Mark Pope made a strange comment about the Louisville game. Here’s what he meant
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Mark Pope teased a pregame incident before Louisville, then declined specifics
- Pope said team flipped its emotional switch about 90 minutes early in game
- Pope admitted the tease drove fan speculation and plans to reveal details later
Two days after Kentucky’s loss to Louisville, UK men’s basketball coach Mark Pope raised eyebrows with a comment related to something that occurred leading up to the annual rivalry game.
During his regular Thursday press conference, Pope said, “I’m not ready to tell the story yet,” before proceeding to say about 200 words that didn’t offer much in terms of specifics but did lead to much speculation in UK basketball fan circles.
“At some point, we’ll talk in detail about our pregame experience at Louisville. And it was out of character for us,” Pope said, before adding that he didn’t want his players “to be run by their emotion” and pointing out the need to “channel” that emotion.
“So you’re controlling your emotion, your emotion’s not controlling you — is a big deal,” he finished. “It’s a learning process, and it’s something that we’ll continue to work on this year.”
Pope clearly didn’t want to go into details Thursday — less than 48 hours after a 96-88 loss at Louisville — but the way he presented this particular thought only led to more intrigue, with Kentucky fans clearly wanting to know what went down before the rivalry game and social media running wild with speculation over what could have possibly been the cause for Pope’s unprompted comments.
Fans offered up theories that ran the spectrum. A pregame fight in the UK locker room? Something Louisville did as hosts to purposely throw the Cats off their routine? What was it, those who follow the Wildcats were left wondering?
After UK’s 99-53 victory over Eastern Illinois on Friday night, the Kentucky coach was asked to elaborate on what he had teased the previous day.
He grinned at the question.
“So you guys know I’m a big Taylor Swift fan,” Pope replied, name-dropping the pop icon with a penchant for leaving breadcrumbs for her overzealous fan base. “And I just like to leave out these little things that just keep everybody wondering and guessing. There’s really not much to it. At some point, I’ll tell you the story, but I’d like you guys to prognosticate on that for a couple more days.”
Well, that didn’t really shed any light on the situation.
“It really is nothing,” Pope continued. “It’s just something about the emotional level of our team. I want to like tease this out and let it play for a few more days. But when we talk about it, it’s really not going to be very interesting. It was just the way that we felt as a team and how we responded. So thanks for letting that float around for a while. It’s fun, right?”
It certainly got people talking, which, according to Pope, was part of his plan.
He then interrupted the next question to return to this subject.
“By the way, the comment was very genuine. It was super genuine,” he said, with a tone in his voice that suggested he was actually telling the truth. “Like, I’m genuinely trying to learn this group, for sure. So it wasn’t nonsense.”
That still doesn’t really answer the question of what happened before the Louisville game.
A few minutes later, during his postgame radio interview with Tom Leach on the Rupp Arena court, Pope was asked to follow up on what he had just said in his press conference.
The UK coach addressed the crowd that had stayed for the show.
“Anybody wonder what I was talking about?” Pope asked the fans. “How mad would you guys be if I told you that it was really not much to it? I just kind of like floating it out there so we could all have something to talk about. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I mean there’s a little something there, but it’s just not as exciting as all the prognosticating was.”
And then, finally, he did talk in a little more detail about what happened Tuesday night.
“We’re very meticulous about managing our emotions,” he said. “It’s really important to us as a program that we are incredibly emotional — like, we care so much, this matters so much — but we actually don’t want to be run by our emotions. We want to control and focus our emotions.”
Pope said that, for all of UK’s pregames, the team will have one last meeting in the locker room to get in the proper headspace before hitting the court.
“We’ll actually physically go through the action of flipping the switch,” he said. “We keep our emotional level pretty low, and then we flip the switch to get to an 8 or 9, where there’s no more fighting, there’s no more laughing, joking around. Like, it’s on. I could go into greater detail, but in essence we flipped the switch like an hour and a half too early in that game. We can talk more in detail about that, but that’s just about what it was.”
So, in Pope’s telling, this was much ado about not much at all. And it’s likely to happen again.
“I’ll tell you, the thing that I love the most is — when I said this, when I said I’m not gonna give you the details now — I had this sense that this beautiful BBN community was gonna be like, ‘All right, what is it?!’ and I love that. And so from time to time we’ll do that.”
