‘This is our team’: In the presence of greatness, Mark Pope’s Wildcats delivered
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- 1996 champions reunited at Rupp as Pope led ’26 Wildcats to a win.
- Kentucky overcame a 14-point halftime deficit to win 74-71.
- Otega Oweh and Collin Chandler made the clutch plays to seal it.
Hours before tipoff Saturday, the current Kentucky Wildcats received a visit from greatness.
The Cats were preparing to face Tennessee in Rupp Arena, but this night wasn’t supposed to be all about them.
This was the night that members of UK’s 1996 national championship team — one of the greatest squads in college basketball history — would reunite in Rupp.
This was the night that — for the first time since that magical season ended — these Cats would wear the denim jerseys that those Cats wore when they cut down the nets 30 years ago.
And Mark Pope — a co-captain of that ’96 team and the head coach of this ’26 squad — brought some of his old friends in a little early to speak to the new generation.
UK great Derek Anderson was one of the players who shared some wisdom.
“We had a passion for beating you bad,” he said of his team. “And I told them, ‘You have to have a mindset for that, when you put that Kentucky jersey on.’ People want to beat us. … People don’t like us. Well, we don’t like you either. Let’s go play basketball, and see who’s better. And we went out and proved that.”
No doubt about that. Those Cats earned bragging rights for life with the way they decimated pretty much everybody in their path. They outscored the competition by an average of 22.0 points per game. They beat quality opponents by much worse than that on their best nights and still defeated good teams by double digits on their bad ones.
And with one of their own now coaching Kentucky, they’ve all been paying a little bit more attention than usual these past couple of years.
This season hadn’t gotten off to the best of starts. There have been blowout losses, especially in the beginning, but Anderson said before Saturday’s game against Tennessee that he was starting to see this bunch play with more passion.
“If you play with passion, you can beat anybody,” he said. “And when you play with that mindset, you can start dominating teams.”
That’s what “the Untouchables” did on a nightly basis back in 1996.
These Wildcats go about things a little differently. And with the national champions of three decades ago watching from their seats a few rows behind the UK bench, the new guys gave them an up-close look at what Kentucky basketball in 2026 looks like.
The old guys recognized the final scene: a Wildcats’ victory and a Rupp crowd in a frenzy. “Go Big Blue!” chants in the second half. “C-A-T-S!” chants in the concourse on the way to the parking lot. Everything else was different.
But that final score — Kentucky 74, Tennessee 71 — was all that mattered.
“I’m proud of our guys, man,” Pope said of his team afterward, with several ’96 teammates surrounding him on the postgame podium. “... And I talked to ’em right before. I said, ‘Guys, I know all this is going on, but this is not about 30 years ago. This is not about denim. This is not about anything except for the story that you guys are writing right now.’ Because the story that these guys are writing right now is awesome. It’s their story. And if you’re not enjoying it — if you’re not on this ride with us — I feel bad for you, because it just is what it is, man.
“It might not be the normal way we do things here at Kentucky. But it’s pretty great.”
Things were not looking great at halftime. The Wildcats were down 14 points.
Thirty years ago, such a score after 20 minutes would have been unfathomable.
But on Saturday night?
“It was good,” UK star Otega Oweh said of the mood at halftime. “Because we’ve been here. So we know we can’t come into the locker room like, all down, depressed, or too rattled. Obviously, we had some adjustments that we had to do. And we did them. And that’s what our halftime looks like. It’s more just figuring out, you know, how we can fix it.”
For the fourth time in 24 days, Kentucky was down double digits at halftime. The Cats have now come back to win three of those games. They did it to LSU last month, beating the Tigers at the buzzer in Baton Rouge. They did it to Tennessee three days after that, beating the Vols in Thompson-Boling Arena to leave that sellout crowd in stunned silence.
On Saturday night, they gave their own fans — and some of the most famous players in the program’s history — a taste of their comeback capabilities.
