‘There was no panic whatsoever.’ How Kentucky pulled off a stunner at Tennessee
The Cardiac Cats? Not so fast, says Mark Pope.
Kentucky basketball lore features a few teams that earned nicknames along their path to immortality. Some — the Fiddlin’ Five, the Comeback Cats — were national champions. Others — Rupp’s Runts, the Unforgettables — came up short in the end, but they did enough on their way to win the love and respect of the fans who followed the journey.
The fans who have followed this team so far have been subject to a rollercoaster of emotions. And even by the topsy-turvy standards of the first couple of months of this 2025-26 season, the past couple of games have kept those fans on the edge of their seats. If they stayed put, that is.
Kentucky beat No. 24 Tennessee 80-78 in Thompson-Boling Arena on Saturday afternoon, rallying from 17 points down for perhaps the most improbable comeback of the season so far. The top competition for that honor? It had to be what happened three days earlier, when LSU had the Wildcats down 18 points in the second half before UK stormed back to win it on Malachi Moreno’s miracle jump shot at the buzzer.
Those two wins directly followed a 92-68 victory over Mississippi State in which the Wildcats were down double digits in the first half and lost starting point guard Jaland Lowe for the season.
So, Cardiac Cats?
“We have a lot of work to do before we get to carve our name into something historic like that,” Pope said. “But I like this group, man. I’m proud of them. This has not been an easy road.”
No, it hasn’t. And it wasn’t Saturday, when Tennessee jumped out to its first-double digit advantage before the second TV timeout of the afternoon. The Vols were up 20-8 before that whistle finally came. They led Kentucky 41-24 in the final minutes of the period.
Tennessee went into the halftime locker room leading by 11. So, what else is new?
“We actually felt great going into halftime down 11,” Pope said. “It’s the first time we’ve only been down 11 in like a month, right? So it felt like we won the first half, which is weird. But it’s the Kentucky way right now.”
Not the way you want to start if you’re the Wildcats, but when it sets up finishes like these, no one on the postgame podium is complaining at the end.
“I actually thought we got off to a good start today,” sophomore guard Collin Chandler said afterward. “We had a good first half. Tennessee had a little bit of a better half. But, I mean, we’ve been preparing for times like this. We’ve been in times like this this season.
“So there was no panic whatsoever. We knew what we had to do.”
And, by now, their coach knew they had it in them.
“It gives you so much confidence as a group that you can walk in the locker room and nobody’s sideways,” Pope said of the second-half deficits. “Like, ‘Yep, this is what we do. And we’ll come out and win the second half.’ And these guys have proved to do it, man.”
They did it three nights earlier in Baton Rouge, storming back in the second half of that one to pull out a 75-74 win. They earned the lead before halftime of the Mississippi State game four days before that, but the Cats were down by as many as 12 points in the first half of that one.
Last month, they fought back from seven-point halftime deficits to beat Indiana and St. John’s.
A month ago, Pope might have been on edge as he watched his team give up one open 3-pointer after another, turn the ball over inexplicably and fail to box out time and again. Kentucky was guilty on all three counts Saturday afternoon. Pope was feeling OK.
“I’m breathing a little bit more in the first half, because they’ve given me so much confidence about what they do in the second half,” he said.
What they did in the second half of this one won’t soon be forgotten.
Kentucky trailed by 11 at the break and went down 44-31 when Ja’Kobi Gillespie scored a bucket on Tennessee’s first possession of the second half. From there, the Cats slowly whittled away at that deficit.
They got within six by the first TV timeout. They were within four before the second one came. It was a one-possession game — for the first time in seemingly forever — when Otega Oweh hit a 3-pointer to cut Tennessee’s lead to 65-62 with 7:52 left. Oweh, who had only two points at halftime, had missed his first seven shots of the game.
The Cats couldn’t quite get over the hump from there, but they never quit fighting.
Mouhamed Dioubate, relegated to a reserve role in recent days, came off the bench and changed the tone for Kentucky, which lost the offensive rebounding battle 8-1 in the first half but grabbed 13 offensive boards — four of them by Dioubate — after halftime.
Denzel Aberdeen, who picked up his second foul with 17:52 left in the first half — sending him to the bench for a long spell — didn’t leave the floor after halftime until just two seconds remained in the game, and he made big play after big play to keep the Wildcats within striking distance.
A Kentucky team that had eight turnovers in the first half — getting outscored 10-0 on points off turnovers in the period — committed just one after halftime.
Tennessee coach Rick Barnes lamented his team’s poor ball-screen defense after the break. Gillespie agreed with that assessment. The Cats took advantage, finding seams amid UT’s breakdowns and otherwise forcing the Volunteers into so many defensive rotations that good shots eventually opened up. Pope’s team shot 6 for 10 from 3-point range after halftime.
