Mark Pope makes it official, adds former staffer to help build Kentucky’s roster
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Pope hires Keegan Brown as director to aid roster and transfer strategy.
- Brown will integrate analytics, scouting and coordinate info with agents.
- Pope says Brown will model salary, win-share and roster scenarios 24/7.
Mark Pope has made his hire for a new Kentucky men’s basketball position designed to help the Cats evaluate talent for future rosters.
He’ll be reuniting with a familiar face.
Keegan Brown was officially announced as UK’s director of roster management Thursday. He’s joining the program immediately, and one of his first major tasks will be helping the coaching staff pinpoint top targets in the transfer portal for the 2026-27 season.
According to UK’s release announcing the hire, Brown will be “involved with roster construction and player acquisition strategy, including transfer portal evaluation and acquisition strategy, roster planning, scholarship allocation and resource optimization.” He’ll also work in “player personnel scouting, evaluation and decision support.”
Brown will “utilize the integration of analytics into recruiting and roster decisions, along with coordinating information across staff, agents and key external relationships,” according to the release.
“I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to join a historic program like Kentucky basketball,” Brown said in the release. “The tradition, expectations, and standard here are unmatched, and I’m excited to get to work alongside Coach Pope and the staff to build a roster that reflects that level.”
Brown had been the subject of speculation since UK posted a job listing for a “player development” position with the men’s basketball program earlier this month. He previously served on Pope’s staff at BYU — his final title there was director of player personnel — and Brown was previously viewed as a potential addition to the Kentucky staff when Pope was hired as head coach in April 2024.
That never came to fruition, however, and Brown eventually joined the Wisconsin Herd — the Milwaukee Bucks’ G League affiliate — as video coordinator before the 2024-25 season, and he remained in that position this season.
Brown was with Pope at BYU from 2019-24, serving under the head coach for all five of his seasons with the Cougars. He was celebrated during his time in Provo as an analytics guru who helped shape Pope’s high-octane offensive approach.
The new addition to Kentucky’s staff also aided Pope and the BYU coaches in their search for potential transfer portal additions, and that will be part of his job in Lexington.
In his final press conference before the start of the SEC Tournament, Pope as asked by the Herald-Leader to expound on his vision for the role that Brown has been hired to fill.
“Somebody that can model for us 24/7. That can do salary cap models, that can do win-share models, that can do comparison research, in terms of us trying to get as deep into the details of managing this spring’s roster construction as we can,” Pope said. “It’s really important to have somebody that, literally — 24 hours a day, seven days a week — is going to be just war gaming and modeling over and over and over again. And so we’re excited about filling that position. It’s going to really help us, as a staff, collect information.”
Pope also made it clear then that he wanted to fill the position as soon as possible. “I’d like to have it in place today,” he said, acknowledging that he couldn’t legally do that, since the job posting was still open at the time.
He moved quickly to fill that spot, and Brown will now have a little bit of lead time before the transfer portal officially opens April 7, the day after the national championship game. The portal will remain open for new entrants until April 21, though any player who enters between those two dates will be eligible to transfer to a new school without penalty at any time this spring or summer.
Kentucky is expected to make a major splash in the portal again this year.
While leading scorers Otega Oweh and Denzel Aberdeen are both seniors, and projected NBA lottery pick Jayden Quaintance is expected to enter the 2026 draft, 11 other players from Kentucky’s 2025-26 roster have eligibility beyond this season.
That includes players who have been regular starters this season — such as Collin Chandler, Mouhamed Dioubate, Andrija Jelavic, Malachi Moreno and Kam Williams — as well as Brandon Garrison, Jasper Johnson, Jaland Lowe and Trent Noah, plus Braydon Hawthorne and Reece Potter, two players who sat out this season as redshirts.
Not everyone in that group is expected to return to Lexington, though, and Pope could lose several of his current players to the transfer portal. With most of the top high school recruits from the 2026 class already committed elsewhere — and UK with zero commitments from that pool of talent — Pope will be targeting multiple game-changing players in the portal this spring.
Brown is expected to play a major role in that search.
“Keegan Brown is an outstanding addition to our program,” Pope said in the news release. “He brings a unique blend of organization, analytics and feel for the game that’s critical to any organization, along with a deep understanding of what it takes to build a roster that can compete at the highest level. In today’s game, roster management is everything, and Keegan is as good as it gets in that space. We’re excited to have him in Lexington and confident he’ll make an immediate impact on our success.”
This isn’t necessarily the “general manager” position that is becoming more common in college basketball — and something that a vocal segment of the Kentucky fan base has been clamoring for — but Brown will be a key voice in the Cats’ roster-building efforts. Pope has also said that he will be looking at other new positions to bolster the program’s operation behind the scenes.
“This is not the final piece that we’ll add,” he said before the SEC Tournament.
This story was originally published March 26, 2026 at 10:46 AM.
