No more Mr. Nice Guy? Mark Pope shows some fire in Kentucky’s latest blowout win
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- Mark Pope displayed visible anger, benching a starter and breaking a clipboard.
- Kentucky beat North Carolina Central 103-67 but remains 0-4 versus quality opponents.
- Otega Oweh accepted leadership duties and urged teammates to raise defensive intensity.
Mark Pope had seen enough.
That was a true statement well before Kentucky took the Rupp Arena court Tuesday night for what turned out to be a 103-67 victory over North Carolina Central, one of the lowest-rated teams in college basketball and the sixth overmatched opponent that the Wildcats have run off their home court this season.
Pope wasn’t happy before, during or after this 36-point win. It didn’t do anything to change the narrative around his UK basketball team, a group that has feasted on cupcakes while going 0-4 against quality opposition.
The second-year Kentucky coach has worn heartache on his sleeve after those losses, but his demeanor during the course of the defeats — mostly positive with his players, often stoic amid the onslaughts — rubbed a vocal portion of the UK fan base the wrong way.
Why doesn’t Pope show more emotion on the sideline? That was a point of wonder on talk radio, social media, message boards and everywhere else that Kentucky fans gather. It’s the type of nitpicking that happens when supposedly good teams show the world otherwise.
This UK team was supposed to be good. So far, that hasn’t been the case.
And Pope is clearly fed up.
So when Brandon Garrison turned the ball over and loafed back on defense — while North Carolina Central’s Kyric Davis sprinted ahead of him and soared in for a dunk to cut UK’s lead to 29-21 — Pope called a timeout.
And then the emotions of a season that has gone so wrong came pouring out.
First, Pope stormed onto the court, shouting at Garrison and making it crystal clear that the junior forward would not be back on the floor when play resumed. As the players huddled together near the bench and UK’s coaches talked separately closer to midcourt — as is Pope’s custom during timeouts — it seemed like things might calm down.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, Pope broke away from his assistants, and — clipboard in hand — barrelled his way into the players’ huddle. Before sitting down, he raised that clipboard up in the air and slammed it over his knee, splintering pieces and clearly shocking some of the Wildcats in the process.
Otega Oweh is the only player who has started all 46 games that Pope has coached at Kentucky. Has the senior guard ever seen him that angry during an actual game?
“No,” Oweh replied afterward. “But it was justified. It gets to a point where, as players, we gotta be sick and tired of the same thing over and over again. So, I mean, it’s what was right in the moment.”
And, just to be clear — because the ESPN cameras didn’t pick it up — did Pope actually break a clipboard over his knee? “Little bit, yeah,” Oweh confirmed. “A little broken.”
A little broken. That would be a fair way to describe this Kentucky basketball team, but the Wildcats’ season is not yet a third of the way finished, and Pope is clearly hell-bent on fixing what ails his roster.
He knew as well as anyone in the commonwealth that whatever happened Tuesday night against North Carolina Central — the No. 350 team in the KenPom ratings when the ball was tipped — would do nothing to change the minds of those who had given up on his Wildcats.
And the Rupp Arena stands said that plenty had. Or they were taking a break, at the very least.
This was Kentucky’s first game since a 94-59 loss to Gonzaga four nights earlier in Nashville, where UK fans booed the Cats off the Bridgestone Arena court. That game came three nights after Pope’s team missed 13 consecutive shots down the stretch in losing 67-64 to North Carolina in Rupp Arena.
When Tuesday’s game started, there was room enough to move around in the e-Rupp-tion Zone, the standing-room-only section on the baseline where students usually pack in like sardines. The student seating in the lower level was more than halfway empty. The upper-level student section was a ghost town.
Plenty of blue seats stood out in a scan of the rest of the arena. Some of those chairs filled in after tipoff. Many didn’t.
During pregame introductions, Pope was grimacing. The exchange with Garrison, who never played again after coming out with 8:06 left in the first half, was the height of his rage. But he simmered all night long.
Even during the final TV timeouts of the game — the Cats leading by 30-plus points — Pope seemed on edge in those huddles, intensely relaying instructions to his players. At the postgame podium, he skipped an opening statement and was clearly still irked.
“We just have a standard that we have to live up to,” he said. “And we’re not. And so we’ll keep fighting until we do.”
Before answering a question about his demeanor with Garrison that carried over to the rest of the game, Pope paused for a few seconds, seemingly on the verge of boiling over.
