In evaluating Mark Pope’s first season, don’t lose sight of bigger picture
Mark Pope assumed the Kentucky men’s basketball head coaching position five years into what seems likely to go down as the least successful decade in UK’s regal hoops history.
Since the Southeastern Conference formed in 1932-33, Kentucky men’s hoops has won at least three SEC regular season championships in every decade and has won five or more league titles in six different decades.
So far in the 2020s, however, the Wildcats are taking a ziggy in SEC regular season crowns claimed.
Since the SEC men’s hoops tournament resumed in 1979, Kentucky has won at least three tourney titles in every full decade since.
Yet not only has Kentucky yet to cut down the nets at the SEC Tournament in the 2020s, the Wildcats have not even won two tourney contests in a single league tournament this decade.
In the NCAA Tournament, UK has one solitary victory — a 61-53 win over Providence in the 2023 round of 64 — to show for all the Big Dances held in the 2020s.
This walk through Kentucky men’s hoops recent run of relative ordinariness should serve as a neutralizer to any frustration that has formed as Pope’s injury-plagued Wildcats have gone 7-7 in their first 14 SEC games.
Heading into Wednesday night’s contest at SEC newcomer Oklahoma, Kentucky stands 18-9 overall, and seems all but assured of its fourth double-digits loss season of the 2020s.
For a fan base yearning to see UK reclaim its status among the programs at the peak of the men’s college hoops hierarchy, the risk is that the accumulated frustration carried over from the previous disappointments of the 2020s obscures the bigger picture of what has been accomplished in year one of the Pope era.
The baseline of this Kentucky season is that Pope inherited zero returning scholarship players when he took the UK job. So it is encouraging that Pope and his staff were able to put together on the fly a team that, when healthy, has been a cohesive fit for UK’s new system and is a team in which the sum exceeds the parts.
As much as Wildcats backers are desperate to see Kentucky get back to winning championships and reaching Final Fours, the realistic expectations for Pope’s first season were four:
1. Install an exciting style of play. Even as Kentucky’s offensive numbers have declined with the Wildcats’ three most-experienced lead guards sidelined in recent games by injuries, UK still ranks fifth in the nation in adjusted offensive efficiency in the Pomeroy Ratings.
Averaging 85.7 points a game, Kentucky is third in NCAA Division I in scoring.
This mission has been accomplished.
2. Win more than Kentucky’s share of rivalry games. Beating John Calipari when the ex-UK head man brought Arkansas to Rupp Arena for the first time was hugely important to many Cats fans.
That Pope and his team failed in that assignment, falling 89-79 to the Razorbacks on Feb. 1, was a blight on the new Kentucky coach’s first-season job performance.
Otherwise, however, Pope has been terrific in year one at vanquishing the team’s UK backers most want to beat.
Kentucky owns wins over Duke and Louisville and has two victories over Tennessee — the three teams that much of the Big Blue Nation likes the least.
3. Prove he can recruit at a “Kentucky level.” Pope has signed the players ranked No. 18 (Jasper Johnson), No. 20 (Acaden Lewis) and No. 27 (Malachi Moreno) in the 2025 Rivals 150.
Losing out to North Carolina in the recruiting battle for forward Caleb Wilson (No. 5 in the Rivals 150) took some of the luster off Pope’s recruiting effort. That lost luster would be fully restored if Kentucky could win out in the contest for forward Nate Ament (No. 4).
4. Win some postseason tournament games. Because Pope came to Kentucky without having ever won an NCAA tourney game as a head man, taking that issue off the table by winning in 2025 March Madness would be big.
Kentucky has not won more than one SEC Tournament game in any year since the 2018 Wildcats (think Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Kevin Knox) won the tourney.
UK has not gotten out of the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament since the 2019 Cats (think PJ Washington and Tyler Herro) advanced to the round of eight.
While the ultimate goal at Kentucky is always to cut down nets, a reasonable expectation for the 2024-25 Wildcats is just to get UK back to winning some games in the SEC and NCAA tournaments.
This has been an unusual UK season — the Cats are 5-2 vs. teams ranked in the top 20 in the NCAA NET Rankings and 2-6 vs. teams ranked 21 through 41.
Yet the big picture is, however this year ends, Pope has already done well on three of the four primary tasks he faced in season one as top Cat.
This story was originally published February 25, 2025 at 7:08 AM.
