There is no question some are using this putrid Arkansas basketball season as an opportunity to kick John Calipari while he’s down.

After all, the Hall of Fame coach hasn’t been in charge of very many teams that have struggled to the extent as the Razorbacks have in his first year at the helm.

Even before Arkansas sputtered to a 1-6 start to SEC play, though, Calipari faced a bit of criticism for how he built his debut team. His decision to sign only nine rotational players received most of the attention, but at least a few critiqued the staff he assembled in Fayetteville.

Not only did he bring Chin Coleman and Chuck Martin with him from the Kentucky basketball program, but he also reunited with Kenny Payne after his disastrous two-year run as Louisville’s head coach. The gang, as they say, was back together. Calipari completed his staff by hiring his son, Brad Calipari, to his first full-time assistant coaching job.

CBS Sports college basketball insider Gary Parrish mentioned after the Razorbacks’ loss to Baylor in just the second game of the season that he would have gone another route for at least one of those spots.

“When he moved to Arkansas, if I were Cal, I swear I would’ve called Nate Oats if we’re friendly enough, and I would’ve said, who would you hire?” Parrish said on the Eye on College Basketball podcast back in November. “I would’ve overpaid for that person.”

Considering the resumes of the first three assistants, most Arkansas basketball fans were excited about the group and weren’t quick to jump off the bandwagon after a neutral-site loss to a top-10 team.

However, what started as a minority has grown into more vocal criticisms of Calipari’s staff as the Razorbacks have scuffled in 2025.

In a quasi-hit piece, with no name attached to the claim, one anonymous SEC coach told Jeff Goodman for Hoops HQ that the UA assistants “all do the same thing.”

Goodman — who, to be fair, is considered one of Calipari’s biggest media enemies — echoed that sentiment when he went on the Paul Finebaum Show this week and said his staff is “full of yes men.”

Parrish has long been one of the national media’s most Razorback-friendly college basketball analysts, but he still levied a more diplomatic version of the same critique when he wrote that “if Calipari doesn’t surround himself with some fresh faces with modern ideas this offseason, many coaches have suggested privately that they believe his days of operating at the tip-top of college basketball might well be over.”

The crux of these complaints is the Razorbacks’ floundering offense. Heading into the Arkansas vs Kentucky game on Saturday, which tips at 8 p.m. CT on ESPN, the Hogs are averaging only 64.3 points and shooting just 36.8% from the floor. That includes a paltry 24.8% from beyond the arc, in seven conference games.

South Carolina is the only SEC team scoring less than Arkansas, while those percentages rank dead last in the 16-team league. It also ranks 14th in assists at 10.3 per game.

The Difference with Kentucky Basketball

That was not the problem with John Calipari’s last team at Kentucky, to say the least.

While the Wildcats were knocked out in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, they had one of the best offenses in the country, much less the SEC.

In fact, they were at the top of Division I in scoring for much of the season before finishing second at 89.0 points per game. Led by top-10 NBA Draft picks Reed Sheppard and Rob Dillingham, Kentucky did finish No. 1 nationally in three-point shooting at 40.9%, plus ranked 14th in assists (17.5 apg). Overall, the Wildcats had the seventh-best offense in the country, according to KenPom.

The man largely credited with that explosion was one of the staffers who didn’t follow Calipari from Lexington to Fayetteville: John Welch.

A longtime NBA assistant known as one of the best player development coaches in the game, the 61-year-old joined Kentucky’s staff the summer before the 2023-24 season and made an immediate impact, Cats Illustrated managing editor Jeff Drummond told Best of Arkansas Sports.

“He really kind of modernized what Kentucky was trying to do offensively and got them more up to speed with how the game was being played at the NBA level and that kind of style,” Drummond said. “And he had guys that were really built for it. You had Antonio Reeves and Reed Sheppard and Rob Dillingham. That’s obviously the way you should go when you’ve got weapons like that.”

In the eyes of many critics, as the Lexington Herald Leader put it in a story last January, Kentucky basketball “had grown stale in its offensive approach to the game” in the years leading up to Welch’s arrival.

Why Welch Didn’t Follow Calipari

Despite all of the success, Kentucky basketball fans and media alike questioned some of Calipari’s personnel decisions. Among the biggest was often keeping Reed Sheppard and Rob Dillingham on the bench in favor of D.J. Wagner.

