John Calipari will bring a Deion Sanders-like air to Fayetteville. Can the small-town vibe of the Arkansas fan base handle it?
Arkansas in 2024 isn’t Arkansas in 2004. It certainly isn’t the Arkansas of 1994, of 1984. John Calipari wouldn’t have been in Fayetteville if it were.
The state has changed. The state’s flagship university has changed. The state’s basketball team has, too. Nothing was like it once was. It’s called progress and it isn’t always easy for some to take.
The NIL and the transfer portal are generally hated by fans when players from their favorite team exit for a new locale and/or bigger money. But those same fans want that money to throw around and to draw players from other schools to their favorite one. The hypocrisy isn’t new, of course, but it’s about to become more pronounced.
It wasn’t 10 years ago fans from fan bases across the country, not the least of which was Arkansas, were calling John Calipari a cheater, a liar. They despised him – and Marcus Monk – for plucking Malik Monk out of Bentonville High School to Kentucky instead of Arkansas. The Razorbacks deserved the youngest Monk brother, as it were, they believed. The betrayal was tantamount to heresy.
It was also, in the grand scheme of things, pretty inconsquential to Arkansas basketball in the big picture. The Razorbacks were good in those Monk years with Mike Anderson at the helm and followed with even better years under Eric Musselman. What stands out now about the Monk ordeal is how nuts it was at the time. Arkansas fans, in the wrong then, had lost their mind. It was insane enough that country music guy Justin Cole Moore got into it with me on Twitter about it all, how Monk was a fraud, a swindler, not a real Arkansan. Stuff like that.
The stupidity was overwhelming. I was glad when it was gone.
Then it reared its head again this winter. Those same fans were busy attacking their own in January and February. Throwing Arkansas native Devo Davis, who should have left the Razorbacks as one of the most beloved players of the decade, under the bus. Abandoning Trevon Brazile. Rumor-mongering about Tramon Mark. Dogging Jalen Graham. Claiming Musselman a racist for not playing Joseph Pinion. Various things so pathetic I’m not going to bother linking them, probably to the disappointment of Google’s algorithm and my bosses.
The game had changed. The world had changed. The Arkansas fan base had not. Not at its core. I might even argue it has become worse, more prone to outbursts of rage and Otherism, sort of like a lot of a particular set of Americans have become in the last eight or so years. It isn’t a good look, though the fans committing the heinous acts and spewing the bile will argue every team has fans who do it, as though that makes it OK that Arkansas’ does.
This matters now even more with John Calipari onboard. Now, the Razorbacks have every opportunity to show they are in the big leagues, that the basketball program isn’t second-tier, but one of the elites in the country. Musselman had them on the precipice, lifting Arkansas’ team profile and elevating the Hogs brand.
But Arkansas could barely handle the stage lights, nevermind the spotlight, before he arrived. Calipari will turn Arkansas, according to DeMarcus Cousins, into the hot spot of college basketball, bringing a Deion Sanders-at-Colorado-like atmosphere to Fayetteville.
Can the state handle it? Walmart changed its image in the late 2000s and early 2010s by cultivating those winds of progress, much to the chagrin of the same kind of Arkansan who claims Eric Musselman a racist; the region and the company have both blossomed because of it. John Calipari – and all that comes with him – can bring the same positivity, albeit on a different scale (I’m not insane, here), altering a basketball program and Arkansas as a whole.
But to do so, the nonsense has to stop.
Here’s to hoping we don’t, as a state, act like it’s 1994 again, even if Hogs fans wish the basketball team plays like it.
