Kentucky Basketball: 20 candidates to replace John Calipari as Head Coach

Jay Wright

If you’ve been watching March Madness coverage recently, you’ve possibly seen Wright as a studio analyst, a role he’s settled into since retiring from coaching in 2022. After two years out of the game, could Kentucky convince him to return to the court? It’s unlikely but at least worth thinking about.

Wright played ball at Bucknell and spent a decade as a collegiate assistant, most notably under Rollie Massimino. He had a good run as head coach at Hofstra before taking the head coaching job at Villanova back in 2001. Across more than two decades, Wright led the Wildcats to a pair of national championships in 2016 and 2018 and four total trips to the Final Four. He turned Villanova into the best of the Big East.

Why would Wright leave a cushy analyst job to get back into coaching when he reportedly retired due to disinterest in the changing tides of the college basketball atmosphere? This is a pipe dream that will never happen, but maybe it could? Wright would certainly be a home run at Kentucky and could get some astonishing things done over the next half decade, but we’re including him more as a “what if” than as a realistic candidate…right?

We’ve looked carefully at twenty different candidates for this shocking opening at Kentucky. Each candidate is different than the last and the likelihood of several of these coaches alters drastically. Which will be the next head coach at Kentucky? What lies ahead for this Wildcats program?