While Wagner — who now starts for the Razorbacks — was a Freshman All-SEC selection, the other freshmen were one-and-done NBA Draft lottery picks and are now playing for the Rockets and Timberwolves, respectively. (Sheppard was recently named to the Rising Stars event that’s part of the NBA All-Star Weekend.)

“We rarely saw those guys on the floor together and it was a head scratcher all season long,” Drummond said. “I think it may have even bothered Welch a little bit that they weren’t getting the guys on the floor that the analytics suggested gave Kentucky its best shot to win.”

There lies the potential reason for not being able to retain Welch on staff – something that could prove to be Calipari’s biggest offseason whiff.

Arkansas’ offense was described as “archaic” by another one of the anonymous coaches in Goodman’s piece and it’s hard to ignore its significant struggles throughout the year, which have only been exacerbated in league play.

One of Welch’s primary responsibilities at Kentucky last season was game planning and scouting, an area in which the Wildcats had apparently lacked since the departure of longtime assistant coach John Robic in 2021, and something for which none of Calipari’s current assistants seem to be widely praised.

A guy like Welch would probably have helped the Razorbacks with those issues, but instead, he is now an assistant coach at Fresno State. According to Kyle Tucker of The Athletic, he was planning to move on from Kentucky even before Calipari took the Arkansas job.

It was a situation similar to that of Jai Lucas, an up-and-coming coach who Drummond said “got frustrated” during his two-year stint in Lexington and left to join Jon Scheyer’s staff at Duke following the 2021-22 season.

“There was never any confrontations or exchanges on the bench,” Drummond said. “It caught us by surprise that he was leaving after one year, especially when it was for a much more low profile job. … So it was surmised that there was some kind of an issue there and it may have had to do with what we were seeing late in the season when they just couldn’t get those guys on the floor together. They were kind of going back to that stuff that had always worked for Cal in the past and he may not have had any interest in sticking with that.”

Of course, Fresno State does make sense as a landing spot for Welch. Not only was that his last stop in college before breaking into the NBA ranks, but it reunited him with Vance Walberg.

Wahlberg is the creator of the Dribble Drive offense that is the bedrock of Calipari’s coaching philosophy. Calipari originally picked it up more than 20 years ago in Memphis thanks to Welch, who was then an assistant with the Grizzlies. Welch had learned the offense from his observations of Wahlberg’s high school practices in central California.

What Calipari Could Do at Arkansas

In all likelihood, John Welch isn’t going to swoop in and revitalize Arkansas’ offense in 2025-26.

Instead, it might behoove John Calipari to search for someone similar – perhaps someone younger than the 61-year-old Welch – who could help the Razorbacks bounce back.

That is what Gary Parrish suggested way back in November despite having just a two-game sample size at the time.

“I think John Calipari could really benefit from just listening to somebody younger and with fresh ideas, particularly on the offensive end,” said Parrish, who added the key is to trust that fresh face. “Hire the brightest, young offensive mind in modern basketball and let him or her coach your offense while you just motivate, coach toughness and fundraise.”

The million-dollar question is whether or not Calipari would be willing to make such a hire.

With five on-court assistants allowed by the NCAA and only four currently on staff, he does have an open spot to fill without letting anyone go – assuming athletics director Hunter Yurachek could fit it into an already tight budget.

However, Calipari was described as “sometimes-stubborn” in The Athletic story about Welch’s hiring from May 2023.

That could complicate things, but he doesn’t have to look very far for inspiration: Arkansas football coach Sam Pittman swallowed his pride by hiring Bobby Petrino as his new offensive coordinator last offseason. Even though he knew he’d get no credit, Pittman felt Petrino was the best option to give his offense the jolt it needed — and that’s what happened, albeit with not as many points as they would have liked.

It’s worth noting that Calipari already sounds open to tweaking his nine-man rotation, plus he has drastically changed his style in the past. That came more than two decades ago, though, when he first met Vance Wahlberg through Welch.

“It’s like you’re a teacher, and you’re teaching for 15 years, and your lesson plan never changed,” Calipari told Sports Illustrated in 2008. “This has been invigorating for me because it’s gotten me to think, to study the game again.”

That was the first inflection point of Calipari’s career and it helped cement him as a Hall of Famer.

Another one might be needed for him to lead Arkansas back to the Final Four and carve his face on the Mount Rushmore of college basketball coaches.

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