The questions Kentucky fans should be asking as Pope enters a pivotal offseason
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Pope must reset roster and finances to field a competitive 2026-27 team.
- Staff turnover and new hires will reshape Kentucky’s coaching and ops.
- Recruiting and portal hits will determine whether fan confidence returns.
The third Kentucky basketball offseason of the Mark Pope era will look and feel a lot different from the first two.
Two years ago, Pope was riding a wave of momentum from his Rupp Arena reintroduction to the UK fans, who were happy with his early transfer portal success and refreshed by a coaching change to move beyond the malaise of the last few years of John Calipari’s tenure.
Last year, there were some misses in the portal, but Pope ultimately put together what looked to be a roster capable of contending at the highest level, while coming off a season in which he overachieved (by most accounts) amid difficult circumstances.
This offseason begins with a feeling of disappointment over how Year 2 went (on and off the court), zero recruits from the high school ranks and a whole lot of questions about the future of the program.
Pope has to win in Year 3 to fend off the doubters. First, he’ll have to make the right moves this offseason to ensure that the 2026-27 campaign can be a successful one.
These are the most important questions as Pope dives into the offseason.
Who’s coming back for Kentucky?
The biggest question of every UK basketball offseason is who will be back from the season that just ended. And that question might be more difficult to answer right now than it’s ever been.
With departing seniors Otega Oweh and Denzel Aberdeen out of the equation — and Jayden Quaintance a near-certainty to enter the 2026 NBA draft — Kentucky still has 11 players with remaining eligibility and a realistic path to return to the Cats for next season.
There hasn’t been a UK basketball offseason with this much roster uncertainty in memory, since ample turnover was expected in every year of the Calipari era and rosters were more generally stable in the sport before he arrived in Lexington.
Who will Pope bring back for Year 3? Not all 11 of these guys.
Beyond the question of who fits from a chemistry and playing style standpoint, the financials simply won’t align to allow all 11 to return. Kentucky’s payroll for next season is not expected to reach the level of this past season, and even with Oweh, Aberdeen and Quaintance off the books, Pope won’t be able to assure everyone gets compensated at market value while also leaving enough resources to get some game-changing players from outside the program.
The UK coach implied as much during his final radio show of the season Monday night.
“Everything is dependent on how it fits into a cap,” Pope said, while later adding that he will have the necessary resources at his disposal to build a national title contender.
So, who stays?
It starts with Collin Chandler and Malachi Moreno, a couple of starters with multiple seasons of remaining eligibility. Both seem set on running it back. Pope included Andrija Jelavic, who was also in the starting five by the end of the season, with those two in his postgame comments Sunday.
“Those guys have gained some great experience, and they’re going to get better and better and better,” Pope said. “We’ll start there and kind of build out from there.”
If he had the comment back, Pope would likely have thrown Kam Williams into that group. Williams, who also started for this team, has made it clear that he’d like to return to Kentucky, and the chatter behind the scenes says that feeling is mutual on UK’s end.
Braydon Hawthorne (a sky-high-upside wing) and Reece Potter (an intriguing depth player in the frontcourt) are expected to return after redshirting this season.
Brandon Garrison, who was relegated to the backup big spot behind Moreno, was, surprisingly, as adamant as anyone in the postgame locker room following the loss to Iowa State on Sunday that he’d like to return to UK next season, even though that would likely mean spending his senior year as a backup to Moreno once again.
That would be seven returnees, and while it’s far from a guarantee that all seven will be back — Garrison and Jelavic, especially, will be two to watch — returning the bulk of that core would be a solid foundation of continuity, something that Pope has stressed the importance of.
This isn’t to say some others won’t be back, too.
Trent Noah has deep Kentucky ties, and Pope has given him opportunities in big games. Mouhamed Dioubate was integral to some of UK’s biggest moments this past season and would have a place in the 2026-27 rotation.
Jaland Lowe is clearly talented, but his spot might be contingent on Pope’s playing style direction, and he’d be able to fetch a higher NIL figure elsewhere if he’s not at the center of Kentucky’s plans moving forward.
