The buzz was missing from Rupp Arena on Saturday, but UK basketball got what it needed
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Game day: No. 14 Kentucky 80, South Carolina 57
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s men’s basketball game between Kentucky and South Carolina in Rupp Arena.
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The buzz wasn’t quite there inside Rupp Arena on Saturday afternoon.
At least, the home of Kentucky basketball wasn’t as buzzy as it has been for much of this season.
The crowd wasn’t packed in early for the SEC matchup with South Carolina. The line of students waiting outside a couple of hours before tipoff was far shorter than usual.
Even when game time arrived, there was a smattering of empty seats in that section of the upper level that looks down on the baseline nearest UK’s bench, the one that was often mostly empty in recent years but had been jam-packed for pretty much all of the Mark Pope era so far.
The opponent didn’t help matters. The Gamecocks came in at 0-9 in SEC play. The noon start time didn’t lend itself to a raucous crowd. And the weather — 40 degrees and rainy on Saturday morning — surely kept those UK students who have been lined up down High Street for hours before tipoff the past several weeks at home this time around.
Kentucky’s last two games in Rupp Arena? The return of John Calipari with his Arkansas Razorbacks last Saturday, and a date with national title contender Alabama two Saturdays before that. Compared to those two marquee events, South Carolina seemed secondary.
All of those variables surely contributed to the tamer atmosphere inside and out of Rupp on this Saturday, but it was also fair to wonder if what the Wildcats have been up to on the court in recent weeks was a contributing factor.
They lost that game to Alabama after going 11-0 at home to that point. They lost the game to Arkansas, too, an embarrassing chapter in the saga of Calipari’s exit as Kentucky coach.
The last couple of weeks also saw the Cats lose at Vanderbilt and get run off the court at Ole Miss. Four defeats in five games, only a victory over now-No. 4 Tennessee preventing many UK fans from devolving into total meltdown mode.
The Wildcats needed a win in the worst way. On Saturday, they got it. And the way this 80-57 victory against the Gamecocks came about should be enough for a collective sigh of relief.
“It means a lot,” Pope said afterward. “This is really important to us. … It was important in a lot of ways.”
About 12 hours before he said that, Pope awoke to a horrible thought.
The Kentucky coach said he fell asleep around 1 a.m. and was jarred awake two hours later — “In a full sweat,” he added afterward — unable to go back to sleep ahead of the early tipoff.
UK’s injury report Friday night listed backup point guard Kerr Kriisa as out, which he has been since early December, due to a foot injury.
It listed Lamont Butler as questionable, an improvement — Butler had missed the previous three games with a shoulder injury and was clearly playing hurt in the two before that — but that still gave UK’s starting point guard just a 50-50 shot to play.
And this report featured a new name — de facto starting point guard Jaxson Robinson, one of the Cats’ best players and most dangerous scorers — as questionable. Robinson was involved in a collision in Friday’s practice — “scary” was the word Pope used to describe it — that resulted in an injured shooting wrist and late-night X-rays on the eve of the game.
“(I) couldn’t go back to sleep, because I really, genuinely didn’t know if I was going to walk into the gym and have no Lamont and no Jaxson and no Kerr, right?”
At 10:15 a.m., Butler emerged from the UK locker room, the first Wildcat to hit the court. He was wearing a brace on his left shoulder — “it’s like a tank,” Pope said of the size and unwieldiness of it — but otherwise looked OK going through pregame warmups.
Twenty minutes later, Robinson emerged with black tape on his right wrist. He was bending that wrist back and forth as he put up shots, consulting with one of UK’s graduate assistants, assessing how it felt. But once he got in a rhythm, Robinson rarely missed.
The starting lineups were posted, and both players were on it.
When the game started, the Cats couldn’t hit anything.
About a minute in, Butler drove to the basket and clanked an open layup. Pope reminded everybody about it after the victory.
“It was really shaky,” he said. “But that’s what happens when you haven’t dribbled the ball for two weeks.”
Robinson missed his first four shots — everything ranging from layups to jumpers to 3-pointers — amid an opening stretch in which Kentucky was 1-for-10 from the floor as a team.
The relative quiet of the Rupp crowd turned to restlessness, a noise not often heard in Pope’s first season in charge. The affection with the fan base was rekindled from there.
Down 11-8, the Cats unleashed an 11-0 run to get the crowd into it. The game was never tied again. By halftime, Kentucky led by 14. The lead was never fewer than nine points in the second half, and even that single-digit deficit was a brief one.
“There was one particular stretch in the second half where the lead was at nine, and it went to 20,” Gamecocks coach Lamont Paris said. “It seemed like in a blink of an eye.”
