Mark Pope is in a surprisingly good mood for a man who just got beat by 25 points and is staring down a Top 20 opponent on the road.
Maybe he knows something we don't. Or maybe he is just ignoring the fire alarm blaring in the background. Because while the current team is regressing on the court, the good times definitely aren't rolling on the recruiting trail, and that is the one place where this program absolutely cannot afford to fail right now.
We are in late January of Year 2. The transfer portal roster that cost $20 million has been a bust so far. We didn't land a Top 20 impact player in the portal last cycle (outside of the currently injured Jayden Quaintance), and it shows every time we play a physical SEC team.
The solution should be high school recruiting. But right now? Kentucky has zero commits.
The Misses are Piling Up
It’s not just that the commitment list is empty; it’s who we are losing to. We just watched Alabama pick up 5-star Qayden Samuels. That was a recruitment Kentucky was always going to lose, but it sets the stage for another big battle between the Tide and Cats.
That puts immense pressure on the Caleb Holt recruitment. He is largely down to Kentucky and Alabama. If Pope loses another head-to-head battle to Nate Oats while Oats is also beating him on the court, that is not something
And let's not even talk about the "locks" that vanished. Before Thanksgiving, it felt like the nation's No. 1 recruit, Tyran Stokes, and Top 10 prospect Christian Collins were destined for Lexington.
Now? Stokes is trending heavily toward Kansas, and Collins looks likely to stay on the West Coast. What went wrong? Was it NIL? Was it Pope? Was it the JMI boogeyman? We will probably never know the full truth, but the scoreboard says Kentucky is batting .000.
The hero pitch isn't landing
Despite striking out on his top targets, Pope remains relentlessly positive. In fact, he seems to believe that the current on-court disaster might actually be a selling point for the right kind of guy.
"Sometimes when things are not smooth, it's actually a better story for some recruits," Pope said. "Some guys want different things."
I understand what he is saying. He is pitching the come be a hero, kind of the opposite of last year, which moved Lamar Wilkerson to Indiana. Last year, it was about coming in to be a part of a team. He is now looking for the alpha dog who sees a struggling team and thinks, "I can be the one to fix that. I can be the hero who turns it around."
It’s a noble pitch. But in the modern NIL era, it feels naive. Recruits today don't want to be mechanics; they want to be drivers. They want to step into a machine that is already humming, not one that is leaking oil on the side of the road in Nashville.
The reality check
You can spin the "challenge" however you want, coach. But the data speaks for itself. If top recruits actually viewed a struggling Kentucky team as an attractive "story," we would have commits by now.
We don't.
We have zero.
And until Pope realizes that "stability" sells better than "chaos," that number might stay at zero for a lot longer than we are comfortable with.