Jasper Johnson is widely expected to enter the transfer portal when it opens April 7.
What’s going on with UK’s staff?
The UK sideline likely won’t look the same in Year 3.
Pope had to hire an entirely new coaching staff when he arrived at Kentucky, and all five assistants — Alvin Brooks III, Mark Fox, Cody Fueger, Jason Hart and Mikhail McLean — stayed on for Year 2.
McLean, however, is the only assistant who is signed beyond this season, and there has been speculation for weeks that Pope could lose multiple members of his staff this spring, either to head coaching jobs or other high-profile assistant positions.
The first move happened Tuesday night with the development that Hart, who works primarily with the team’s guards and was the lead recruiter on No. 1 prospect Tyran Stokes, will depart to become the associate head coach at SMU, reuniting with Andy Enfield, who had Hart on staff at Southern Cal for eight seasons.
Now it will just be a matter of how many assistant spots Pope will need to fill this offseason. As the national coaching carousel ramps up in the coming days and weeks, expect to hear more chatter about the possible departure of UK staff members.
Pope will also be adding to his operation.
UK’s posting for a “player development” position — a role that will include some GM-like tasks — has closed, and a new hire for that could be announced soon. Pope told the Herald-Leader late in the season that he would like to have that filled as quickly as possible, and former BYU staffer Keegan Brown is expected to be officially named to the role.
Brown, who worked for Pope in all four of his seasons at BYU, has been the video coordinator for the Wisconsin Herd — the Milwaukee Bucks’ G League affiliate — for the past two seasons.
It’s also possible that Kentucky will be adding a second behind-the-scenes position this offseason that deals with more of the financial side of the roster-building efforts moving forward. Pope has not yet publicly addressed any details regarding such a position, but he has said the “player development” job will not be the only new one this offseason.
Can Mark Pope get recruits?
The Cats are coming off a 22-14 season that fell well short of expectations, but the angst in certain (vocal) corners of the fan base probably wouldn’t be nearly as high if Pope had secured some five-star recruits from the 2026 high school class along the way.
He didn’t, and after also missing out on all of the top-level talent from the 2025 class that dominated college basketball this season, fans who closely follow recruiting — and that’s a sizable portion of the UK base — are well beyond antsy.
Pope can’t do a whole lot to rectify the 2026 misses at this point. Nearly all the best players there are spoken for. No. 1 overall recruit Tyran Stokes, a longtime UK target, is still being pursued, and a late commitment to the Cats would boost enthusiasm, but Stokes is a polarizing prospect with a high price tag that might divert resources from elsewhere this offseason.
Hitting on top portal targets this spring would alleviate some of that unease. Pope did that splendidly as soon as he got the job two years ago, but there were a few high-profile whiffs in the early going of the 2025 portal season — first-team All-American Yaxel Lendeborg among them — and the narrative at the end was that Kentucky had to overpay for the players it got.
It might take a few months to materialize, but Pope could go a long way toward settling the doubters if he could secure commitments from one or two high-profile 2027 high school recruits before next season starts. The work on that has already begun, and UK needs to get some results this time.
How will UK play in Year 3?
Kentucky fans liked that Pope was “one of them” from the beginning, but what really sold much of the fan base on its new leader — someone who had zero NCAA Tournament wins when he got the job — was the forward-thinking offensive style that was promised.
Pope delivered on that promise immediately, putting together a roster that worked well within the system he developed at BYU. The result of getting veteran players like Lamont Butler, Koby Brea, Otega Oweh, Jaxson Robinson, Andrew Carr and Amari Williams was a style of ball that delighted the fans and impressed from an analytical standpoint.
Despite starting from scratch fairly late in the roster-building cycle two years ago, Pope’s first UK offense was ranked in the top 10 nationally in offensive efficiency, a rather remarkable feat.
