The Arkansas basketball program has gotten off to a strong start to the 2025 season, currently sitting at 8-2 after a recent road win over Texas Tech. The Razorbacks currently sit at number 17 in the nation in head coach John Calipari's second year on the helm, and are looking to build off of last year's run in the NCAA tournament.
Recently, Calipari sounded off on the changing state of college basketball.
“I called one guy in and I said, ‘listen, when I tell you to run faster or be rougher, you seem to get sad. You get sad instead of running faster or playing tougher’. Now, if you think professionally, that will work,” said Calipari, per FOX College Hoops on X, formerly Twitter. “I'm here to tell you, if a coach tells you to run faster and you just don't, you're done, because they're paying you to do what they're asking you to do. So when I tell you to run faster, go do it. I'm not going to look out there and see you go the same.
“I mean, that's part of what we all have to do, because these kids, with what they're going through, the social media stuff, people in their ear, ‘Transfer, transfer, transfer so I can make money?' Ok, doesn't always work out. All of the sudden, these kids have the weight of the world. Well that's our job, to deal with that and help them walk through that.”
The college basketball and college sports as a whole landscape have certainly shifted dramatically in recent years due to the rise of NIL, the transfer portal, and other factors that have given players more power than ever before.
Calipari has certainly used those tools to his advantage when compiling his roster at Arkansas, thus far in his tenure there.
