Being the Athletic Director at UK is a really big deal. Like almost everything in the Bluegrass, the UK Athletic Department runs like an old-school aristocracy -- it changes only under extreme pressure. Here's a brief history of the Athletic Department over the last 50 years:
In 1975, Cliff Hagan -- former UK Basketball star -- took over the job. Hagan ran things until the whole department exploded in the recruiting scandals of the late 1980s that brought down Eddie Sutton and almost destroyed the basketball program altogether.
In 1989, desperately trying to save itself, UK reached out to C.M. Newton, a former UK basketball player who had made a name for himself as a very successful basketball coach at Alabama and Vanderbilt. Newton came home and promptly saved the program -- hiring Rick Pitino (exactly the sort of outsider who never would have had a chance at the UK job under normal circumstances). Pitino took the basketball to heights it had not enjoyed in over 40 years, and C.M. Newton enjoyed two basketball titles (in 1996 and 1998) before retiring in 2000.
In 2000, Newton was replaced by Larry Ivy, who had been his Senior Associate A.D. Ivy did not last long, as he was brought down in 2002 by a recruiting scandal in Hal Mumme's football program.
At this point, UK decided to go outside the family. The new Athletic Director was Mitch Barnhart, who had held the same job at Oregon State since 1998. In many ways, Barnhart was the first truly professional Athletic Director the University had ever had -- his expertise was in sports administration, not basketball. In many ways, Barnhart was also a perfect fit for the Bluegrass -- he is himself most comfortable working things out behind closed doors, and communicating with the rest of the world on a need-to-know basis. He's held the job for 24 years, and is the longest serving AD in the Southeastern Conference.
Barnhart has done an extraordinary job with UK's minor sports. The rifle team has won multiple national titles. The women's volleyball team has become a power. UK has produced great track and field athletes under Barnhart. Its baseball team went to the College World Series a few years ago. And the Cats have shown steady improvement in both women's basketball and gymnastics. UK had never really taken minor sports seriously before, and here there's no question that Barnhart has made a big and favorable difference.
I think Barnhart has also done a good job on the business side of the ledger. He's upgraded all the facilities, and both the new baseball stadium and the revision to Memorial Coliseum are really excellent. And, of course, he has generally avoided the type of scandals that have caused so many problems in the past.
I also have a certain amount of sympathy for how he manages his coaches. Barnhart generally takes a patient line, giving his coaches plenty of chances to show what they can do. In 2017, for example, he put Nick Mingione in charge of the baseball program. Mingione had never been a head coach before. The first year, he went 19-11 in the SEC and was SEC Coach of the year. Two years later, he went 7-23 in the SEC and finished dead last in the Eastern Division. Barnhart waited. The Cats went 12-18 in 2021 and 12-18 in 2022, then went 16-14 in 2023. Barnhart still waited. Finally, in 2024 UK went 22-8 in the SEC and charged all the way to the College World Series. Last year, they went back down to 13-17. But his job is safe.
Barnhart took a similar approach with Mark Stoops, his longtime football coach. From 2013 to 2015, Stoops went 4-20 in SEC play. But between 2016 and 2023, Stoops took UK to eight bowl games in a row, winning four straight bowl games from 2018 to 2021. Even after Stoops went 1-7 in SEC play during 2024, Barnhart gave him another chance -- letting him go only after the Cats were blown out by Vandy and Louisville in back-to-back games to end the 2025 season.
The problem with this approach, of course, is that it doesn't work for men's basketball, because UK's basketball fans are not patient. The aristrocrats who run the Bluegrass think in decades, and folks there are willing to sit through four or five losing seasons if they believe the plan will eventually pay off. But the Bluegrass doesn't have the basketball program to itself -- it belongs to the whole Commonwealth, and a lot of Kentuckians far from Lexington care deeply about what happens at Rupp Arena.
