‘We were a disaster tonight.’ Why was Kentucky so bad in 25-point loss to Vandy?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Vanderbilt forced turnovers and contested shots, limiting Kentucky to 32% shooting.
- Kentucky lacked physicality and ball movement, recording only eight assists total.
- Loss extends pattern of blowout defeats under Pope and complicates SEC resume.
With 10:14 left in Tuesday night’s game, Vanderbilt’s Devin McGlockton sank the second of two free throws, and it was Kentucky’s turn to inbound the ball.
At first, no one touched it. After swishing through the net, the ball bounced once on the Memorial Gymnasium court. Then it bounced again. And then UK center Malachi Moreno lunged to grab it.
As Moreno took the ball out of bounds, Otega Oweh waved him down, trying to get his attention. Oweh, standing on the court, put two hands up. Moreno, standing on the baseline, tossed him the ball.
That, folks, is an inbound pass.
Oweh, who was apparently trying to tell Moreno that he wanted to throw the ball in, went ahead and did just that. The senior guard walked that live ball right back out of bounds. As he stepped across the baseline and passed it back in to Moreno, the nearest referee blew his whistle.
That, folks, is a turnover.
Not that it mattered much by that time. McGlockton’s free throw had given Vandy a 26-point lead.
Moreno looked confused. Oweh looked dejected. There were plenty of both feelings to go around all night long.
“Listen, we were a disaster tonight,” Mark Pope said after it was all finished.
On a night filled with misses, Kentucky’s coach was right on target with that assessment.
No. 18 Vanderbilt defeated the Wildcats 80-55, snapping UK’s SEC-best five-game winning streak and dealing Pope’s team yet another disheartening loss in a season filled with them.
The Commodores took their first double-digit lead before the second TV timeout of the first half. They led by 20 points at halftime and upped that margin to as many as 28 in the second half. The Cats trailed by double digits for the final 30 minutes of the game and never got closer than 17 after halftime.
“It’ll never be acceptable,” Pope said immediately after his “disaster” comment. “We’re also a good team, and we’ll take all the lessons that we need to take from this game, and we’ll be better and more prepared for it.
“That’s the only choice we have. So we’ll respond in a great way. That’s what we do.”
That’s not what they did Tuesday night.
Vanderbilt had Kentucky’s number from the opening tip. The Dores jumped out to a 7-0 lead in the first three minutes. UK missed its first nine shots from the field.
The Cats didn’t get their first bucket until nearly five minutes had run off the clock, and they didn’t get their second until more than seven minutes had passed. It took 11 minutes and 58 seconds for someone in blue other than Denzel Aberdeen to make a shot from the field.
By the time Moreno hit that shot, UK had gone 3 for 20 from the floor and fallen behind 26-10.
“I thought our defensive game plan was really good today,” McGlockton said. “I feel like we came out of the gate aggressive and physical. And they had trouble scoring over our length today.”
No argument there.
“They played a great game,” Pope said. “They came out with a ton of fire and energy and intensity. … They came out and just played with a ton of fight — put us on our heels right away — and we never responded.”
To everyone’s point, the Cats struggled to find open looks from the get-go Tuesday night. Many of those early misses were contested. Vandy gave Kentucky’s players little space to operate on or off the ball.
UK had four assists in the first half and four assists in the second half. The eight total assists tied a Pope-era low. The Wildcats were 19 for 59 from the floor — the 32.2% shooting was the third-worst rate in 57 games so far under Pope — and they never seemed to be on the same page.
Across its five-game winning streak, Kentucky had looked more cohesive. The ball was moving, the Cats themselves were moving. They worked screens to their advantage. They worked together to earn mismatches. They were rotating opposing defenses into oblivion and finishing them off once the shots opened up. Nothing much opened up in Nashville on this night.
“They do a good job of reading in the dribble handoff actions. And I thought we did a good job of pushing them out in those actions,” Vandy coach Mark Byington said. “The second half, they kind of went to baseline staggers and then high ball screens. That got us a little bit. But the biggest thing was not having to over-help.”
