I've long been accused of being a Cal slurper, so I'll answer.
In the Spring of 2021 the 9-16 season was a complete fluke during a very strange moment in time. Duke had an awful season, Penn St. football had an awful season, weird things happened across the sports landscape. The year before that we had a great team that won the SEC and were in a good position to make a tournament run. We had also mad the Elite 8 two of the three seasons before that. You simply can't fire a coach with Cal's past after a single bad season, no matter how bad it is. Especially during those weird Covid times.
That St. Peter's season we had a legitimately fun and great team for the vast majority of the season. We blew Kansas off their home court. However, TyTy never fully recovered from his injury at Auburn, Grady could barely walk by the end of the year due to plantar fasciitis, and Oscar was a head case before the St. Peter's game (refused to board the plane because he had visions something bad was going to happen). I wouldn't want Cal fired after losing to St. Peter's any more than I would think K should have been fired after losing to Lehigh or Mercer. In a single elimination tournament anything can happen, and quite frankly it was the first time Cal had been upset like that in the first round.
After the Oakland loss I didn't think we would be better off with Cal. I wasn't going to be too excited coming into this year if he were still here. But if you truly believe it was a guarantee we couldn't have been worse off you're kidding yourself. Pope was a great hire, but he wasn't guaranteed. History is littered with schools thinking the grass would be greener with a new coach and getting stuck in a decades long cycle of mediocrity. And there was a lot of pissed off people on this board the night Pope was hired.
Ultimately, it has worked out very well so far. I don't think there's anyone who truly thinks at this point we would have been better off with Cal going forward. But I also think it's perfectly fair to recognize that there was always a risk his successor didn't work out.
Cal stopped getting top end talent in 2016 (Fox/Monk/Bam), his schtick no longer worked, but the SEC was still weak enough where he could still pull it off, however with the exception of the 2020 team, he couldn't win the SEC, or the SECT.
In 20/21, yeah, it was weird, but Cal sat there and watched Brandon Boston do everything in his power to lose games. Richmond had no problems with Covid, they came into Rupp and beat our NBA draft guys. Dontae Allen was the better player, but Cal refused to play him. and this is Kentucky, why the hell are we rolling with Devin Askew and Sahvir Wheeler? Heck, he rolled with Wheeler for 2 years. How do you go from John Wall to Sahvir Wheeler?
Bottom line is, he used UK to be a middle man for the NBA draft. He was shepparding kids to the draft that were going to get drafted no matter where they went to school. He put individual goals and accomplishments over the program and gave UK fans the middle finger while doing it.
What ended up happening was there wasn't that duper high end talent to cover up the BS.
We should never lose to Evansville, Richmond and UNCW anywhere, let alone at home.
In my opinion, Pope is closer to a Players first coach than Cal and it's not close. Cal has better talent at Arkansas, but when you watch Arkansas, you're seeing UK from 20-24 and the 17/18 team that had 7 future NBA players on it that lost 10 games.
Cal was washed many years ago, some good players just did a good job hiding it from some.
