End Of An Era: After 11 years of dating at Kentucky, Calipari and Payne are getting back together at Arkansas after facing….

After 11 years of dating at Kentucky, Calipari and Payne are getting back together.

John Calipari announced on Thursday that longtime Kentucky assistant and former head coach of Louisville, Kenny Payne, will become an associate head coach for the Arkansas basketball team. Although Payne, 57, and Calipari were rivals in the Bluegrass State for the previous two seasons, the two collaborated to win a national championship in the UK in 2012.

Since he was unveiled as the new head of the program last week, Payne is Calipari’s first formal hire. During the program’s one-and-done era, Payne supported Calipari throughout 11 of his 15 seasons at Kentucky, aiding in the recruitment of numerous elite players for the Wildcats.

Payne’s reputation has suffered ever since. Following a 12-52 record in two seasons, Louisville fired Payne, a former player for the Cardinals, at the end of the 2023–24 season. The miserable two years demonstrated that Payne is unfit to be a head coach and was a terrible end for a once-proud program. However, Payne was a major factor in some of Calipari’s best victories at Kentucky, and Calipari is placing a high value on those past victories by giving Payne a significant staff job so soon after the Louisville debacle.

Payne served as an assistant for the New York Knicks from 2020 to 2022, so Calipari and Payne’s collaboration ended with the 2019–20 campaign. Since then, conference realignment, NIL payment, and mass transfers have all been implemented.have altered the landscape of collegiate basketball, prompting some to speculate that Calipari would gain from having more youthful players surrounding him on the bench.

Even if it might still occur when Calipari assembles his Arkansas staff, the early indications point to Calipari focusing on what he knows as he embarks on the next phase of his Hall of Fame coaching career.