LEXINGTON, Ky. — The track record of major college basketball and football coaches who have “lost” their team’s fan bases — which seems now the case for John Calipari at Kentucky — going on to recover and produce a positive ending is not great.

Yet it is not impossible.

Former UK football coach Rich Brooks went from a “dead coach walking” midway through the 2006 season to lead Kentucky to four straight bowl games and assume a respected place in University of Kentucky sports lore when he departed of his own choosing in 2009.

Let’s stipulate that when the time for parting comes, it will be better for everyone involved if UK and Calipari are able to end on positive terms. Regardless, Calipari’s age, 65, dictates there must soon be a men’s basketball coaching search at UK.

As the factors that go into hiring coaches in the current era have become increasingly complex, there is reason to fret that Kentucky’s traditional approach to finding a coach to lead its historically regal men’s hoops program may not work as well as it has in the past.

That is why one of the biggest priorities for Mitch Barnhart and UK athletics administration should be putting together a well thought-out succession plan for choosing — and then acquiring — Kentucky’s next men’s basketball coach.

Historically, “the Kentucky way” of hiring men’s basketball head coaches has been to make a “splash hire” of the nation’s best available coach irrespective of any previous ties to the commonwealth or to UK.

When Joe B. Hall retired, Kentucky hired a coach with a Final Four trip on his resume in Eddie Sutton from Arkansas.

After Sutton resigned, UK lured a sitting NBA head man in the New York Knicks’ Rick Pitino.

Once Pitino returned to the NBA, Kentucky hired a rising coach, Tubby Smith, who had taken Tulsa (two) and Georgia (one) to a combined three NCAA Tournament round-of-16 appearances in the prior four seasons.

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