Otega Oweh just had his worst game as a Kentucky Wildcat. His next one could get weird
Mark Pope doesn’t like losing.
No college basketball coach does, but it seems to hit this one especially hard. Pope suffered very few defeats during his own playing career as a Kentucky Wildcat — his two UK teams were 62-7 overall, 30-2 in the SEC, and he ended it all with the 1996 national championship — and he knows how much wins mean to the fan base. And how much losses hurt.
Pope wears his heartache on his sleeve during postgame press conferences after those losses — and there have been nine already this season — but he usually finds a way to blend his disappointment with insightful answers regarding what had just gone wrong on the court.
There was some of that after UK’s 96-83 loss at No. 4 Alabama on Saturday night.
But, in general, Pope was about as short as he’s been after a game this season. And he was at his snippiest when an Alabama-based reporter asked how the Crimson Tide managed to “take Otega Oweh out of the game.”
Oweh, the Cats’ leading scorer this season, had just two points on 1-for-9 shooting before fouling out with nearly seven minutes remaining.
Pope hesitated for a couple of seconds before replying.
“You baiting me into an answer here?” the UK coach said, an insincere smile on his face.
“I think Alabama’s a terrific defensive team,” Pope added of a Crimson Tide squad that has been struggling mightily on that end of the floor recently.
Perhaps Pope didn’t want to get on the subject of officiating. All eight of Oweh’s misses were 2-point attempts, five were classified as layups, and the UK guard earned zero trips to the line despite drawing plenty of contact at the rim. This from a guy who is averaging 5.1 free-throw attempts per game and ranks in the top 10 in the SEC in that category.
Maybe Pope simply didn’t want to say anything bad about a player who has meant so much to his first UK team. It was probably some of both.
But the numbers, fair or not, will say this was Oweh’s worst game as a Kentucky Wildcat.
The next time he steps onto the basketball court — Wednesday night at Oklahoma — things are likely to go from worst to weird.
Before coming to Kentucky last offseason, Oweh played his first two years of college ball with the Sooners, and there will be plenty of familiar faces on the opposite sideline Wednesday night in Norman.
Oklahoma head coach Porter Moser is still there. So are some of Oweh’s former teammates. And there is likely to be a rush of strange emotions upon his return.
This won’t be the first time this season that a Wildcat will be facing his old team.
Jaxson Robinson has done it twice.
The first one was the most personal.
Robinson scored 22 points in an 81-69 victory over Texas A&M last month. In the final minute of the first half, he drained a 3-pointer and — standing not far away from his former coach, Buzz Williams — turned toward the Aggies’ bench, gestured, and said something severe enough to get hit with a technical foul.
For Robinson, who rarely shows much emotion of any kind on the court, this was certainly out of character. More recently, he scored 20 points in a loss to Arkansas, where he played his second season of college basketball.
Robinson, who’s now in his third year under Pope, has adopted his coach’s treat-every-game-the-same approach. Outwardly, at least. He didn’t acknowledge it much before or after, but the Texas A&M game — against his former coach — clearly meant a little more.
And while Arkansas’ personnel has turned over entirely since he was there — moving on from Eric Musselman to John Calipari — that ended up being another one of his best games this season, from an individual standpoint.
Things didn’t end on bad terms between Oweh and Oklahoma. This won’t be any kind of a “revenge game” for either side. But it’s still likely to be an awkward experience.
Otega Oweh, from Oklahoma to Kentucky
Moser had nothing but good things to say about his former player when asked to assess what Pope would be getting from Oweh at SEC media day last fall. He lauded Oweh for his toughness, athleticism, physicality and ability to get downhill. Moser called the 6-foot-4, 215-pound guard a “great kid” that plays with “an edge” to him.
“A lot of good things they’re going to have from Otega,” he concluded.
In a preseason interview with the Herald-Leader, the player himself had nothing bad to say about his experience in Norman. He said he enjoyed his time there. But he was also clearly excited about a new beginning with Pope at Kentucky, and his comments across the summer and fall did nothing to hide that feeling.
Oweh did say that part of the reason for his move was to put himself in a better position to compete in the NCAA Tournament, which Oklahoma failed to qualify for in each of his two seasons there.
“I just wanted to be in an environment where I knew that I would be surrounded by a winning culture,” he told the Herald-Leader before the season. “And I feel like there’s no place like Kentucky when it comes to that.”