“We just have a lot of growing that we have to do right now,” he finally said. “And we’ll grow. We have good guys. We have competitive guys. We don’t know, really, what it means to compete yet, which is terrifying. But we will learn. We’re gonna learn. And we’re gonna learn fast.”
During the summer and fall, an overwhelming narrative coming out of UK’s practice sessions centered on how hard this team competed. They were basketball wars, said those who regularly attended. And here was Pope, now 10 games into the season, saying his team didn’t know how to compete?
Was all that preseason talk simply false? Or is UK’s competitiveness just not translating to the big games?
“It hasn’t translated,” Pope said. “It hasn’t translated yet, but it will. ‘Yet’ is a powerful word, guys. It’s the best word in the English language. It’s three letters that are super powerful, and it hasn’t translated yet, but it will. It will.
“We’re going to be so proud of this team. We’re not yet, but we will be. And that competitive spirit, man — I’ve done a poor job of getting that out of our guys in games, which has been monumentally frustrating for me, but we’ll get it out. We’re going to find it, or we’re going to die trying.”
Pope kept going from there. He said he needed to “get guys outside of themselves” and “get guys living and dying for this team” and protecting Rupp Arena and performing at a high level for the UK fan base.
“And in competitive games, when things go bad, we have to be able to tap into that,” he said, reiterating that he’d done a “poor job” of getting it out of his players so far. “Nobody’s more surprised about that than I am. But that’s not going to stand.”
A little while before that, a question about UK’s defense — it was bad once again, despite NCC putting up only 67 points — set Pope off. The coach listed off all the things that disappointed him: the defense, in general, UK’s 16 fouls against one of the worst teams in the country, the Cats’ inability to help on D and their subpar ball-screen pressure. He continued to come up with negatives.
“I love these guys,” he said. “We just need to get better there. And we will.”
There were some bright spots. Oweh scored a season-high 21 points to go along with seven rebounds and four steals. “I thought he was great,” Pope said.
Kentucky dished out 27 assists — tying a season high — and Collin Chandler had eight of those and just one turnover. “That’s really impressive,” Pope said.
Trent Noah joined the starting lineup, at the expense of Kam Williams, who didn’t make his first appearance until midway through the second half, and Noah scored 11 points before halftime. Jasper Johnson scored a career-high 22 points off the bench. Pope had postgame praise for both.
Once Pope was finished, it was the players’ turn, and — while his coach spoke for only seven or so minutes — Oweh held court for nearly 20. The SEC preseason player of the year — and a lightning rod for fan angst amid the early losses — owned all of it.
Oweh said he needs to bring more intensity to games. He did that Tuesday night, setting the tone with his defense and effort. He said leading by example was no longer enough. He knows he needs to be more vocal. He did that, too, getting in teammates’ faces and holding them accountable. He knows many fans directed their rage at him after the Gonzaga loss.
“I saw it all,” he said. “... Obviously, the display we put on last game was nasty. So, I mean, it’s justified.”
Kentucky gets another chance Saturday night. The Indiana Hoosiers are coming to town. They’re not ranked, but they’re a name-brand program projected to go to the NCAA Tournament. And beating them in Rupp Arena this weekend could be step one in salvaging a season that has plenty of big games left on the schedule.
Oweh talked about the flight home from Nashville. “We were just embarrassed, as a group,” he said of UK’s fourth loss against a quality team.
He also talked about his one-on-one meetings with Pope, who has urged him to step up and set the tone with his defense. Pope said earlier in the week that Oweh’s practice the day after the Gonzaga game was his best as a Wildcat. The player didn’t dispute that.
“We just got to be tired of the same thing,” he said. “And that’s just going out there and not having good energy. And once again, that’s on me. I feel I got to be the leader in that department.”
Whether the blame lies with him or not, Oweh was as contrite as can be Tuesday night. He took every question head on. And he didn’t back down from any of them. Is it possible that a game against the worst team on the schedule — in front of one of the sparsest Rupp crowds in years — could be the catalyst for what turns this season around? That remains to be seen.
But Kentucky’s coach — and the Cats’ best player — sure struck a different tone on this night. It started with Pope. It’s spread to Oweh. Can it trickle down to a team in desperate need of something new?
“I feel like he’s trying to give us that seriousness — that intensity — that we all should have,” Oweh said. “Obviously, we’re 0-4 in these high-major games. So we gotta be fed up. And I think he’s just trying to show us that. And I feel like the message that he sent to us, after this, is good for us. We got this win, but now we gotta focus on something bigger. And we got to start building some chemistry. Stack some wins.”
This story was originally published December 9, 2025 at 11:46 PM.
