As Kentucky preps to face Kansas, has John Calipari's tenure with Wildcats run its course?

When John Calipari walks over to shake Bill Self’s hand on Saturday at Rupp Arena, it will be the 10th time the two Hall of Famers have met, a rivalry that encompasses 20 years, four schools and two national championship games.

In many ways, their careers have been on parallel tracks; both experiencing early success that made them coaching stars, both being labeled as March underachievers, both having run-ins with NCAA enforcement and ultimately both becoming respected as all-time greats as the powerhouse programs they built won more and more.

But at this particular moment, even as both Kansas and Kentucky arrive at this game in the midst of recent disappointments, there is one major difference between the two men that has completely changed the narrative around what they’ve accomplished and where their final coaching years are headed.

When Self won his second national title last year, he rewrote every narrative about his legacy for the rest of time. When Calipari lost to St. Peter’s, still stuck on just one national title in a career that could easily have four or five, he lost the argument — at least for now, and perhaps forever — about who will be considered the greatest coach of their generation.

The head-to-head record currently says Calipari 6, Self 4. But never has it been more clear how much it matters that the trophy count is Self 2, Calipari 1.

Even as Kansas stumbles into the SEC/Big 12 challenge on the back of three straight losses, possibly headed for its first-ever four-game slide under Self, there is little discussion of dissatisfaction among the fan base or even a hint of rumor that he is closing in on the end of his tenure.

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Kentucky, meanwhile, has shown signs of life in the last two weeks after a brutal stretch of losses, winning four in a row. But where the Wildcats stand in the bigger picture — squarely on the NCAA tournament bubble and desperately needing a marquee win — underscores how profoundly disappointing this team has been after starting the year ranked No. 4.

The atmosphere around Kentucky got so bad in late December and early January, in fact, that Calipari’s interest in the open Texas job became a topic he was asked to address on his radio show. Athletic director Mitch Barnhart had to publicly refute reports that his relationship with Calipari had disintegrated to nothing. For the first time in Calipari’s 14 years at Kentucky, it seemed like their marriage might be heading toward a messy end.

“You’ve got teams losing games around the country, and the only one that is really the focal point seems to be that we're awful and dying,” Calipari said after Kentucky’s win at Vanderbilt on Wednesday. “And I like this team. I'm saying it. I told you before, we just had to get on the same page.”

The next several weeks, and games like this one against Kansas, will determine whether Calipari is right. But the plain reality is that if Calipari’s tenure effectively disintegrates this spring, it will not be because this team didn’t live up to expectations. It will be because he does not have what Self earned last year.

For anyone who was fortunate enough to be in the Superdome on April 2, 2012, watching Calipari celebrate with Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist after beating Self and Kansas, it would have been almost inconceivable that he’d be stuck on one national title a decade-plus later.

Winning isn't easy, of course, particularly in a sport with a one-and-done tournament that lends itself to randomness. But at that moment, Kentucky had everything Calipari could have dreamt of when he took the job. They were the “it” program in college basketball, and nobody else was particularly close.

But something changed for Calipari in 2015. For years, even going back to his time at Memphis, he had talked publicly about his goal of coaching a 40-0 team. Ever since that group came up heartbreakingly short, losing to Wisconsin in the semifinals while Duke went on to win the title that year, Kentucky hasn’t been the same program.

There are a number of reasons why that happened. Mike Krzyzewski copied Calipari’s recruiting formula at Duke and started beating him at his own one-and-done game. Then college basketball evolved, becoming a sport tilted toward veteran teams, favoring programs that specialized in player development like Villanova and Virginia.

We’ll never know what would have happened in 2020 — Kentucky is one of several teams that would have liked its chances before the NCAA tournament was canceled by COVID-19 — but the bottom line is that Calipari enters the home stretch of this season trying to end a seven-year Final Four drought. That’s simply not what Calipari was hired to do. And despite a tremendous amount of success in the first half of his tenure, the fact that he does not have a second national title makes every one of his recent failings that much more problematic.

Few people understand this more than Self. Even before the national title game they won against North Carolina last April, Self was remarkably open about how much it gnawed at him that Kansas had come up empty for 14 years since he beat Calipari's Memphis team in 2008.

“At most places, winning one national championship would be quite an accomplishment,” Self said. “I think as many good teams as we’ve had, one’s not enough.”

It’s unlikely Calipari would ever make a similar admission, but it's true. And he's had plenty of chances to make it happen.

A brief look:

History does not look kindly on his first Kentucky team with John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins and Eric Bledsoe losing to West Virginia in the Elite Eight.

The next year, Kentucky lost by a measly point in the Final Four to Kemba Walker and Connecticut.

In 2014, Kentucky underwhelmed all season but caught fire in the tournament and found itself as the favorite in the championship game against an under-talented UConn team, only to play quite poorly and lose by six.

The loss to Wisconsin in 2015 is largely remembered for Calipari burying Devin Booker on the bench in the final minutes as Kentucky’s offense floundered.

And in 2017, Kentucky was just a basket away in the Elite Eight from beating North Carolina, which went on to win the title.

Individually, there are no crises among those losses. But collectively, they paint the picture of missed opportunity. If Calipari ends his time at Kentucky with just the one championship, it will be remembered as a very good period of the program's history, not a great era. With another tournament loss to the likes of St. Peter’s, or perhaps missing March Madness altogether, it may be even less than that.

And that’s what makes the angst over the Wildcats’ struggles this season so urgent: At 63 years old and with the landscape of college sports changing rapidly, the clock is ticking.

Because of what Kansas accomplished last April, Self no longer has to worry about whether he’s done enough. Historically, the difference between one and two national titles is that big. It's the rarified air only 16 coaches have breathed.

If Calipari had what Self has, it would be a lot easier to feel confident about what Kentucky's future holds. Instead, everyone is looking to games like Saturday for clues about whether the arrow is still pointing up on Calipari’s tenure or whether after 14 years it has run its course.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Kentucky's John Calipari, Kansas' Bill Self square off again Saturday