Billy Donovan might be interested in the Kentucky basketball job. But there’s a problem.

By Sunday night, it was clear that John Calipari would not be the coach at Kentucky at the start of the 2024-25 college basketball season. It took nearly 48 hours for confirmation, with Calipari officially stepping aside Tuesday afternoon to take the head coaching position at Arkansas.

By that time, everyone knew that one of the most coveted jobs in the sport was about to open up for the first time in 15 years, and attention had already turned to who would fill it.

UK athletics director Mitch Barnhart could not seriously move on the position until Calipari formally resigned. As soon as that happened, the focus of Kentucky’s search quickly centered on two highly successful coaches: Baylor’s Scott Drew and UConn’s Dan Hurley.

The reasons were obvious. Both have national championships on their résumés. Both are seemingly built for the UK basketball fishbowl. Both, depending on who you talk to, were realistic candidates.

Drew was long thought to be at the top of Barnhart’s list as a potential hire, and the Herald-Leader was told Tuesday night that the two sides had already engaged in serious discussions soon after Calipari’s resignation.

However, Drew has decided to stay put in Waco, where he’s spent the past 21 seasons as the head coach of the Bears, leading the program to its first national championship in 2021.

Hurley, fresh off winning back-to-back national titles with UConn, was clearly the favorite of a large and vocal segment of the UK fan base — as well as an influential bloc of the program’s boosters — and, despite his comments that he was staying put in Storrs, there was a thinking (however misguided it might have been) that Kentucky was capable of putting together an offer that might actually bring him to Lexington.

On Thursday afternoon, Hurley confirmed that he would not be UK’s next head coach.

As the first full day of the post-Calipari era dawned Wednesday morning, those were the top two candidates for the job. And it sounded highly unlikely that anyone else would get an offer until both men unequivocally turned one down. Now, both of them have.

Under other circumstances, a third name would have already been on that list: Billy Donovan.

If all three situations were the same, Donovan would’ve started in that top tier of candidates.

But the situations are not the same. Drew and Hurley are in offseason mode. Donovan still has games to play.

And that’s a problem.

Is Billy Donovan to Kentucky possible?

National pundits have already dismissed the idea of Donovan returning to college basketball. In certain circles, it’s an unthinkable scenario.

But the Herald-Leader has been told over the course of the past couple of days that Donovan could be much more open now to a return to college — particularly, a return to blue-blood Kentucky, where he was an assistant coach under Rick Pitino for five years — than at any point since leaving this level of the sport for the NBA in 2015.

The catch: Those same people who think the door would be open for UK to make a move on Donovan are in agreement that it will be tightly shut for at least another week. As long as the Chicago Bulls — the team he’s coached for the past four seasons — are still playing, the 58-year-old coach will not even consider the possibility of leaving the NBA for Kentucky.

Donovan, in so many words, said the same thing himself Tuesday, when he was hit with several questions regarding the UK job before the Bulls’ game against the New York Knicks.

“Obviously, I spent five years (there),” he said of Lexington. “My first five years in coaching, when Coach Pitino gave me a job. Two kids were born there. Like at all my stops, you have very, very fond memories. I have not been contacted by anybody. I haven’t spoken to anybody. My total commitment and focus is here — to this team and to this group.”

Donovan was asked what he would say if he were to be contacted by UK.

“I would still say the same thing I said,” he replied. “I’m committed to being here. With this group, and trying to help these guys — as best we can — to close out this year and try to get a home court in the Play-In (Tournament) and to try and advance.”

By all accounts, that is true. Donovan is committed to the Bulls for the remainder of the 2023-24 season. And there’s no point in anyone from UK trying to talk to him in the meantime. But in a press conference Tuesday that was filled with multiple questions related to Kentucky and candid, thoughtful answers from Donovan, there was never a denial that he would be interested in the job after the Bulls’ season was finished.

And that timing is the issue.

The Billy Donovan-Kentucky timeline

The Bulls have three regular-season games remaining, and they’ve already clinched a spot in the Play-In Tournament, which means the earliest possible date their season could end would be April 17. If Chicago wins that night, it would play again on April 19. And if the Bulls won two games in the Play-In event, they would make the NBA playoffs and move on to a full series, which could push their season until the end of the month.

In this every-day-matters landscape of college basketball, the longer Kentucky’s coaching search drags on, the more it could negatively affect the Wildcats’ chances to be successful in the 2024-25 season, a campaign that will set the tone and build the momentum for the next UK coach’s tenure.

Compounding that problem is the fact that — in a scenario where Donovan is the next head coach of the Wildcats — he wouldn’t be bringing any players with him. Anyone presently employed in college basketball could theoretically bring along some current players and recruits to Lexington for next season, and such a coach would already be in the process of identifying and recruiting potential additions in the transfer portal.