The Wildcats (18-9, 7-7 SEC) go into this week projected as a 3 seed in the NCAA Tournament by most bracketologists, despite ongoing injury issues with Lamont Butler, Kerr Kriisa and Jaxson Robinson.
Oklahoma (17-10, 4-10 SEC), meanwhile, is tied for 13th in the league standings. The Sooners are generally regarded as one of the final teams in the 2025 March Madness field, though three of their final four regular-season games will come against ranked opponents, so they could easily slide out of the picture between now and Selection Sunday.
If the primary goal was playing deeper into March, the decision Oweh made was obviously the correct one.
Oweh also clearly formed a quick personal bond with his new coach.
“When you talk to Coach Pope, you don’t even think you’re talking to a head coach, really,” he said a few weeks after arriving in Lexington. “You just think you’re talking to your friend, someone that you trust. So, it’s been great. Just being able to go up to his office whenever — just have normal conversations.”
Pope’s style of play — an open, flowing offense, with plenty of room to operate — seemed a perfect fit for a player like Oweh, who could get to the basket at will during his time to Oklahoma but often struggled with a collapsing defense and the quick decision-making that came with playing in traffic at the rim.
When Oweh came to Kentucky, he was billed as a defense-first player. He had offensive talent, sure, but he had been inconsistent in that area. During his first meeting with local reporters in Lexington last summer, Oweh seemed to bristle at a question that defined him “mainly as a defensive player” during his time at Oklahoma.
“That’s what people thought,” he said, his tone making clear he was not among those people. “But I think I’m really just a two-way player. I can go out there and defend. I can also put points on the board, as well. Playmake, do all those things. … I mean, that’s just what people think. But I’m a two-way player, for sure.”
He was just waiting for an opportunity to prove it. Pope and the UK coaches provided that.
Under their tutelage — and playing within Pope’s offense — Oweh has transformed into one of the best and most consistent scorers in the SEC.
The two-point performance Saturday night in Tuscaloosa snapped a run of 26 consecutive games scoring in double figures to begin Oweh’s UK career. He was the only SEC player who had achieved that feat this season, and one of just three to do it at the high-major level.
He had his moments of offensive promise at Oklahoma, too. Oweh emerged as a starter for Moser by the end of his freshman season. As a sophomore, he scored in double figures in 12 of the team’s 13 nonconference games — tallying nine points in the other one — but Big 12 play was a different story. He hit double figures just once in his final 11 games of the regular season and was coming off the bench by the end of it.
There’s been no such fall-off in conference play this season.
“He’s been really special. I’m proud of him,” Pope said. “And he’s obviously just a massive part of our team and this league and college basketball.”
Oweh is now averaging 15.7 points per game — tops on Kentucky’s team — and his numbers are up in every major statistical category. His turnovers are also down, even though he’s carrying more of a load offensively than he has in the past.
There won’t be any bad blood when Oweh walks into the gym Wednesday night, but it’s a good bet that the Kentucky Wildcat will be looking forward to showing his former Oklahoma coaches and teammates how much his game has changed over the past year.
And perhaps he’ll start a new streak that will carry him through the rest of this season.
“It’s really hard,” Pope said of that run of double-figure scoring games last week, before it was snapped in Alabama. “He’s the only one. So it’s gotta be hard. He’s been unbelievable. He has brought a physicality and an emotion and an urgency and a consistency to the game that’s unparalleled in the SEC right now. And that’s saying a lot. I mean, that probably says more than I could say with words. It’s really hard to do, and it’s been really impressive to watch him do it.”
The streak ended the following day, but one bad game won’t do anything to change Pope’s perception of a player who has already done so much for the Wildcats.
“What an incredible season,” Pope said Monday night. “... The truth is, he is the model of consistency. There is nobody in college basketball that’s done it better than him this season. That’s just a fact. Normally, I’m super hyperbolic, but that’s not. That’s actually just the fact. And he’s also been carrying a tremendous, tremendous load. With a bunch of his teammates out, more is falling on his shoulders.
“And I don’t spend any time worrying about him. We talk about everything. We cover all the bases. But I know that it’ll be fun for him, with his history, to get back to Oklahoma.”
Next game
No. 17 Kentucky at Oklahoma
When: 9 p.m. EST Wednesday
TV: SEC Network
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Records: Kentucky 18-9 (7-7 SEC), Oklahoma 17-10 (4-10)
Series: Kentucky leads 3-0
Last meeting: Kentucky won 76-64 on Nov. 22, 2010, at the Maui Invitational in Hawaii
This story was originally published February 25, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
