Arkansas ran the Bear Bryant playbook on John Calipari

And this time, it worked.

Bryant: Public domain. Calipari: © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports.

John Calipari is now the men’s basketball coach at Arkansas because:

• Kentucky fans had gotten sick of their coach.

• A bunch of middling ACC schools wanted marginally more TV revenue, so they decided SMU would now be Atlantic. This made SMU a palatable destination for the head basketball coach at USC, so he left, and the Trojans in turn hired away Arkansas’ coach, leaving a vacuum.  

• Calipari is friends with the rich chicken man.

A fascinating piece of Calipari’s move to Fayetteville is how it intersects with a move Bear Bryant didn’t make 72 years ago. Sometimes history rhymes. Sometimes it doesn’t rhyme but offers tangential lessons.

Arkansas almost poached Bear Bryant from Kentucky, using a strategy similar to the one that apparently landed Calipari. 

In 1913, Bryant was born in Moro Bottom, Arkansas, a town he described as “no more than it sounds, a little piece of bottom land” near Fordyce, which he called “our big city.” Arkansas was where Paul Bryant wrestled a bear and became Bear Bryant. And it’s where he lived until 1931, when he moved to Alabama to play college football. A bit more than a decade after that, he was the head coach at Maryland. And a year after that, in 1946, Bryant got to Lexington.¹

In the early ‘50s, Kentucky basketball was stuck in the first big scandal in modern college athletics. (It was the first case the NCAA’s dedicated enforcement arm ever prosecuted and laid the groundwork for all future cases.) The basketball team got mixed up with gamblers, and Adolph Rupp was the guy overseeing that circus. The shenanigans in Rupp’s program brought so much NCAA attention to Kentucky that it became a pain in Bryant’s ass, eventually leading him to stop recruiting players from out of state. But the university stood by Rupp, the national championship coach and arguably the most powerful man in the Bluegrass. Bryant was sick of it, and right as former Kentucky hoopers were amid a high-profile legal case, the Hogs called. Bryant could go home. Before 1952, Bryant “tried to resign,” he later explained in his autobiography.

“The trial was coming up and I thought the bad publicity was hurting my program. I was trying to recruit at the time and I thought, ‘Why the hell do I have to go through, as tough as it is to recruit at Kentucky?’” Bryant said “the Arkansas people” took him on a private plane to meet the governor and school president, “and they offered me all the goodies they could.” 

Reportedly, Calipari will get NIL money from the Tyson Chicken family and other Arkansas benefactors. Bryant had a chance to get a lot more: He said two men offered him stock in Arkansas-Louisiana Gas, a new oil company, and Bryant wrote that he would’ve been worth $40 million by the ‘70s if he’d just taken the deal. “I should have,” he said later from his perch at Alabama.

But Bryant recalled that Kentucky president Herman Donovan convinced him that Rupp was going to resign, which would fix UK’s problems with the NCAA, so Bryant stayed around for 1952. News reports also suggested Bryant wanted total control of Arkansas’ program and didn’t want to report to an athletic director. Arkansas lawmakers proposed a budget amendment to eliminate the AD job that December, but Bryant, placated for a brief moment by his boss, went back to Kentucky anyway.

That wasn’t the only time Bryant angled for the Arkansas job. 

He had also wanted it in the winter of 1941. Fred Thomsen was on his way out after four straight losing seasons, and Bryant worked some connections to replace him. Yankees catcher (and future Hall of Famer) Bill Dickey introduced him to Governor Homer Adkins, and the trio met a few times to talk about the Razorbacks job. Bryant was a Vanderbilt assistant at the time. In his recollection, he “knew the job was mine” as he drove back to Nashville on December 7, 1941.

On the car radio, Bryant heard that Japanese warplanes had bombed Pearl Harbor. “About all I had time to do when I got home was kiss Mary Harmon hello and good-bye,” Bryant wrote. “The next day I was in Washington, D.C., and shortly after I was in the U.S. Navy.” Years later, Bryant said he was in the car with Dickey, who “just threw on the brakes” when the report came on. He may have hammed up his retelling of the story a bit.

Bryant also wanted Arkansas in 1953, a year after almost leaving Kentucky. Hogs coach Bowden Wyatt had just gone 3-7 in his first year, but the Hogs did not have room for Bryant. His cold shoulder the year before left hurt feelings, as Bryant said later that an Arkansas booster friend warned him he’d never be able to recruit in the state again. “I’d dealt myself into a corner. The only offer I had left, the only one still open, was Texas A&M,” Bryant wrote. “I had to take it.” And that’s the story of how Bryant, almost a Hog, became an Aggie.

Two lessons stick out from these stories.

1. The University of Kentucky ain’t big enough to have a successful basketball coach and football coach for too long. Mark Stoops is in the midst of one of the great games of Survivor in sports history. Good for him for outlasting a national championship hoops coach who was very public about wanting the food from Stoops’ plate. Gravity is eventually going to win, though.

2. By GDP per capita or median income, Arkansas is one of the five poorest states in the union. By “rich dudes willing to express their love for the state by throwing money at favored football and basketball coaches,” however, Arkansas is the wealthiest territory in all the land. 

Want more of the story of Bryant and Rupp at Kentucky? 

I’ll direct you to our “Dead Letters” podcast installment on that history. 

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1. In this newsletter’s initial publication, I allowed a typo that said Bear Bryant was born in 1993, rather than 1913. No, but allow yourself to be swept away by internal debate over whether the Bear would have been a Nickelodeon or Disney kid.