By Kentucky basketball standards, Mark Pope’s first ‘T’ was a long time coming
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Pope received his first Kentucky technical after 51 games, breaking prior calm.
- Stomp and profanity targeted refs after Jayden Quaintance was knocked to floor.
- Pope limits referee confrontations but will escalate to protect injured players.
Relative to the past, the home sideline at Rupp Arena has been a calm place recently.
That serenity was shattered last week, when the typically cool and collected Mark Pope got stomping mad and swore a blue streak at any referee within shouting distance.
Pope’s projected NBA lottery pick, Jayden Quaintance, had just been mauled to the floor on the other end of the Rupp court, and as play continued — his team already struggling against Missouri in the basketball game itself — Pope let everyone within earshot have it.
Tired of the verbal abuse and accompanying histrionics, referee Rob Rorke hit Pope with a technical foul. It was his first as Kentucky’s head coach. It took him 51 games to earn it.
Pope’s protests didn’t end there. He spent the ensuing free throws and the next couple of possessions quickly pacing back and forth on the sideline, adding in the occasional stomp. At one point, official Doug Shows came over to see what all the fuss was about. Fellow veteran ref Pat Adams made his way to the UK sideline, too. When Pope turned his back on Adams without a word, the official responded with a comical shrug of the shoulders and headed the other way.
The stomp that preceded Pope’s technical was audible on the TV broadcast. And it didn’t take a professional lip-reader to decipher the words that were coming out of his mouth. Those words haven’t often been used from the UK bench in the direction of officials over the past year or so.
Pope made it through his first season as Kentucky’s head coach — as stressful a position as there is in college sports — without getting a technical foul. And he rarely got close.
UK assistant coach Cody Fueger, who has been on Pope’s staff for all 11 of his years as a head coach, thought back on the 2024-25 season and the run-ins his boss had with referees. The closest Pope got to a T, according to Fueger, was during Kentucky’s loss at Alabama, when Terry Oglesby took a tongue-lashing from the Wildcats head coach and then followed him down the sideline in Coleman Coliseum after Pope had walked away. Cooler heads prevailed that day.
“But Terry’s given him one in the past,” Fueger pointed out, referencing the time Oglesby T’d up Pope during a game at Kansas, back when he was BYU’s head coach.
The single instances are easy to recall, because there haven’t been many of them.
Pope has spoken several times since taking the UK job of his admiration for referees and the job they do. He doesn’t often argue — in comparison to his colleagues, at least — and almost never curses in their direction.
For a man in his position, that’s a rarity.
UK basketball coaches vs. the refs
Since Adolph Rupp stepped down in 1972, the Wildcats have been led by seven different head coaches. Of those seven, it took Pope the longest to get his first technical foul. And many of his predecessors got it out of the way quickly.
Joe B. Hall, who replaced Rupp, picked up his first one in his fourth game on the job.
When North Carolina’s eventual 78-70 victory over the Cats in Freedom Hall got rough toward the end, Hall was T’d up twice — it took three to earn a coach an ejection in those days — both of the technicals resulting from what the UK coach thought were missed calls.
The officiating that day “wasn’t on the highest order” — according to the Lexington Herald’s report from the game — and the Cats fell to 1-3 on the season, an awful start to Hall’s first year.
Eddie Sutton followed Hall in 1985, and he didn’t waste much time either.
Sutton was called for a technical foul in game six of his first season. The Cats went to Allen Fieldhouse with a 5-0 record, but Kansas jumped out to a 5-0 lead early, and when UK’s Kenny Walker was called for a foul on 7-foot-1 center Greg Dreiling, the Wildcats’ coach — thinking the call should have gone the other way — charged several feet onto the court before being restrained by an assistant.
“A bad call,” Sutton said afterward. “He knocked Walker to the floor. You always expect you won’t get the benefit of the calls on the road. But, listen, the officials didn’t beat us. A good Kansas team did.”
The Jayhawks defeated the Wildcats 83-66 that day. UK found itself in a 14-1 hole after Sutton’s technical.
Next up: Rick Pitino. No surprise that it didn’t take him long to get T’d up.
The then-37-year-old head coach — in charge of a program mired in NCAA sanctions from the Sutton era — earned his first technical in his fourth game with the Wildcats, a 111-75 win over Tennessee Tech in Rupp Arena.
With 14 minutes left and his team leading by 18 points, Pitino was sanctioned for arguing when UK point guard Sean Woods didn’t draw a foul call on a shot attempt. One theory back then said the first-year coach might have been simply looking to fire up his team, which was on the wrong end of an 8-2 run at the time.
“The refereeing was fine,” Pitino said. “If we had lost, it would have been bad.”
A few minutes later, Tennessee Tech coach Frank Harrell was hit with a T for being outside the coaching box.
“I said, ‘Look at Coach Pitino. He’s at halfcourt,’” Harrell protested afterward. “I wasn’t nearly as far out as Coach Pitino on that same exact play. That’s the way life is at Rupp Arena. There are 20,000 referees in the stands.”