But Pope — and many fans and media members, to be fair — felt that approach might not be the best to thrive in a take-no-prisoners SEC teeming with athleticism and physicality. So the coach pivoted to more length, athleticism and grit in the transfer portal last year in an attempt to combine the two styles.
It didn’t work.
Pope’s contention that things would’ve played out differently with a healthy Jaland Lowe leading the offense can never be confirmed or disproven at this point. What’s indisputable is that Kentucky’s scoring attack in Year 2 was a whole lot harder to watch than the beautiful game Pope put on the court in Year 1. And UK’s defense, while improved, wasn’t the top-10 unit that Kentucky’s coaches visualized in the preseason.
And while the SEC was still the best league in college basketball, it wasn’t nearly as filled with top-tier teams as it had been in Pope’s first season, making the shift in philosophy look like an overcorrection.
So what will Pope do for Year 3?
There’s now a clamor to go back to what helped get him the job in the first place, a fun, ball-moving offensive style that stretches the court, leads to open shots and keeps everyone watching (and playing) on their toes.
Pope acknowledged struggles with getting through to his most recent team, especially early in the season, and he never seemed fully content or comfortable with what was happening out on the court.
He should have the kind of returning roster pieces necessary to run it back with the style that was so fun to watch in his first season, and his first few weeks on the job proved he’s more than capable of finding guys in the portal who can thrive in such a system. It should also be possible to add a little more defense and grit to such a roster without selling out on the necessary skill to keep everything humming offensively.
Who sticks around — and who Kentucky adds over the next few weeks — should tell the story of which direction Pope plans to go for Year 3.
Can Pope weather the storm?
Don’t believe everything you read on social media.
If that were reality, then Pope would’ve been forced out after the Michigan State game in November. Or the Gonzaga game in December. Or at halftime of the LSU game in January. Or as soon as Allen Graves hit that shot to put Santa Clara up 73-70 last week. Or at any of several other points throughout the season that had folks taking to message boards and the circus formerly known as Twitter calling for him to be fired.
Pope has four years left on his contract, and he isn’t going anywhere. He also has plenty of supporters in his corner.
The seats at Rupp Arena were still noticeably more full at the end of this season than toward the end of the Calipari era. The crowd for the finale against Florida was as hot as it had been all season. The fans came earlier than they usually have for recent Senior Day festivities and stayed late to listen to the coach’s show and implore Pope and players for autographs, even after a loss to the Gators.
He has supporters. But the “Pope is not the guy” crowd is real, and it’s loud, and that contingent of fans and online commentators won’t be quieting down any time soon.
Getting some recruits and prominent portal additions this offseason would help Pope’s cause, but he won’t be able to fully win over those detractors without winning some actual basketball games, and he won’t have an opportunity to do that again until November.
In the meantime, he’ll need to traverse an angsty offseason that will be filled with change.
Along with whatever happens to his own roster and staff, Pope will start next season with a new boss. Longtime athletics director Mitch Barnhart — the man who hired him and one of his staunchest supporters — is retiring this summer, and Pope will be answering to someone else during his third season on the job.
As he deals with that transition, he’ll need to hold together the fan base, as well as stay in the good graces of the donor base that will be necessary to allow the program to compete for the best players in the country amid this ever-changing NIL landscape.
Bottom line: Pope needs to win.
Even taking the injuries into account, missing out on the second week of the NCAA Tournament this year was a major disappointment. And it doesn’t align with the best of Kentucky coaches.
Four UK coaches — Joe B. Hall, Rick Pitino, Tubby Smith and Calipari — have won national titles in the modern era. Pitino missed the Elite Eight just once in his six seasons of March Madness eligibility. None of the other three had back-to-back years without a trip to the Sweet 16 until the end of their lengthy tenures.
Pope is aware of this history, and he shares the expectations that fans have for UK’s program. He knows better than anyone that he needs to put a winning product on the floor next season.
He won’t be able to get any more victories on the court until November, but he can do plenty in the meantime to ensure that Year 3 of the Pope era will be one worth celebrating.
