John Calipari admits small roster was a mistake for Arkansas basketball after South Carolina loss

Posted by author March 1, 2025 Basketball

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A little bit of late-season irony isn’t changing a fatal flaw in John Calipari’s roster construction, and the Arkansas basketball head coach admitted as much after Saturday’s embarrassing loss to South Carolina.

Without Boogie Fland and Adou Thiero, the Razorbacks (17-12, 6-10 SEC) played their worst game of the season in a 72-53 loss to the last-place Gamecocks. Arkansas never led, missed its first 17 3-point attempts and allowed Collin Murray-Boyles to score 35 points in a decisive defeat.

Calipari elected to build his first team in Fayetteville with just nine rotation players. He didn’t want to develop talent that would eventually transfer to another school.

But early injuries meant Arkansas spent plenty of its preseason practices with fewer than five healthy players. The Hogs could not scrimmage, and they eventually lost two of their best players in Fland and Thiero to injury.

After the loss to South Carolina, Calipari admitted that it was a mistake to have such a small roster.

“We needed to have more. You don’t plan on what happened, but we needed more guys. But, you know, when we had the guys, we played better as we got shorter,” Calipari said.

The final point from Calipari’s quote presents the irony. Arkansas was 0-5 in the SEC when Fland went down and has rattled off six wins in its last 11 games. The Razorbacks secured one of their most meaningful victories of the season, an 86-81 overtime triumph over bubble rival Texas, in their first game without Thiero.

But the loss to the Gamecocks showed the small margin of error that has doomed this team throughout the season.

“I’m going to say it again, it’s not only being injured, you can’t have three or four of your seven play poorly and you expect to win,” Calipari said.

There’s nothing the Razorbacks can do to amend the problem this season, other than pray that Thiero can return from his hyperextended knee in time for either the SEC or NCAA Tournaments. However, it sounds as though Calipari won’t repeat this roster construction strategy this coming offseason.

Until then, the Hogs are fighting for a spot in March Madness. They’ll try to bounce back Tuesday night on the road against Vanderbilt before closing the regular-season at home against Mississippi State.

“I can’t make any trades, I can’t pick up anybody at the wire, this is who it is. So what we’ve done, how do we make this work? And that’s all I’ve been thinking about,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been doing all season and now we’ve got two games left. We’re going to be in dogfights both games.”

Jackson Fuller covers Arkansas football, basketball and baseball for the Southwest Times Record, part of the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at jfuller@gannett.com or follow him @jacksonfuller16 on X, formerly known as Twitter.