It was 94 seconds — another 11-0 run to finish off South Carolina for good.
The final eight points in that flurry were scored in a span of 54 seconds. The first of those eight points came courtesy of an Otega Oweh steal and dunk, defense turning into offense turning into Kentucky fans going nuts in the stands.
That summed up the afternoon. Amid a season filled with poor defensive performances, Kentucky turned in a good one Saturday.
“I thought our guys were really focused for the most part,” Pope said. “We had some lapses. We can get much better. But they bought into being a little bit more disruptive, a little bit more aggressive at the point of attack.”
Coming into the day, UK had surrendered an average of 86.3 points per game over its nine SEC games. The Cats had also gone 4-5 in those games and came into this weekend at No. 108 nationally in defensive efficiency, the worst rating — by a wide margin — in the conference.
On Saturday, the Cats had given up only 19 points by halftime. South Carolina’s 57 points were just three more than the lowest total this season for a Kentucky opponent. (Brown scored 54 against the Wildcats on Dec. 31, the final game before league play began.)
On Tuesday night at Ole Miss — the ugliest loss of UK’s season — the Cats allowed 24 assists and forced just one turnover, a stat that obviously left Pope flustered afterward. On Saturday, the Gamecocks managed just seven assists, their lowest total this season.
“I think we were just more locked in,” UK guard Koby Brea said. “We did a good job executing the game plan. But at the end of the day, you just gotta go out there and show a lot of effort, play with a lot of heart. And I think we did that today. And on top of that, just having each other’s backs. You know, basketball is not a game of (being) perfect. We’re going to make mistakes. But we gotta be willing to help our brother out.”
Pope took a question about team defense and Butler’s return after the game and spent most of his time talking about Brea’s individual effort on that side of the ball. He used the words “incredible” and “unbelievable” and “brilliant” to describe the way Brea defended.
His offense was big, too. He scored eight of the points in that initial 11-0 run that put Kentucky ahead for good, and he ended up with a career-high six assists in his 136th college game. Brea also had five rebounds in a team-high 30 minutes off the bench.
But Pope was more proud of his defense, noting that he and Brea had talked in the days leading up to this game about ways for him to improve — and help the Cats do the same — defensively.
“I think it’s something that the team has obviously needed to work on the last couple of games,” Brea said. “And I’m just trying to set the tone for everybody. And I think that once they see that I’m taking that really seriously, and I’m really being locked in on that and taking it personally, then, you know, it helps the rest of the group.”
By the end of it all, Butler and Robinson had played 23 and 20 minutes, respectively, and came out feeling fine. Andrew Carr, who has been dealing with a back injury for weeks, was a major factor in Kentucky’s first half. Kriisa remains out, but the rest of the Cats seem good to go.
And UK played some defense on top of it all, the team’s efficiency rating jumping from No. 108 nationally at tipoff to 93rd in the country by the middle of the afternoon. Still not great, but it’s a start.
Afterward, it was all smiles in the Rupp Arena tunnels, the default setting over the first couple of months of this season, but not a common sight these past few weeks.
“It feels like we’re back to normal a little bit,” Brea said.
Out on the court, things were back to normal, too.
Hundreds waited to watch and listen to Pope’s postgame radio show. The UK coach had the crowd laughing while the show was live and smiling as he signed autographs and posed for photos during the commercial breaks.
Before the final segment, he spotted his daughters walking off the Rupp court, headed home. He got the crowd’s attention.
“You guys are amazing,” he told them. “Because you’re still here, and my own daughters are leaving.”
Pope then encouraged the UK fans to boo his kids. They did as he asked, one of the Pope girls throwing her arms up in a, “C’mon, Dad!” gesture before leaving the arena.
Once the show was over, Pope stuck around. He signed the last autograph and posed for the last photo at 4 p.m., nearly two hours after the game had ended.
As he walked off the court alone, Pope spotted some friends and family waiting for him behind the UK bench. He smiled and walked over, and they gave him a little ovation. He and his wife, Lee Anne, spoke with the small group for another 30 minutes before the first couple of Kentucky basketball finally left the court, smiling and holding hands as they walked through the tunnel.
On Tuesday night, they’ll be back in the building for another challenge. No. 4 Tennessee is coming to Rupp next. But, after a much-needed victory, that was a problem for another day.
“I think when you go through a couple of losses and, you know, things aren’t really going in your favor, you might start to put your head down a little bit,” Brea said. “And sometimes you just need something to uplift you a little bit. And that’s what a win does for us. Now we go into Tennessee with fresh minds, fresh hearts, and I think it’ll help us a lot.”
This story was originally published February 8, 2025 at 5:25 PM.
