"You're stuck with me": How Scott Drew got to "No" when Kentucky called

On the evening of Sunday, April 7, Baylor coach Scott Drew was sitting on an airplane in Phoenix, site of the Final Four, waiting to take off for home. He scrolled through Twitter on his phone and came across reports that Kentucky coach John Calipari was on the verge of becoming the new head coach at Arkansas. Just two days before, Drew had been counseling his former assistant, Jerome Tang, who just finished his second season at Kansas State, about whether he should take that same job. Drew previously had a similar chat with Ole Miss coach Chris Beard before he said no to Arkansas as well. “I was shocked,” Drew told me during a pair of telephone interviews last week. “I didn’t think Cal would leave Kentucky to go to Arkansas.”

At that same moment, Baylor athletic director Mack Rhoades was sitting on his couch at home. He didn’t have to seek out the news. The news found him. “My phone just started blowing up,” Rhoades said. “I was on the phone until about midnight just getting prepared for what might happen in the next two or three days.”

The next 72 hours would indeed be a whirlwind – for Drew, for Rhoades, for the fan bases at Baylor and Kentucky, and for college basketball at large. The annual spring