ESPN REPORT: John Calipari announced the departure of two talented player today….
Seven players unrelated to Kentucky John Calipari ought to aim to reassemble the Arkansas football team.
John Calipari, the new head coach of Arkansas basketball, has been working hard to revitalize the team in the little more than a week since his arrival. He said, “I met with the team,” which perfectly summed up the state of affairs. In his first press conference, he addressed the median and said, “There is no team.”
While humor can be a useful coping strategy in tough situations, Calipari has a serious task ahead of him. “There is no team,” he remarked, and he meant it. All of the players from the previous season’s squad will be absent from Fayetteville in 2019 save for walk-on Lawson Blake. Worse, Jalen Shelly and Isaiah Eloheim, two recruits out of Arkansas high schools, want to be taken out of their national letters of intent.
Fans of the Razorbacks should rejoice since Calipari is among the nation’s top recruiters. Coach Calipari persuaded players like Demarcus Cousins, Malik Monk, Karl Anthony-Towns, and Anthony Davis to play for him. The team and recruiting class he led at Kentucky the previous season were identical.
With Zvonimir Ivisic’s dedication, he has already begun to gather his soldiers to the Hill. Despite playing in just half of the season, the 7-foot-2-inch Croatian phenom made waves around the country with an impressive 20-minute effort against No. 13 Alabama that included 18 points and four blocks.
In the next days, more Bluegrass talent will be available in Arkansas. Kentucky signed six high school players, five of whom have requested to be removed from their NLIs, and Three transfers from Kentucky are still pending team commitments.
However, this does not guarantee that Coach Calipari will be able to persuade these players to play for him in the future. It’s likely that he will have to use the transfer portal to add players to Arkansas’ roster. Arkansas should give serious consideration to targeting at least one player from each position on this list during the off-season.