Three days after that, Kansas beat Kentucky 150-95, and Pitino earned two T’s in that one. That was three technicals in five games for the future Hall of Famer.
“For all of you for all the future, I don’t comment on officiating,” Pitino told reporters after the 55-point loss. “If you’d like to comment — which you very rarely do — you comment on it. But don’t ask me about officiating because I will not say a negative nor positive word.”
Pitino’s replacement was generally more mild-mannered — that’s not saying much — and it took Tubby Smith 43 games before he was whistled for his first technical foul. It came in game four of his second season.
Smith earned the call with 5:30 remaining in UK’s 64-52 win over Colorado in the Puerto Rico Shootout. “It’s disappointing,” he said, sheepishly, after the game. “You never want to get a technical. I apologize.”
According to Herald-Leader beat writer Jerry Tipton’s report from that game, Smith had a legitimate complaint. The technical came after his son, backup point guard Saul Smith, was knocked to the floor while battling for a rebound.
“It was getting a little physical,” the UK coach said. “And I wanted to make sure, ‘Hey, watch all the pushing going on.’ That’s all. All I said was, ‘Who’s supposed to be watching that?’”
According to a database on Jon Scott’s invaluable UK basketball history website, Smith received seven technical fouls during his 10 seasons as Kentucky’s coach. The man who followed him, Billy Gillispie, also got seven technical fouls. He coached for only two seasons.
Gillispie’s first one came in his ninth game in charge. Shows was the referee who hit the new UK coach with a T in the Cats’ 83-69 loss to Houston, a defeat that dropped Kentucky to 4-5 on the season. (Adams, who was on the floor for Pope’s first T last week, also called that game.)
In this one, Gillispie came onto the floor gesturing for a foul call as Houston’s players swarmed for a loose ball, knocking a couple of Cats to the court in the process. Gillispie got three more technicals that season, including one for taking the ball and refusing to give it back to a referee during the Wildcats’ 93-52 loss at Vanderbilt.
There was a lot to be upset about in those days.
From Calipari to Pope
Until Pope arrived, his predecessor held the modern-day record for most games without a T.
On one hand, that will come as a surprise to anyone who knows anything about John Calipari, who’s as entertaining as they come on the sidelines. On the other, there wasn’t a whole lot for Calipari to complain about in his first season as Kentucky’s coach.
The Cats went 35-3 that year, and Calipari’s first technical at UK didn’t come until his second season, in game 48 of his tenure. There shouldn’t have been much to complain about that day either — Kentucky beat Mississippi Valley State 85-60 — but Calipari found something.
His first technical came with 6:44 left in the game after a no-call on a baseline drive by UK that Calipari clearly thought deserved a whistle. The second one came 18 seconds after that, when referee Mike Stuart hit Calipari with a T from across the court. The UK coach had been staring down Stuart, imploring him to walk over for a conversation.
“Are you going to make me scream or come over here like a man?” Calipari yelled from the UK sideline before Stuart ejected him from the game.
“That’s the first time I’ve been thrown out of a game, college or pro,” Calipari said afterward.
That wasn’t true. He had been thrown out of a game in 1996, his final season with UMass.
“I didn’t say two words to those guys,” Calipari said of his first two UK technicals.
That wasn’t true either, according to those who were courtside.
Ah, well.
“I took my coat off, put my feet up, had a little drink of water and said, ‘This ain’t so bad,’” Calipari crowed of the final six minutes and change.
It was the first time a Kentucky coach had been ejected since Pitino was run from his final home game as UK’s coach in 1997. Calipari was tossed four more times while in charge of the Wildcats.
Don’t expect Pope to follow the same path as his mentor or his predecessor.
While Pitino and Calipari so often seemed on the verge of temporary sideline insanity, Pope’s theatrics during the Missouri game served as a reminder of his typically stoic demeanor.
But there are some things that can wind him up. In an interview with the Herald-Leader last season, Fueger confirmed that his boss had never been ejected from a game in his head coaching career. What gets his ire up the most?
“Protecting our players,” he said. “If someone’s hurting our guys, that’s when all gloves are coming off. And like, ‘Let’s go. You gotta control this thing. Because if one of my guys gets hurt …’ And that’s what it should be.”
And that’s what it was in that Missouri game.
Pope started his stomping and swearing when Quaintance — in just his fourth game back from major knee surgery — was swarmed by Missouri players and sent to the Rupp Arena court. No foul was called. And Pope was livid.
Kentucky’s coach didn’t let up after Rorke hit him with that technical foul, to the point that some around the UK bench area thought he was going to earn a second one and his first career ejection. It didn’t come to that. The streak continues.
“He tries not to let the refs affect him,” Fueger said. “And you watch every other coach, and they’re just yelling at the officials the whole time. And those guys sometimes get calls, but he doesn’t want to give power to any of that.”
This story was originally published January 16, 2026 at 6:30 AM.
