The best and worst thing about college basketball is this. Despite a season in which Kentucky and Mark Pope picked up more wins against AP top 15 opponents than any year in history, the season will largely be defined by this weekend.
In all fairness, there’s a lot more going on here. Yes, Kentucky has hit heights under Pope which would have seemed nearly unimaginable when he was called on to gather an impromptu roster as the replacement to John Calipari. Wins over Duke, Gonzaga, two victories over Tennessee, a win over Florida, and a 5-0 record against the teams that met for the SEC and ACC Tournament titles.
Then again, Kentucky also lost to Georgia, Vanderbilt, and Arkansas. The Wildcats dropped a 29-point loss to Alabama in the second-worst postseason loss in the history of Kentucky basketball.
It’s a 22-11 Kentucky team off a 10-8 record in the SEC. But the SEC never looked like this version of the SEC (did we mention 14 teams in the NCAA Tournament?).
But even then, there are extenuating circumstances upon extenuating circumstances. Pope’s constructed roster was a bit short on depth. Literally losing every scholarship player from a 23-10 team that lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournamentwill do that. Of Pope’s initial rotation of 9 players, 2 (Kerr Kriisa, Jaxson Robinson) have now been lost to season-ending injury. Another (Lamont Butler) has missed 9 games and is just now trying to return to the lineup again. A fourth (Andrew Carr) has battled a back injury all season that saw him miss just 1 game, but be visibly limited in another half dozen or more games.
But at the end of the day, good, bad, and unexpected matters all being considered, Pope could really use a couple of NCAA Tournament wins this weekend.
Why This Weekend Matters So Much (And Could Be Scary)
After all, John Calipari was all but run out of town for his failure to produce anything of meaning in March. After 31 NCAA Tournament wins for Calipari in his first decade at Kentucky (that works out to an average of an Elite Eight finish per year), the ensuing 5 years included exactly 1 NCAA Tournament win. They also included embarrassing first-round losses to Saint Peter’s and Oakland. Sure, there was more to it than that. Calipari’s lack of accountability, his struggles in adjusting his tactics, and the general trend of college basketball away from high school recruiting to transfer portal juggling all figured in. But make no mistake, Big Blue Nation ran out of tolerance for a lack of March productivity.
Enter Pope, who has generally exceeded reasonable expectations in Year 1. But the rub on Pope, the biggest strike against him as a candidate for the Kentucky job was a total of zero NCAA Tournament coaching wins. Granted, Pope was coaching at Utah Valley and BYU. Those zero wins also included just 2 losses. Both losses came in 6 vs. 11 games, which are essentially Tournament coin flips.
For everything Pope got right — and his “aw shucks, just a common man of the people” is amazing for a nearly 7-foot former NBA player who was also a Rhodes Scholar candidate — make no mistake: this is his proving ground. With Kentucky as a No. 3 seed, a first-round humiliation would be particularly painful. But at the same time, taking an injury-riddled team to a pair of NCAA Tournament wins would essentially leave Pope entering Year 2 playing with house money.
For Kentucky fans, that seems like a reasonable proposition. But here’s the thing — for a Kentucky team that had previously avoided embarrassing NCAA Tournament upset losses, suddenly even mild success looks much more daunting. Forgive Big Blue Nation if it seems like there’s a Doug Edert or a Jack Gohlke lurking around every corner. Forgive Kentucky fans if the Troy Trojans of the Sun Belt Conference seem an awful lot like John Wooden’s 1960s and 1970s UCLA Bruins.
