Is Mark Pope hurting UK basketball with too many player substitutions?

As seems to happen after every disappointing Kentucky loss, Mark Pope’s substitution patterns came under heavy scrutiny following UK’s 86-78 home loss to previously-struggling Georgia Tuesday night at Rupp Arena.

An emerging critique of Pope within the Big Blue Nation is that he substitutes too much.

For those Wildcats fans who feel that way, it was the verbal equivalent of dragging fingernails across a chalkboard when Pope said after the Georgia loss he feared he was playing standouts Otega Oweh (34 minutes vs. Georgia; 37 at Florida in the prior game) and Denzel Aberdeen (32 against Georgia; 34 at Florida) too much.

“We’ve got to find a way to get our guys’ minutes down,” Pope said. “Probably can’t have Otega at 38 (minutes) and DA at 36. Just because our performance suffers as those guys get fatigued.”

How big a rotation should a Kentucky head man use?

Well, UK won the NCAA championship under Rick Pitino in 1996 using a nine-man rotation in which no player played more than Antoine Walker’s 27 minutes a game.

Kentucky also won the national title under John Calipari in 2012, when its top six players all averaged between 26.1 minutes a game (Darius Miller) and 32.6 (Marquis Teague).

It comes down to what a coach believes in — and can make work.

When Kentucky hired Pope — one of the nine rotation players on UK’s 1995-96 NCAA champs — it was getting a coach who has consistently preferred a deep rotation.

Over his five-year tenure (2019 through 2024) as BYU coach, Pope used playing rotations of eight, 10, nine, 10 and 10 players, respectively. In Pope’s final two seasons leading the Cougars, BYU did not have one player average 30 minutes a game.

Last season, in Pope’s debut campaign as top Cat, Kentucky consistently used a nine- or 10-man rotation even as injuries thinned out the Wildcats’ depth.

In 2024-25, Kentucky had six players average between 22.8 minutes a game (Amari Williams) and 28.3 (Oweh). Besides those six, UK had three other players average between 10.4 (Collin Chandler) and 17.3 (Brandon Garrison) minutes a contest.

This year, even as Kentucky has seen injuries sideline three projected preseason starters, it still has nine active players all playing between 11 minutes (Trent Noah) and 30 minutes (Oweh) a game.

In the Georgia loss, after Kentucky saw a first-half lead of 27-19 turn into a 39-34 halftime deficit, there was a school of thought that Pope disrupted UK’s momentum with substitutions.

Ultimately, that’s hard to prove or disprove because you can only speculate on what might have happened had Kentucky utilized its playing rotation differently.

Still, it is true that, from the point UK was leading 27-19 with 7:34 left in the first half, Pope substituted eight times over the remaining duration of the first half.

Yet it is also true that Kentucky had four starters on the court when Mike White’s Bulldogs wrested away the lead late in half one.

In the big picture, I have long believed UK should have a coach who plays a lot of people. The Wildcats program should, over the long run, be able to attract more good players than most of its opponents and should use that fact to its advantage.

The question with the current Cats is whether the level of talent coming off the bench merits the use of a deep playing rotation this season.

Since sophomore wing Kam Williams was sidelined by a broken foot in UK’s win over Texas eight games ago, Kentucky has utilized a nine-man rotation with juniors Mo Dioubate and Brandon Garrison, sophomore Trent Noah and freshman Jasper Johnson coming off the bench.

Using the plus/minus metric as an evaluation tool, Kentucky has recently benefitted the most from a substitute when Dioubate is on the court.

With the Alabama transfer in the lineup, the Wildcats have been in the plus (four times) or even (once) in each of their past five games.

The plus/minus verdict has been mixed on the other three.

Noah was plus-8 in the Cats’ victory at Arkansas and followed that up with a plus-6 in a win over Oklahoma. However, UK was minus-13 (meaning the Wildcats were outscored by 13 points with the former Harlan County High School star in the contest) in the loss to Georgia.

Garrison has been in minus territory in four of the past six games.

Johnson has had an especially-rough go in the past two contests, logging a minus-16 at Florida and then coming back with another minus-16 vs. Georgia.

Yet, even off those struggles, there are reasons not to cut Johnson’s minutes. The former Woodford County star is thought to have offensive upside that could make him a late-season difference maker for Kentucky.

Bottom line: With Mark Pope as your coach, history shows your team is going to deploy a large playing rotation.

So, whatever you think about how UK is allotting playing time, it would be a surprise to see Kentucky shorten its bench down the stretch.

Mark Story

Lexington Herald-Leader

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Mark Story has worked in the Lexington Herald-Leader sports department since Aug. 27, 1990, and has been a Herald-Leader sports columnist since 2001. I have covered every Kentucky-Louisville football game since 1994, every UK-U of L basketball game but three since 1996-97 and every Kentucky Derby since 1994. Support my work with a digital subscription