Pitino appears on Calipari's 'Cal Cast' — a public one-on-one (Jan 2017)

John Calipari invited Rick Pitino onto his long-form 'Cal Cast' podcast in January 2017. Rather than exchanging short, televised quips, the coaches recorded an extended conversation that covered mutual history, coaching perspectives, and their relationship. During the episode Pitino said, "I've never had a bad relationship with John... Our relationship is just as good as Roy and Mike's. It's very cordial. It's very professional," framing the interaction in cooperative language [17]. The sit-down was widely reported as an uncommon, public one-on-one between two rival coaches who had previously traded pointed media lines, and it provided a recorded example of the pair engaging civilly and directly.

This episode matters because it shifted the public record from short, adversarial soundbites (such as Pitino's pre-2012 Final Four remarks) to a sustained, on-the-record dialogue. For fans and reporters, the podcast offered a concrete instance of de-escalation and mutual acknowledgement, complicating the narrative that the coaches were permanently at odds. The recording therefore serves as primary-source evidence of a partial reconciliation or at least a professional détente, altering how later coverage interpreted their relationship [17][14].

The podcast did not erase earlier disputes (the UMass disagreement and pre-2012 barbs continued to be cited in retrospectives), but it reduced the frequency of direct, public personal attacks between the two coaches. Within months of the podcast, institutional events (Louisville's 2017 scandal and Pitino's subsequent firing) shifted attention away from coach-to-coach media theater; nonetheless, the podcast remains the clearest documented example of them engaging openly and cordially on the record [17][6].