College basketball's most barren coaching tree
John Calipari has won nearly 850 games, but none of his former assistants have had close to the same level of success as head coaches. It makes the Kentucky boss a historical outlier
On Thursday night, John Calipari did what any good friend would – he offered public support to an embattled buddy.
Calipari’s Kentucky team had just polished off a 95-76 win against Louisville that was somehow more lopsided than even its lopsided final score in a game between two longtime rivals in which the storied programs looked nothing like peers. When he spoke to the assembled media at the KFC Yum! Center, he didn’t want to bask in the win as much as he wanted to lend a helping hand to Cardinals coach Kenny Payne.
Payne was Calipari’s longtime lieutenant at Kentucky, serving as his assistant coach for the Wildcats for 10 seasons before eventually heading to Louisville, his alma mater, where he went 4-28 last season and is 5-7 about two months into his second season, with losses to Arkansas State, Chattanooga and DePaul.
“He's got a really young team,” Calipari said. “And you gotta go let him do what he does. The players love him because they play for him. They never let go of the rope. And I'm watching, and I feel for him. But shoot, we went through it a couple years ago. The people get mean and nasty. They do. And that's what you have to deal with in this profession. Anytime I text him, 'Coach your team.' That's what I tell him. 'Coach your team.' All the other stuff doesn't matter."
It’s not the first time he has had to watch one of his former assistant coaches flail.
Calipari is one of the most accomplished men’s college basketball coaches of his or any other generation, with a list of achievements that speaks for itself. He has taken three different schools to the Final Four, including UMass in what is perhaps the most impressive program-building effort from any coach in the history of the sport. In 2012, he guided Kentucky to its first national championship in 14 years. His approach to recruiting – turning over rosters annually and building around a collection of highly rated freshmen who much more often than not coalesce into a bonafide Final Four contender by the end of the season – has made him the defining figure of the past two decades in college basketball.
But there’s at least one area, albeit a much less important one, in which Calipari falls noticeably short – the success of his former assistant coaches as head coaches.
Payne is the most recent and perhaps most glaring example, given how long he worked under Calipari at Kentucky and how a top-10 all-time program has plunged to such unimaginable depths under his watch. Some, including this author, have gone so far as to suggest Payne is a sleeper cell for the Wildcats, sent to their ailing archrival to sink whatever hope it had of ever recovering as a program (to be clear: I don’t actually believe this).
The list of misfires goes well beyond Payne, though.
Nine Calipari assistants have gone on to be Division I head coaches, all of whom found varying levels of success, but none of whom did particularly well at a major-conference program. None of them, for example, have made it past the first week of the NCAA Tournament and only three have coached at a program in one of the sport’s top six conferences.
Excluding Payne, who we’ve already gone over in some detail, here’s a rundown:
Orlando Antigua (23-55 career record)
Antigua coached about two-and-a-half seasons at South Florida and never won more than nine games. While USF’s a challenging job, the Bulls had gone 46-53 in the three seasons before his hiring. He was fired 13 games into his third season, with the program under NCAA investigation for academic fraud.
Bruiser Flint (331-289 career record)
If there’s a success story in this group, it’s probably Flint. He succeeded Calipari after he left UMass for the then-New Jersey Nets and initially maintained some of the program’s momentum, going 40-25 his first two seasons. Over time, though, things slipped and he went 46-47 in his final three seasons before resigning. He made two NCAA Tournaments with the Minutemen, but once there, never won a game. He then took over at Drexel in his hometown of Philadelphia, going 245-217 over 15 seasons. He never made the NCAA Tournament and only won at least 20 games three times, though his 2011-12 team, which went 29-7, got screwed out of a bid.
Tony Barbee (153-177 career record)
Barbee took over what was a strong UTEP program in the mid-2000s and found his footing in the back half of his tenure, with a 49-21 record in his final two seasons in El Paso. That earned him the job at Auburn, where he went 49-75, never had a winning record and never finished better than 6-12 in what was a much weaker SEC before being fired after four seasons. He’s in his third season at Central Michigan, where’s currently 22-50.
Derek Kellogg (229-211 career record)
Kellogg’s nine-year tenure at UMass, where he played for Calipari in the early-mid 1990s, wasn’t without its peaks. From 2011-14, he led the Minutemen to a 70-33 record, capped off by what is still the program’s lone NCAA Tournament appearance this century. But after going 46-51 in his final three seasons, he was fired in 2017. He immediately re-surfaced at LIU Brooklyn, where he went 74-74, posting a non-losing record in four of his five seasons there, but never finishing more than two games over .500.