“I think just in life, in general — but in games, in basketball, in other things as a competitor — you just have to find ways to win,” said UK guard Collin Chandler. “You’re not going to win everything. You’re not going to dominate everything.”
Kentucky came out of the halftime locker room and matched Tennessee’s physicality. By the midway point of the second half, the Vols’ 14-point lead had been cut to 57-53. An Oweh dunk made it 57-55. A few minutes later, UK’s best player drove the baseline and threw up an acrobatic reverse layup while falling to the floor that rattled in and gave the Cats a 61-60 advantage, their first lead since the opening minutes of the game.
Clearly, this team has earned a reputation.
“This is exactly how we thought the game would be, even when we were up (14),” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said afterward. “You knew it was going to settle into coming down to a last-minute play.”
And that’s what happened.
The Volunteers regained the lead after Oweh’s circus shot, and it went back and forth a few times from there. With under a minute left, the Cats had the ball, down one. Pope drew up one play in the timeout huddle. And he changed it as that huddle broke.
The new play called for Oweh to get the ball on the wing. He worked around a screen set by Malachi Moreno to do just that. Oweh had Bishop Boswell defending him at first, but he managed to work a switch so that Felix Okpara — at 6-11, 243 pounds and not nearly as quick as Boswell — was on him instead.
Okpara stayed with Oweh as he drove the left side, but the UK guard turned on a dime before hitting the baseline. At the moment he stepped into the paint, all five Tennessee players were looking right at him, the SEC preseason player of the year demanding every defender’s attention.
Oweh, who was under the basket at this point, jumped in the air and threw a perfect pass to Chandler on the wing. Nothing but net. Kentucky 71. Tennessee 69. Rupp Arena going mad.
The Vols dribbled it downcourt and called a timeout with 27.4 seconds left. Teammates flocked toward Chandler. Oweh met up with him as they got closer to the huddle.
Pope picked up the story from there.
“One of my favorite moments of the game was — after he banged that 3, which was just cold, man — we walked in the huddle, and Otega grabbed him and went eye-to-eye with him,” Pope said. “And he was like, ‘You are a cold’ … and then there were a lot of other words.”
A cold what? Chandler wouldn’t say what Oweh had told him either.
“Just a teammate hyping you up,” he said with a grin.
Oweh had no qualms repeating the line.
“I said, ‘You a bad motherf*****, boy. You cold, bro.’ Because that’s just like the third, fourth — I don’t even know how many times — he’s done something clutch. So I just told him, ‘You bad.’”
Chandler volunteered to throw the inbounds pass that led to Moreno’s buzzer-beater in the LSU game. He came up with the steal that led to Oweh’s big bucket to cap the comeback in Knoxville. He hit the dagger shot to clinch Kentucky’s win at Arkansas a week earlier. There were other big plays and big shots at big moments. Perhaps none bigger than this one.
UK played out those final seconds and secured a series sweep of its biggest SEC rival.
When the buzzer sounded — and Rupp erupted one more time — those players from the 1996 squad were high-fiving each other behind the Kentucky bench. When the postgame handshakes were over and Pope circled back to hit the tunnel to the UK locker room, they were waiting.
Cameron Mills was the first one there. Then Anderson joined in. And then, one by one, the Untouchables mobbed their friend, celebrating on the sideline like it was 1996 all over again.
Those guys did it their way back in the day. These Cats have their own way of doing things now.
And as soon as that ball was tipped Saturday night, everything about the hours leading up to it — all of that greatness that this team had been hearing about — receded to the background.
“We’re grateful for the legacy of Kentucky, the history of it, and everything like that,” Chandler said. “But tonight was about us. It was about the team that was wearing these uniforms and finding a way to get it done and representing the history of Kentucky. And that was what we focused on. All the noise is great — and we love it, because that’s what comes with being at Kentucky — but this is our team. We’re writing a story. And it’s special.”
This story was originally published February 8, 2026 at 2:33 AM.
