so wouldn’t be leaving.
“I think Kentucky is going to have to find a different coach than Coach Oats,” he added with a smile as the room broke into laughs:
Three days later, Mark Pope was announced as Kentucky’s new coach. He had a shaky start to his tenure, but lately has gotten much of Big Blue Nation back on his side by getting commitments from two major high school talents in Jasper Johnson and Malachi Moreno.
Of course, Pope did luck out some here as Johnson and Moreno are both Kentucky natives. We’ll see how many head-to-head recruiting battles he can win against Nate Oats and John Calipari for the out-of-state blue chippers.
When it comes to too-early college basketball rankings, Alabama is almost always ranked higher than Arkansas and Kentucky. The Hogs often slot in the 10-20 range with Kentucky after them. That’s the case both in preseason polls and in Final Four odds according to betting sites with welcome bonus.
In the latest ESPN preseason ranking, Alabama checks in at No. 2, Arkansas at No. 14 and Kentucky at No. 23.