So when Barnhart picked a young coach named Billy Gillispie to take over from Tubby Smith, both Barnhart and Gillispie were on a short leash. Everyone thinks that Billy G. did OK in his first year and collapsed in his second year, but that's not really true. According to Ken Pom, in 2008 the Cats were the 78th best team in the country -- by far the worst team they've fielded since Ken Pom started keeping track. However, they squeezed out enough close wins to make the tournament, and Billy G tied for coach of the year honors. The next year, the team was much better -- they finished 48th on Ken Pom. On January 24, they were 5-0 in the SEC and 16-4 overall. But they went 3-8 the rest of the way, and missed the NCAA's. I think it's highly likely that left to his own devices, Barnhart would have let Billy G work through his issues -- like he did with most of his coaches. However, the pressure from the fan base was too great, and Barnhart was forced to take John Calipari, a guy who has nothing in common with anyone else Barnhart ever hired.
On paper, the Barnhart/Calipari relationship could have worked -- and for many years, it did work. Barnhart's professionalism and good press relations created a stable environment for Cal to work his magic. And given resources beyond anything he'd ever had before, Cal responded by building the best program in college basketball -- between 2010 and 2019, the Cats had seven trips to the Regional Finals, four appearances in the Final Four, and a National Title in 2012. These were joyous times.
But the relationship between Calipari and the Blue Bloods of the Bluegrass (including Barnhart) was fraught with difficulty. Calipari resented the fact that so many folks thought that Stoops's limited success with the football team was more impressive than his extraordinary success in basketball. The Blue Bloods were never comfortable with a coach who had the personality of a bull in a China shop. After COVID, for reasons that were never explained, the relationship steadily deteriorated. Cal increasingly looked like he was just there to pick up a paycheck, and the fans were not slow to notice a significant lack of intensity in key games. Barnhart, who had been Cal a massive contract to keep him from going to the NBA, was in an awkward position until Arkansas stepped in after the 2024 season to give Cal a landing zone.
Getting Cal off the payroll should have been a wonderful triumph for Barnhart -- he finally had another chance to put his own mark on the premier program at UK, and to show everyone his talents weren't limited to sports like volleyball and rifle. And I believe that Barnhart thought he had just the guy: Mark Pope, who was everything Cal was not. The Blue Bloods saw Cal as a mercenary -- Pope was a former UK player. The Blue Bloods saw Cal as crude -- Pope went to medical school. The Blue Bloods saw Cal as a guy who was constantly skirting the edge of trouble -- Pope had a spotless record at B.Y.U. You can see exactly what Barnhart had in mind -- take a talented coach like Pope, give him the virtually limitless resources of the UK basketball program, and how could he lose?
My guess is that Barnhart still thinks he made the right decision -- being an aristocrat means never having to say you're sorry. But once again, he's racing against the clock -- the Cats are obviously headed for an extremely disappointing season this year, and the anger from outside the Bluegrass will be intense. (The boos that rained down on UK in its Nashville game against Gonzaga gives you a sense of the mood in Western Kentucky.) Meanwhile, Barnhart faces other challenges -- he was just forced to hire a new football coach, and UK's status in the major sports has fallen well below its rivals at Louisville, Tennessee, Indiana, and even Vandy.
Most importantly, Barnhart -- who was originally brought in to clean up the UK football program -- must now operate in an environment dominated by Big Money. Aristocrats are not hacks who simply do what they are told -- they are usually men (or women) of principle who much prefer to do what is right. And it's not clear to anyone that UK can win football or men's basketball games at the level its fans prefer and also remain consistent with Barnhart's values.
But that's always been a huge issue for Kentucky, which has long been dominated by an extremely conservative class of wealthy people who are comfortable with the way things are -- and who seem to have the view that if you don't like the way things are, maybe Kentucky isn't the place for you. Every year, many smart kids from outside the Bluegrass take the hint and head for places like Nashville, or Atlanta, or even Washington, D.C. On the whole, their departure makes things easier for the folks who run Kentucky, because you can't vote against the Establishment if you don't live in the Commonwealth. However, Barnhart will find that there are still enough angry fans left in the Commonwealth to cause him major headaches if his pick to lead the basketball team can't turn things around. And if Barnhart's failure to adapt to the new rules of the NCAA put UK at a long-term disadvantage vis-a-vis schools like Louisville and Vanderbilt, all the volleyball titles in the world may not be enough to save his legacy.
So we name Mitch Barnhart as our Kentuckian of the Year -- in 2025 no one else better symbolized the gap between how the folks who run Kentucky would like the world to be, and how it really is.
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