LEXINGTON, Ky. — When North Carolina went 14-19 last season, the university did not fire Hall of Fame coach Roy Williams.
After Syracuse lost 15 games in 2016-17, it did not fire Hall of Fame coach Jim Boeheim.
When Mike Krzyzewski left the Duke team midseason in 1994-95 for personal reasons, then returned to lose 13 games the following year, the Blue Devils administration did not pink slip the school's iconic coach.
So however bad a finish Kentucky's 5-11 start to the 2020-21 season ends up yielding, it is silly to call for the job of Hall of Fame coach John Calipari absent some kind of "take your banners down" off-the-court issue.
One bad season — even one shaping up to be historically awful like UK's current campaign seems to be — should not erode all the stored-up goodwill an otherwise successful head man has banked.
There is another reason why unhappy Kentucky backers calling for Calipari's job are wasting their energy.
If I am reading Calipari's UK coaching contract correctly, it would cost Kentucky $52.5 million to remove its head men's basketball coach without cause if the university wanted to make a change after the current season.
There's no way that kind of financial outlay NOT to coach the UK basketball team can be justified by one awful season.
Besides, the most likely outcome is that this year's Kentucky men's hoops collapse is a one-off. One that was created by a unique set of circumstances related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact UK was caught with an all but completely new roster in a season when experience has proven to be the coin of the realm in college basketball.
None of which is to suggest that the segment of the UK fandom who sees this season as the culmination of a trend of decline — and I hear from some of you after every Kentucky loss — do not make some legitimate points.
There has been an acceleration of "things that shouldn't happen at Kentucky" happening at Kentucky in recent years.
The 2018-19 UK season began with the humiliating 118-84 beat down by Duke in the Champions Classic.
Last season featured the shocking home-court loss to Evansville.
Other than Florida, UK has lost its most recent game against all its preeminent rivals — Duke, Kansas, Indiana, Louisville, North Carolina and Tennessee.
Starting with the crushing loss to Wisconsin in the 2015 Final Four that ended Kentucky's bid for an undefeated national title, UK is 1-5 in its last six NCAA Tournament games against other Power Five conference foes.
After losing to the Badgers in the 2015 national semifinals, UK fell to Indiana in the 2016 round of 32; beat UCLA in the 2017 round of 16, but lost to North Carolina in the round of eight; lost to Kansas State in the 2018 round of 16; and fell to Auburn in overtime in the 2019 round of eight.
Now, no one much wants to admit it, but NCAA Tournament success/failure often comes down to luck. When Calipari was taking UK to four Final Fours in five seasons from 2010-11 through 2014-15, Kentucky won at least five games on clutch shots in the final minute of games.
In 2017, North Carolina hit that last-second shot to eliminate UK. The following year, Kentucky failed at the end with a chance to send the Kansas State game into overtime.
So some of what feels like program decline may just be NCAA Tournament breaks evening out.
There are two knocks one most often hears from the burgeoning number of Calipari critics in the Big Blue Nation.
One is that the coach has not embraced the analytics-driven revolution in how offensive basketball is played. Kentucky does not, Golden State Warriors-style, spread the floor with 3-point shooters and skilled offensive players at each position.
That charge is unquestionably true.
However, I do not think it proves that Calipari's preferred way to play no longer works. Just last season, Kentucky went 25-6 and won the SEC regular-season title by three games.
That suggests that, with a properly constructed roster, Calipari's philosophy of how to win games is still effective.
The other concern by what seems to be a growing number of Kentucky backers is that UK's reliance on one-and-done-oriented rosters has become counter-productive.
A less-talented but more physically mature Kansas State pushed a young UK team around in the 2018 NCAA tourney round-of-16 loss.
The following season, Auburn's veteran guards badly outplayed Kentucky's all-freshman backcourt in the round of eight.
For UK, it's not the guys who leave school early to be chosen in the first round of the NBA draft that hurt.
It's the players who turn pro early with no hope of hearing their names called in the draft and/or underclassmen transferring out of the program that keep Kentucky from building a veteran core of the kind that recent NCAA championship teams have featured.
That, for my money, is what needs to change for Calipari to get UK basketball back on track — which, this year notwithstanding, remains the most likely outcome.
