A ‘really terrible day’ in Rupp Arena. How it all went wrong for Kentucky vs. No. 1 Auburn
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Game day: No. 1 Auburn 94, No. 17 Kentucky 78
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s men’s basketball game between Kentucky and Auburn in Rupp Arena.
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The anticipation was in the Rupp Arena air Saturday afternoon.
Auburn, the No. 1 team in college basketball, was in town, just the sixth time in history that the Kentucky Wildcats would get a chance to play the nation’s top-ranked team on its home court.
The Cats were underdogs for this one, sure, but they’d come out on top from that position before. They were double-digit ’dogs going into their game at Tennessee on Jan. 28, in fact. They won that one. They also beat Duke in November and Florida in the SEC opener. Those teams were ranked No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, in the latest AP Top 25 poll.
Coach Mark Pope’s first season in charge has been filled with marquee victories.
There have also been deflating losses. And once the anticipation subsided and the actual basketball began, it didn’t take long for the Cats to be well on their way to one of the most demoralizing days of this 2024-25 season.
On the court, Auburn beat Kentucky 94-78, a lopsided loss that was every bit as ugly as that score would indicate.
Off the court, Pope announced that Jaxson Robinson would miss the rest of the season with a right wrist injury, bringing an abrupt end to the college basketball career of one of Kentucky’s best players.
By the time Pope stepped to the podium for his postgame press conference, he’d had a night to process the news related to Robinson’s injury. He was clearly still grappling with what went wrong in Saturday’s game itself.
That list was a long one.
While answering a question related to Kentucky’s lack of 3-pointers — the Cats went just 4-for-17 from deep, with Koby Brea responsible for all four of those long-range makes — Pope said his team was at its best Saturday when it was pushing the pace.
But he also said that Kentucky — a team with a stated goal of putting up double that number of 3-point shots in every game — “gave up” on playing with a fast pace. As his explanation of that continued, he kept searching for the reason why that had happened.
“I don’t know, actually, is the answer,” he said at one point.
The troubles for Pope’s team began early.
After Otega Oweh hit two free throws out of the first TV timeout to cut Auburn’s lead to 7-6, the Tigers unleashed a 12-0 run that needed only 58 seconds to reach completion. It was a stunning flurry courtesy of an historically good offense.
Coach Bruce Pearl’s Tigers came into the weekend with the most efficient scoring attack in the history of the KenPom ratings, which date back to the 1996-97 season. The Cats did nothing to slow it.
Auburn was already up 13-6 when Miles Kelly banked in a 3-pointer — his third of the afternoon — to extend the advantage to double digits barely five minutes into the game. As Kelly trotted down the court on defense, he turned to a teammate and flashed a Michael Jordan-esque shrug. The next trip down the court, he banked in another 3-pointer.
Pope referenced those back-to-back banks after the game, but those were just two shots in an offensive onslaught courtesy of the No. 1 team in the country.
“We certainly didn’t ring the bell schematically,” Pope said. “Individually, we didn’t. And so that’s a place where we were very poor tonight. We’ve actually been making strides, but we regressed a little tonight.”
Defense has been one of Kentucky’s weaknesses all season, and — while the Cats had indeed made great improvements in that area in recent weeks — they didn’t have much for Auburn’s offense Saturday.
Oweh, who lifted Kentucky to a win at Oklahoma less than 72 hours earlier — putting the Cats on his back by scoring the final 18 points of that game himself — picked up three fouls in the first half against the Tigers. He ultimately scored just four points and attempted only three shots in 20 minutes on the court. Until last week, Oweh had never scored fewer than 10 points as a Kentucky player.
With Robinson out, Oweh neutralized and Lamont Butler still clearly bothered by his left shoulder injury, the Cats found themselves down 15 points at halftime.
They’d come back from worse earlier this season. Kentucky trailed Gonzaga by 16 at the break before rallying to beat the Zags in overtime in Seattle back on Dec. 7.
Nothing like that was going to happen Saturday, and it became clear shortly after the break.
The Wildcats, who committed 10 turnovers in the first half, had six more in the first three minutes of the second. Five of those miscues came in a span of 61 seconds. Many of them were unforced errors. Poor passes. A lack of concentration. Just general sloppy play.
“It was really unfortunate,” Pope said of the sequence. “It was more a manifestation of, I think, the stress that we were feeling. Feeling sped up, because none of them were forced. We were just dribbling the ball out of bounds. Actually, you can give credit to Auburn for that. They got us in a hole, and you can put the blame for that on me. I wasn’t able to get the guys to a place where we could just kind of be present in execution of the moment.
“But that’s what happens when you get under duress, and you’re carrying around baggage. You have a really inexplicable series of plays like that. That was a pretty devastating run for us, for sure.”
Even more demoralizing in that moment was the fact that the Cats were making some stops at the other end. Even with all of those miscues, Auburn’s 15-point halftime lead had grown to only 18 by the end of it, with plenty of basketball still to be played, and a Rupp Arena crowd that was clearly raring to get back into it.
“It definitely gets to you a little bit,” UK’s Andrew Carr said. “They kept adding on and affecting the way that we were playing the next couple of minutes. And you sit down at a timeout — and they only outscored us by three points in that time — but it feels a lot different, because you feel like you missed an opportunity.”
It was a missed opportunity, for sure.
Instead of knocking off the No. 1 team in the country, the Cats suffered their most lopsided loss in SEC play this season. It actually tied for UK’s sixth-worst losing margin ever in Rupp Arena.
Kelly ended up with 30 points and ultimately went 9-for-14 from 3-point range. Chad Baker-Mazara scored 22 points, and freshman guard Tahaad Pettiford added 21.
Johni Broome, still a contender for national player of the year honors, was held to only one point in the first half and finished with nine points and six rebounds, both totals about half of his season averages.
But even while holding the SEC’s top player to those numbers — and even with Auburn’s starting point guard and top perimeter defender, Denver Jones, limited to only eight minutes due to injury — the Cats never really had a chance. The Tigers’ lead didn’t dip below 13 points in the second half.
Auburn (27-2, 15-1 SEC) left the Cats (19-10, 8-8 SEC) licking their wounds with just two games remaining in the regular season. There’s the home finale against LSU on Tuesday and then one more Saturday on the road, this time a trip to play No. 14 Missouri, before the postseason begins.
Pope made clear Saturday that he still has a ton of faith in a group that has battled adversity for most of the season and beaten many of the nation’s best teams along the way.
But, on the first day of March, these Wildcats looked out of sorts. And there’s not much more season left.
“It’s not a lack of desire,” Pope said. “It was a whole cocktail of some energy miscues, some being sped up miscues, some terrific shotmaking from Auburn. And all put together, it resulted in a really, really terrible day for us.”
This story was originally published March 1, 2025 at 7:15 PM.
