Gonzaga to face John Calipari, Arkansas in road exhibition game

Jun. 9—Gonzaga will travel to SEC country for a high-level tune-up game before taking on one of the country’s most demanding nonconference schedules.

The Zags will travel to Arkansas in October for a preseason exhibition, Razorbacks coach John Calipari told Pig Trail Nation in an interview on Tuesday.

There isn’t a date set for the game at Bud Walton Arena in Fayetteville, Arkansas, but it’s likely to take place at some point in mid- to late October given Gonzaga is set to open the season on Nov. 2 against Purdue in Las Vegas.

Gonzaga doesn’t have any other known games on its exhibition schedule at this point.

“We’re bringing Gonzaga in as an exhibition,” Calipari said. “I’m trying to remember who the other exhibition is, I can’t even remember.”

The third-year Arkansas coach and Gonzaga’s Mark Few have a relationship that stems back decades to Calipari’s tenure at the University of Memphis in the early 2000s.

Few and the Zags played Calipari’s teams at Memphis four times from 2006-09 and twice during the coach’s tenure at Kentucky. The coaches scheduled a six-year nonconference series prior to the 2022-23 season, but Calipari was involved in only two of those games, leaving Kentucky for Arkansas in 2024.

Gonzaga and Kentucky played twice more in the two seasons that followed, but Few and third-year Wildcats coach Mark Pope mutually agreed to discontinue the series last month.

The Zags have lined up multiple exhibition games against power conference games in recent years, traveling to Frisco, Texas, for a preseason tune-up against Tennessee in 2022 and playing USC in Palm Desert, California, prior to the 2024-25 season.

Gonzaga hasn’t played Arkansas during the Calipari era but matched up with the Razorbacks twice previously, winning 91-81 at the 2014 Maui Invitational. The second meeting came in the Sweet 16 of the 2022 NCAA Tournament, where a No. 1-seeded Gonzaga team featuring Chet Holmgren, Drew Timme and Andrew Nembhard lost 74-68 to Arkansas at the Chase Center in San Francisco.

This October, the Zags will face an Arkansas team coming off a Sweet 16 run of its own. Featuring projected NBA lottery pick guard Darius Acuff Jr., Calipari’s team won NCAA Tournament games against Hawaii and High Point at Portland’s Moda Center — the same venue where GU played NCAA games against Kennesaw State and Texas — before bowing out with a 109-88 blowout loss to former Zag assistant Tommy Lloyd and top-seeded Arizona at the SAP Center in San Jose, California.

Arkansas is losing four of its five starters from last year’s squad, but brings back guard Billy Richmond (11.2 points, 4.3 rebounds) and added five-star high school shooting guard Jordan Smith, who was widely considered the No. 2 overall prospect in the country. The Razorbacks also bring in Finnish prospect Miikka Muurinen, a 6-foot-10 forward and former teammate of Gonzaga’s Davis Fogle at Arizona’s Compass Prep.

Few’s program will travel to Arkansas three years after former Gonzaga guard Khalif Battle wore a Razorbacks uniform, suiting up for the SEC program during Eric Musselman’s final season in Fayetteville. Battle averaged 14.8 ppg during his lone season in the season before relocating to Spokane as a sixth-year senior, averaging 13.6 ppg and leading the Zags to a WCC Tournament championship.