Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly-ish column on the Texas Longhorns.
The speculation isn’t new. With Kentucky trying its best to make the 2023 NIT (the odds are stacked against them) and Texas looking for yet another head coach, John Calipari’s name has been loudly on the radar for an athletic department which loves to make splashes when hiring men’s basketball coaches. The new thing is not the speculation. It’s the report, from Travis Branham at 247 Sports, that “Texas has contacted John Calipari through back channels,” which feels like something that would be very easy to make up, except that Branham’s a Lexington guy, not an Austin guy, and Texas would be likely to make this up but I don’t know about Kentucky. The Nuts would be more skeptical if someone at Texas was pushing this rumor around.
It’s fairly unfathomable that this would happen during the season, but at this point, who knows. We weren’t expecting Chris Beard to be out of the job before he’d even hit the halfway point in Year 2. We weren’t expecting Calipari to become Public Enemy No. 1 in Big Blue Nation.
At the very least, we’re going to get a great round of Texas/Calipari speculation, and if everything goes our way, we’re going to get that for almost three months. There is a lot of very sad stuff that has led to this, and we wish that sad and bad stuff hadn’t happened, but we do appreciate a three-month coaching search rumor. It’s really too bad tracking private jets is illegal now (I was told Big Tech censorship violates the first amendment, so I assume that makes Big Tech the government). We’re going to have a lot of fun asking questions like “What does John Calipari look like in burnt orange?” and “Is John Calipari an Uber Eats guy or do I need to switch to DoorDash if I want to meet him via burrito?”
For now, though, let us just point something out:
For years, the speculation involving Chris Beard and Kentucky was that Beard would be the guy to take over when Calipari moved on to whatever it was Calipari did after Lexington. Beard was the right age, Beard was in the right region (more or less), Beard had won a whole lot, Beard was good enough with the media and good enough with blue collar folks to be a good fit at Kentucky. Now, we learn Kentucky’s coach might succeed Beard??
The only explanation is that in the wake of Texas’s 2019 national championship, the one that built the new arena and made Austin officially a basketball town, the Longhorns have passed Kentucky on the college basketball program rankings. Yes, Calipari’s won a title before—back in 2001—but that was at Memphis. That’s old news. He’s a rising star again, and Texas, looking to recapture its 2019 magic, is turning to an up-and-comer from the coal belt. Talk about a gamechanger.
