It’s far too soon to give up on Mark Pope — but there are some warning signs
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kentucky under Pope sits 29-16 overall and 15-16 vs power-conference foes.
- UK has lost nine of 11 to ranked opponents and posted poor perimeter shooting.
- Second-season decline echoes past UK coaches; improvement must solidify tenure.
Mark Pope just endured about as bad a week as a Kentucky men’s basketball head coach can experience.
Last Tuesday, the Wildcats went the final 13:46 of the second half with only two made field goals, a stretch of futility that yielded a come-from-ahead 67-64 loss to North Carolina at Rupp Arena.
Three days later, before a heavily pro-UK crowd in Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, Pope’s Cats essentially no-showed for what became a humiliating 94-59 loss to Gonzaga.
Kentucky losing in opposite but maddening fashion to both a college hoops blue blood and a new blood in the same week turned up the scrutiny on some worrisome trends in the still relatively new Pope coaching era at UK:
• After starting his Kentucky coaching career winning his first five games against AP Top 25 teams and seven of the first nine, Pope has subsequently lost six straight, eight of nine and nine of 11 against ranked opposition.
• As UK head man, Pope is now 15-16 against other power conference teams plus Gonzaga (a power conference-caliber men’s basketball program without that official designation).
• Leading a program with an all-time winning percentage of 75.8%, Pope has won at a 64.4% clip through 45 games as Kentucky coach.
Simply put, if Pope doesn’t improve the above numbers, his tenure as head men’s basketball coach at his college alma mater will not be an enduring one.
Yet it is much too soon to write off the former Kentucky Wildcats center.
In the aftermath of the “Music City Massacre” vs. Gonzaga, some of the understandable frustration in the Big Blue Nation led down dark back roads.
For the first time since John Calipari sent himself into exile in Arkansas in 2024, I had fans tweeting at me questioning whether Kentucky was better off prior to its coaching change.
If you think Pope’s current win percentage of 64.4 is not “Kentucky level,” you did not enjoy the 63.4% of wins that Calipari posted over his final four seasons combined as UK head man.
You would also be unhappy with the results Calipari has produced so far at Arkansas, where his record, 29-16, is exactly the same mark that Pope has compiled to date at Kentucky.
To put that in context, Calipari took three UK rotation players plus half (three of six) of his final Kentucky recruiting class with him to Arkansas prior to the 2024-25 season.
Pope last year inherited a UK program that literally returned not one scholarship basketball player.
Given that reality, there’s a more-than-viable argument that Pope’s 29-16 has been achieved more impressively than has Calipari’s.
Students of Kentucky men’s basketball history will not be entirely surprised that Pope’s second season has, so far, been a slog.
With one exception, every UK men’s basketball coach of the modern era (which I define as after Adolph Rupp’s retirement) has experienced a hoops version of the “terrible twos.”
• Joe B. Hall. Declined seven wins from 20 victories in season one as UK coach (20-8 in 1972-73) to 13 wins in season two (13-13 in 1973-74).
• Eddie Sutton. Decreased 14 wins from year one (32-4 in 1985-86) to two year two (18-11 in 1986-87).
• Rick Pitino. The exception to the rule, Ricky P. went from 14 victories in his initial season (a plucky 14-14 in 1989-90 with eight scholarship players after a harsh NCAA probation) to 22 wins in year two (a 22-6 mark, boosted by incoming freshman star Jamal Mashburn, in 1990-91.)
• Tubby Smith. Went down seven wins from his NCAA title-winning debut campaign (35-4 in 1997-98) to his Elite Eight-making second team (28-9 in 1998-99).
• Billy Gillispie. Billy G.’s ill-fated two-year stint as UK coach actually saw an increase of four wins from year one (18-13 in 2007-08) to year two (22-14 in 2008-09).
However, Gillispie’s first Kentucky team made the NCAA Tournament, while his second settled for the NIT.
• John Calipari. There was a six-win decline from Calipari’s first UK team (which, led by John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins, went 35-3 in 2009-10) to his second (which finished 29-9 in 2010-11).
Of course, the 2011 team went one round farther in the NCAA Tournament than the 2010 Cats and gave Kentucky its first Final Four trip since 1998.
You have to go back to Hall’s second UK team in 1973-74, which lost three straight to Kansas, Indiana and North Carolina after an opening win, to find a Kentucky squad in a coach’s second season that struggled as much early as have Pope’s current Cats.
Against quality competition, Kentucky has been unable to defend. In the losses at Louisville and vs. Michigan State, North Carolina and Gonzaga, UK has surrendered an average of 85 points a game.
When facing ranked opposition, UK has struggled to make jump shots. In its four contests vs. AP Top 25 teams, Kentucky has made an anemic 24.3% of its 3-point shot attempts (27 of 111).
If Pope can get this derailing train back on the track, he will have used his team’s “terrible twos” to demonstrate his coaching chops in a major way.
