John Calipari says he will meet with Mitch Barnhart on Tuesday

Kentucky head coach John Calipari is giving his end-of-year thoughts on the Wildcats’ embarrassing opening-round loss in the NCAA Tournament, cutting through the silence for the first time since the team returned from Pittsburgh.

Will he be back for year 16? It sure sounds like he’s planning on it, but he hasn’t met with Mitch Barnhart to confirm that one way or another. But those conversations will take place on Tuesday, he says.

“We do it every year and we haven’t, but it’ll be done in the next couple of days,” Calipari said. “Every year we share thoughts with each other. I’m sure he’s hurting, he was on the plane back. He was hurting like the rest of us and I look forward to hearing his thoughts. … My guess is we’ll meet, Mitch and I will meet tomorrow.”

What about any potential changes on his end, if Barnhart does decide to bring him back to Lexington?

“We just removed from the season. Every year I go through that process of evaluating everything in the program. You go through, whether it’s all the people around you or whether it’s how we’re doing things. I haven’t gone through everything, but with defense and physicality, how do we get back there? … We’re working on our physicality and we’re working on our defense, trying to set a foundation of who we’re going to be. I don’t want to change offensively. It was fun coaching it, our fans loved it. Obviously, the nation loved it — we were the highest-rated TV game. All of our games. I don’t want to change that.”

We’ll see what Barnhart’s expectations are for the program moving forward.

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