Josh Pastner (276-187 career record)
Pastner, not Flint, is probably the most decorated mentee of this group, but he’s largely here as a technicality. He coached under Calipari for one season at Memphis and was promoted when his former boss left for Kentucky in 2009. If anything, he’s a Lute Olson disciple, having played for him for four seasons at Arizona before coaching under him for another six seasons.
Bill Bayno (94-67 career record)
If there’s an argument against the idea of a Calipari assistant not excelling at the highest level of the sport, it’s probably Bayno given UNLV’s standing in college basketball in the mid-late 1990s. Bayno led the Runnin Rebels to two NCAA Tournaments in five seasons there, but failed to win a game in either instance. He was fired by the school seven games into his sixth season as it was mired in an NCAA investigation, though Bayno was never implicated.
John Robic (58-113 career record)
Robic never got going at Youngstown State, a historically difficult place to win, in his six seasons there. After the Penguins finished 19-11 in his second season, they went 27-86 during the remainder of his tenure.
Chuck Martin (41-118 career record)
Martin, who’s currently in his first season under Calipari as an assistant at Kentucky, never finished better than four games under .500 in a season at Marist, which included a 1-29 mark in 2009-10.
Overall, and removing Pastner from consideration given the specious ties, four of Calipari’s eight former assistants have losing records as a head coach and only one, Bayno, has won more than 54% of his games. As a group, they’ve posted a collective record of 938-1,252 – which comes out to a win percentage of just 42.8%.
Whatever critiques there already were of former Calipari proteges have only been magnified by Payne’s disastrous first 44 games at Louisville.
In some ways, it’s an overly critical assessment of someone who has been an undeniable winner. Calipari has 841 career victories, advanced far in the tournament and even won a title, fulfilling his most important responsibilities. Along the way, that success has created opportunities for nearly a dozen of his former assistant coaches to lead programs of their own.
Still, he’s a bit of a historical oddity. If you scroll through the list of the 30 winningest coaches in college basketball history, few, if any, at the Division I level have failed to produce at least one assistant coach who brought some of that success elsewhere.
Some coaching trees are more robust than others. Dean Smith’s was famously fruitful, giving birth to the careers of Larry Brown and Roy Williams. In the modern era, Rick Pitino has watched as Billy Donovan, Tubby Smith and Mick Cronin have thrived on their own. Bob Knight, despite his singular force of personality, gave us Mike Krzyzewski and Chris Beard at very different points in his career. Krzyzewski’s coaching tree has received scrutiny as many of his former assistants have underwhelmed as head coaches, but even with those misfires, he can still claim Mike Brey, Chris Collins and Tommy Amaker.
Even those who don’t have a lengthy list of accomplished former assistants have at least one star pupil. Jim Boeheim had Pitino. Adolph Rupp had Joe B. Hall. Tom Izzo had Tom Crean. Bill Self had Billy Gillispie. Jim Calhoun had Kevin Ollie (say what you will about him, he’s got a national title).
For Calipari, however, such a silver lining doesn’t exist. With that comes an unavoidable question – how has someone who has done so much winning consistently been unable to transfer some of that to those closest to him?
Admittedly, it’s a bit of a mystery, though there are some plausible theories. Calipari is one of the most gifted recruiters in the history of the sport, so when an assistant is suddenly recruiting for themselves instead of their boss – and all the NBA draftees and millions of dollars in professional contracts he can sell – it becomes a much more onerous task. Unlike some of his historical peers, he doesn’t have a hardened system, per se, that’s easily replicable. Even one of the schematic tenets of his coaching career, the dribble drive offense, has been panned as antiquated in recent years.
Calipari will turn 65 in February and with Flint, Antigua and Martin accounting for three of his five assistant coaches this season at Kentucky, it’s quite likely he never churns out that standout protege.
Instead of looking for answers, perhaps it’s easiest to accept Calipari as one of one, someone who can lead a program to greatness, but whose model and methods can’t simply be copied and pasted. On an otherwise uninspired coaching tree, it might be the closest thing to a compliment you can give him.
(Photos: Kentucky Athletics, USA Today Sports)