Rick Pitino and John Calipari’s Long, Strange Paths Cross Again
The two legendary coaching frenemies will meet again on Saturday.
One of the most hotly anticipated games in the NCAA men’s tournament’s Round of 32 is not necessarily predicted to be a close battle. According to my 🏀 2025 NCAA Tournament Forecast 📊, the favorite has a healthy 71 percent chance to win and move on to the Sweet 16, some the better odds for a team with its seed. One of the teams is among the highest-ranked in the country, while the other is simply trying to play spoiler after fighting for its tourney life for the past two months.
But this game, between Rick Pitino’s St. John’s Red Storm and John Calipari’s Arkansas Razorbacks, is about stakes that extend far beyond the scope of the 2025 tournament.
If you need a refresher on the extensive backstory between Pitino and Calipari, I highly recommend watching this excellent video by Secret Base:
To make a long story short, let’s just say that Calipari and Pitino have a long and, um, complicated relationship. They once appeared to be friends — Calipari even credited Pitino for helping launch his career — but their bond inevitably soured due to competition, ambition and personal slights. The two clashed publicly and privately over time, with the animosity peaking in the 2010s after Calipari took over Pitino’s old job at Kentucky while Pitino coached at archrival Louisville. The tension has since given way to a begrudging mutual respect, but the two have always been more rivals than friends — and for a time, they even shared outright BEEF.
At the same time, both coaches have had wildly successful careers — and what’s fascinating is that their journeys have mirrored each other’s in many ways. Here’s a plot of their cumulative games above/below .500 through each season of their careers, split out by college and pro records:
Despite many different stops — Pitino has coached seven different D-I college teams across 49 years (!); Calipari has coached four across 36 years — and occasional NBA failures, both have won a similar number of NCAA games overall: 885 for Pitino and 876 for Calipari. Their paths even detoured briefly to the NBA at almost exactly the same time in the 1990s, then realigned again when they both returned to college basketball.
Both have had their moments of scandal. Pitino left Louisville in shame in 2017 over a series of incidents that included a sex scandal involving staffers arranging strippers and prostitutes for recruits, and a separate, sprawling corruption probe that implicated the U of L along with dozens of other programs.1 Calipari’s UMass and Memphis teams were each touched by NCAA violations as well, and both coaches have had wins vacated.
But that may go hand-in-hand with competing for talent at the highest level. At Kentucky, Pitino coached one of the most stacked college teams ever assembled in 1996, which boasted nine different future NBA players. (A group that didn’t even include Jamal Mashburn, maybe the most talented player Pitino coached at UK.) At Louisville, he later developed Terry Rozier and then Donovan Mitchell, the greatest talent Pitino ever coached.
And for Coach Cal, it might be easier to rattle off the NBA lottery picks of the 2000s and 2010s that he didn’t bring up at Memphis or Kentucky. His all-time list of prospects includes an unbelievable amount of talent, from Marcus Camby, Derrick Rose and Tyreke Evans to Anthony Davis, John Wall, Karl-Anthony Towns, DeMarcus Cousins, Devin Booker, Jamal Murray, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Bam Adebayo, Julius Randle… I seriously can’t even keep rattling these guys off, this is an insane list.
Overall, Pitino may have slightly more career wins, but Calipari has more wins above .500 and a better list of NBA products. But how do they fare when facing each other directly? Including both college and NBA games, here is every single head-to-head matchup between the two coaches, from the perspective of Calipari’s point differential in each game (green = Calipari wins; red = Pitino wins):
Pitino won their first three meetings, and four of the first five, but a five-game losing streak gave Coach Cal the edge that he has not fully relinquished since. The two were .500 against each other as of this Nets-Celtics game on Feb. 27, 1999, but Calipari has won 13 of the 19 matchups since to bring his overall head-to-head record against his famous frienemy to 20-13.
But Pitino did win the last previous meeting, a 73-70 Louisville win on December 21, 2016. And while a lot has changed for both men since then, Pitino and St. John’s are favored again over Calipari and Arkansas on Saturday at 2:40 p.m. ET. It may not be the familiar Bluegrass State battle we’re used to seeing them in — and Pitino now has the upper hand, based on the job he’s done turning the Johnnies around — but we’ve learned by now that things mean more than the usual stakes whenever these two coaches meet up.
Filed under: College Basketball
Pitino had previously managed to survive his own sex scandal involving the wife of a team equipment manager extorting him in 2009.