Kentucky’s previous opponents found trouble as they tried to match the Cats’ offensive actions, often ending up out of position and giving up prime scoring opportunities as a result. Vanderbilt’s defense — one of the highest-rated in the country — didn’t let that happen. The Commodores kept Kentucky’s drivers in front of them and challenged shots at the rim.
Something else McGlockton said afterward raised eyebrows. “We thought we’d just be physical with them. That was our main goal. On the rebounding, on the ball. The coaches told us that was one of their weaknesses, and we could exploit that. And that’s what we did.”
It wasn’t a boast. It was simply a fact.
Again, no arguments from the other side.
A lack of physicality from his Cats?
“Well, it was a massive weakness for us tonight. For sure,” Pope agreed. “And some of it just comes with mentality and commitment. And that’s an area where we’ve struggled a little bit and where we have to continue to develop better answers.”
Kentucky had no answers for Vanderbilt on Tuesday night.
Oweh led the Cats with 20 points, but he missed his first six shots from the field, and his team was down 29-12 before he managed his first bucket. Aberdeen added 15 points, but he was 6 for 15 from the floor. No other UK player scored more than five points. No other Wildcat made more than one shot from the field.
This was a golden opportunity squandered for Kentucky.
Vandy was playing without one of its best players. Duke Miles — the team’s leading second-leading scorer and the SEC’s leader in steals — was ruled out just before tipoff with a knee injury.
The Commodores’ campus had been ravaged by the winter storm that unleashed chaos on much of the country over the weekend. There were trees down everywhere. In-person classes Tuesday were canceled. Byington lost power in his home and had to sleep in his office Monday night. He figured he’d be sleeping there again after this victory.
Whether it was a result of the weather or simply business as usual in Memorial Gym, the place was overrun by Kentucky fans. Loud “Go Big Blue!” chants greeted the Cats before tipoff. What could have been a rowdy home atmosphere for a Vandy team enjoying one of its best seasons in years was something else entirely. A neutral-site crowd, at best, for the Commodores.
But the official record would’ve shown a major road victory for the Cats if they could’ve pulled this one out, a line on an NCAA Tournament résumé that would have been impossible to overlook.
Instead, it turned into one more double-digit deficit in the first half. In 14 games against high-major competition so far, Pope’s team has led just twice at halftime. “It’s obviously an area of concern for us,” he said. “... We got punched in the mouth pretty good, and we just didn’t respond at all in this game.”
Unlike poor starts of the past — UK has rebounded from plenty of those this season — this one just kept sputtering out of the Cats’ control. Instead of a comeback, the second half was filled with slumped shoulders and defeated expressions.
This was the 209th meeting in a series that dates back to 1912, and Vandy’s lopsided victory marked only the third time the Commodores have defeated Kentucky by more than 20 points.
It was just the 15th time in the past 75 years that a UK basketball team has been beaten by 25 points or more by anyone. It was the third time in less than a year that one of Pope’s teams had to suffer through that indignity.
There was the 99-70 loss to Alabama in the SEC Tournament last season. And there was the 94-59 loss to Gonzaga last month. Both of those games were played in Nashville, too.
And up next is John Calipari and the Arkansas Razorbacks, the highest-ranked team in the SEC and a group that beat this same Vanderbilt squad by 25 points just last week. That game happens Saturday in Fayetteville, and there won’t be much blue that gets into Bud Walton.
“This was a disastrous effort from our team in both halves tonight. And it is exactly what it is,” Pope said. “And so we have to pick up the pieces and be better. We’ve done that before. We’ve been here before. We ran off five straight in the SEC. We had the longest winning streak in the league coming into this game, after having some tough, tough games before.
“So we know we can do it. We got to find some way to avoid this disastrous (showing) tonight. But the only thing we can do now is move forward and get better.”
