Did Kentucky make massive NIL offer to Michigan star? Mark Pope isn’t answering

Mark Pope won’t coach his Kentucky basketball team in the NCAA Tournament until early Friday afternoon.

But already this week he’s been in the midst of March Madness drama.

Yaxel Lendeborg, the Michigan star whose Wolverines are the No. 1 seed in the Midwest Region — where Kentucky meets Santa Clara on Friday at 12:15 p.m. ET in St. Louis — made headlines this week when he told The Associated Press he’d received an offer last offseason worth between $7 million and $9 million to join the Cats.

Lendeborg, then a UAB transfer, chose to play for Michigan, but he told the AP he could have made three times more money at Kentucky.

“They started the number with $7 (million) to $9 (million),” Lendeborg told the AP. “They were pretty much going off on the route like we’ll pay him anything to get here.”

Asked Thursday about that claim, Pope didn’t flatly deny it.

But without directly refuting the AP or Lendeborg, the UK coach spoke in general terms during his NCAA Tournament news conference about accuracy in reporting on name, image and likeness offers among other subjects.

Asked specifically about a $7 million to $9 million offer, Pope alluded to the “craziness swirling around” as part of coaching the Kentucky program.

“Mitch (Barnhart, UK athletic director) walked in my office two days ago,” Pope said. “Right now we are so dug in (on tournament prep) that I am not really spending a lot of time on reporting, and had a couple stories where I was dumbfounded and befuddled by what was out there and what was being said and reported. I was like, ‘That’s the same type of stuff that was said the last week and the week before and the week before.’”

Though Kentucky is believed to have one of the most expensive rosters in college basketball, with an NIL price tag the Herald-Leader reported to be nearly $22 million, there has been no verified report that the Wildcats made an offer as large as $7 million to a single player.

The AP story did not specify whether it had corroborated Lendeborg’s statements with any other source. And while Pope implied the number was inaccurate, he declined to address it directly when he was asked twice about the specific financial range.

“I know that you guys have to come out here with a headline. I am not going to give it to you,” Pope said. “But I would appreciate it if it was some segment of the media that is like, let’s actually search for like — I don’t know. I am trying not to make a commentary on it. This is all part of the distraction that my team is not a part of. We will try and embrace the circus nature of this and count on some responsible media member somewhere to actually kind of dig in and find out or just be responsible reporting.”