John Calipari is no stranger to ruffling feathers during his time as a college basketball coach. While Calipari has won a whole lot of games wherever he’s gone, his brash and in your face style has led to him making a whole lot of enemies over the course of his career. And on Thursday, Kentucky’s basketball coach drew the ire of a new foe: Kentucky’s football program.
Calipari wants the university to build him a new basketball practice facility, and per The Athletic, argument was that Kentucky should do it since they have always been “a basketball school.”
“Alabama is a football school,” Calipari said. “So is Georgia. I mean, they are. No disrespect to our football team. I hope they win 10 games and go to bowls. At the end of the day, that makes my job easier and it makes the job of all of us easier. But this is a basketball school. And so we need to keep moving in that direction and keep doing what we’re doing.”
Well as it turns out, the Wildcat football program — which has been on the up and up in recent years — didn’t like this. Head coach Mark Stoops saw the story on Twitter and decided to chime in by saying that the team competes in the SEC, while pointing out their recent success in bowl games.
Basketball school? I thought we competed in the SEC? #4straightpostseasonwins https://t.co/xUoKmUeonH
— Mark Stoops (@UKCoachStoops) August 11, 2022
A few players got in on the fun, too, bringing up that Calipari’s Wildcats, as a 2-seed in the NCAA Tournament last year, lost to 15-seed Saint Peter’s.
@UKCoachCalipari check dis out, Y’all crapp .. we run the bluegrass yall boys went out first round to saint peters Lmaoo @jjtimeee @octaviousoxend1
— V7⃣ (@vitotisdale7) August 11, 2022
Completely out of the blue question but has the Kentucky football team ever lost to St.Peters?
— Max Duffy (@Max__Duffy) August 11, 2022
It is not often that you see football and basketball programs at the same school go head-to-head like this, so we have to imagine there’s going to be a pretty unhappy phone call or two coming from Kentucky’s AD sometime soon.