Kentucky still almost ran out of time. But the Cats finally broke through in the nick of it.
After Chandler assisted on a Dioubate jumper — two of UK’s 17 second-chance points in the second half — to cut Tennessee’s lead to 76-75 with 1:46 left, Gillespie hit one of two free throws on the other end.
Oweh drew a foul and went to the line with a chance to tie. But he went 1 of 2, too, and the Vols had the ball back with a 77-76 lead and less than a minute to go.
With 19 seconds remaining on the shot clock, Gillespie — who had 24 points and eight assists on the day — attempted to pass the ball to freshman forward Nate Ament on the wing. Chandler, who had been attached to Ament’s hip since the play began, jumped over an attempted screen to stay with him and then jumped the passing lane.
“I heard the play that they were running,” Chandler said afterward. “They kind of telegraphed it a little bit. So when he came off the screen, I knew I had a lane to go steal it.”
He did. And then he went the other way with it, passing the ball ahead to Oweh, who glided in for the bucket, drawing a foul on Gillespie as the shot dropped to give Kentucky a 78-77 lead.
“You guys saw the obvious,” Barnes said. “You can’t throw the pick-6s, especially late in the game. You can’t turn the ball over like that at any point in time, but in the last four minutes, it’s double trouble when you do that.”
It was the Wildcats’ first lead of the game. There were only 34.3 seconds on the clock.
Oweh missed the and-one free throw, but the Cats weren’t finished with that possession. The ball clanged off the rim, and Dioubate worked around Tennessee’s Jaylen Carey to secure the offensive rebound — his fourth of the half — and keep it in Kentucky’s hands.
It worked its way out to Aberdeen, who worked the shot clock down before he made his move. Dioubate set a screen, and Aberdeen was switched onto Carey — gaining a clear quickness advantage for the UK guard — and he took it from there, shaking up the Tennessee forward near the top of the key, going to his left and hitting a tough jumper to put the Cats up 80-77 with 16 seconds left.
Aberdeen had scored only four points in the first half. He scored 18 after that, and this bucket gave the Cats the cushion they would need in the end. Gillespie was fouled with 2.6 seconds left. He made the first one and intentionally missed the second, but the Vols couldn’t score from there.
The comeback was complete. Kentucky had outscored Tennessee 49-36 in the second half. After it was over, Barnes was recounting all the ways his team had lost. He paused, stared straight ahead for a second or two, and finished the thought.
“We gave up 49 points,” he said. “I’m not gonna say we gave them up. They scored 49 points. So you got to give them credit. I’m disappointed. Everybody’s disappointed, but you gotta give Kentucky credit. Mark kept his guys in there.”
The 49 points were big. But the comeback wouldn’t have happened without Kentucky’s defense down the stretch. Tennessee missed the last five shots it took. The Vols scored only three points in the final four and a half minutes, all of them coming at the line. UK forced three turnovers in that stretch. Those three turnovers led to eight Kentucky points.
“I hope nobody’s missing it,” Pope said of his team’s accomplishments over the past week. “I hope people aren’t missing it. I hope they’re not missing what this group is going through, what this group is trying to endure, what this group is trying to become and what this group is actually doing on the court.”
The “it” Pope was referring to, in this case, is these Cats’ never-say-die mentality, no matter what the scoreboard is telling them. On this day, Barnes didn’t miss it.
“A 17-point lead in today’s world — in the first half — is nothing, if you got a group of guys that stick together and do what they need to do,” said the Tennessee coach.
In a season that, on the whole, has been a disappointment so far, that’s what Pope is most proud of. Yet again, the odds were stacked against his guys. Yet again, Kentucky fans were on edge by the time halftime came around. Yet again, according to Pope, everyone who cared about UK basketball was down in the dumps before the game had reached its halfway point.
“Except for the players in our locker room,” he said. “That’s really special, man. So don’t miss it, because it’s a tribute to these guys.”
Pope will be the first to say that they can’t all go this way. His players will quickly second that. “We got to start off our first halves better,” Aberdeen acknowledged Saturday afternoon.
These Wildcats sure have made it hard on themselves. They aren’t the Untouchables. That was the UK team Pope helped lead to a national championship 30 years ago, a magical season in which the Cats demolished pretty much everyone in their path.
But there’s a lot of season to go for this group. And these Cats have shown that they can come up with something magical, too, just as long as there’s still some time left on the clock.
“If we do this right, then at the end of the day, we’re going to be so grateful that it wasn’t an easy road,” Pope said. “Because it gives them a chance to show what’s inside of them. We have so much work to do — so much along the way — but this has been a fun run by these guys so far.”
This story was originally published January 17, 2026 at 6:06 PM.