That’s an important consideration for a Kentucky roster that is expected to be almost entirely depleted by the time the next coach takes over.

Donovan has been in the NBA for the past nine seasons. He has deep ties throughout the basketball world, but no pre-existing relationships with college players or recruits. He would have to build a 2024-25 roster from scratch. And — taking into account the time it would take to actually negotiate an agreement with UK and put a coaching staff in place — he would be weeks behind the competition in getting that job done.

And that’s — from Kentucky’s perspective — a best-case scenario. If the Bulls advance out of the Play-In Tournament and into the actual NBA playoffs, it could be too late to put a competitive roster on the court next season.

None of that takes into account the fact that Donovan hasn’t been a college basketball coach since 2015, and the sport has changed dramatically in the nine years since he left Florida. He has never had to maneuver the transfer portal or deal with NIL requests from players and their representatives. It would probably be too late to make a splash with any star high school recruits from the 2024 class.

For a supremely proud program currently mired in the second-longest Final Four drought in its history, this scenario would present a major challenge for the 2024-25 season.

Why should UK wait on Billy Donovan?

So, why should Barnhart and UK even consider waiting around for Donovan, especially without knowing what his final answer would be?

To be clear, for this to happen, Kentucky was going to have to get a hard “no” from both Drew and Hurley first. Now that it’s actually happened, UK officials could be waiting another week before Donovan will be ready to talk about the opening.

Is that too long for Barnhart and company to sit around?

A week with no coach and extreme roster uncertainty at this stage in the college basketball offseason would seem like an eternity, but is it worth sacrificing the possibility — even if it’s less than a 50-50 shot — to make a home-run hire, when the alternative is to go below your top tier of candidates and choose someone with far lesser demonstrated results, a process that would still probably take a couple of days, at minimum? This search, Barnhart hopes, will result in a long-term arrangement, after all.

The questions about Donovan’s ability to acclimate quickly to the current college basketball landscape are fair, but there’s no doubting his past success at this level or his drive to achieve similar results in the future, wherever he ends up coaching next season. He’s a proven winner.

He also knows what “UK basketball” means more than anyone Barnhart could possibly target (barring a run at his old boss, Pitino, which would be a shocking turn of events).

It’s been exactly 30 years since Donovan left Pitino’s staff to become — at age 28 — the head coach at Marshall University, and much has changed since then, but what it means to be associated with Kentucky basketball never will. Donovan has a unique perspective on this.

“Obviously, I spent time there,” he said Tuesday. “I understand the magnitude of that place. And the history and the tradition and everything that goes into that place. And it is flattering to be mentioned with a school and a tradition like that in this game.

“But I also know that people will speculate on what may or may not happen. And I understand the interest in Kentucky basketball.”

After Marshall, he spent 19 seasons at Florida, leading the Gators to the national title game in 2000, back-to-back NCAA titles in 2006 and ’07, and another Final Four in 2014 — sustained success at a program that had advanced beyond the first round of the NCAA Tournament exactly three times before his arrival.

That success led Barnhart to call him first when Tubby Smith departed in 2007 and again when Billy Gillispie was let go two years later. Donovan has already turned down Kentucky twice in the past. If UK waits around, he might very well do it a third time.

Is it worth a few days of fan consternation to find out? A few more restless nights to possibly get the result that Barnhart — and many of those same UK fans — have wanted for nearly two decades?

In his press conference this week, Donovan reflected on his decision to leave Florida for the Oklahoma City Thunder nine years ago and talked about his desire at the time to coach in the NBA, listing off all the people associated with the league — starting with Pitino — that he’d worked with on his way up.

“I’ve been around that,” he said. “… And I’ve always had a feeling that I would like to coach in the NBA. And that’s really, really what it came down to. So, I’m happy here. At this level and stuff like that. But I also understand, too, that in this profession, sometimes things don’t work out at a particular place. Or things change. And I know I enjoy coaching. And I know I enjoy coaching in the NBA.”

Donovan praised the Bulls’ organization and gave thanks for the open and honest relationship he has with the front office there. Given every opportunity to do so, however, Donovan never shut the door on a return to college.

As the first full day of the post-Calipari era ended, Kentucky was still without a coach.

Now that Drew and Hurley have both declined, Barnhart will have an interesting decision to make. Move on, or wait around and find out?

“I’ve got an enormous amount of respect for Kentucky and their program and what it stands for,” Donovan said Tuesday. “I mean, I competed against them. … And I was there for five (years). So I understand the magnitude of the program.”

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