Year 2 of the Mark Pope era in Lexington did not go to plan. After entering the year at No. 9 in the preseason AP Poll, the Wildcats struggled in their biggest non-conference showdowns, stumbled to a 10-8 record in SEC Play, and finally, on Sunday, their season came to a merciful end with a second-half rout at the hands of the second-seeded Iowa State Cyclones in the Round of 32, 82-63.
Kentucky made plenty of mistakes on Sunday afternoon in St. Louis, losing by 19 despite shooting 47 percent from the field, thanks to 20 turnovers and a -13 turnover margin. Pope and his staff made many mistakes throughout the season, failing to develop his young talent, never developing a reliable point guard option after Jaland Lowe went down for the season, and rarely bringing the defensive physicality necessary to compete in the SEC.
His biggest mistake, however, and the one that will have him on the hot seat heading into Year 3, if outgoing athletic director Mitch Barnhart doesn’t just decide to move on from him in the next week, was made well before the Cats ever took the floor in November and the ball was ever tipped in March.
Kentucky’s roster just never made sense for Mark Pope
Mark Pope has not had a general manager helping him with roster construction throughout his first two years in Lexington. According to a March 10 report from On3’s Joe Tipton, the program is set to hire Keegan Brown, who worked with Pope at BYU, to a front office role. However, Brown’s position is expected to be more geared towards player development than player acquisition, and he is not a GM.
If Pope is the one standing in the way of Kentucky hiring a general manager, he doesn’t deserve that type of power, especially not after last offseason, and not as he currently sits without a single commit in the 2026 class.
Unlike John Calipari, who spent years assembling recruiting classes chalked full of one-and-dones, and is still doing the same at Arkansas, Pope prefers to build with a mosaic of veteran talent acquired through the Transfer Portal. For Year 1, he brought in a group of talented shooters who are comfortable playing off the ball in the free-flowing motion offense that lifted the former Kentucky national champion forward to coaching prominence at BYU.
It was a group that lacked physicality and athleticism to really compete for a national championship, but it was the blueprint, and with a full year to recruit and infuse a few more upper-tier athletes into the mix, Pope looked to be knocking on the door of something special. Then, inexplicably, he changed course, over-indexing on strength and athleticism while abandoning the type of unselfish shooters who surrounded Otega Oweh and carried the Cats to the Sweet 16.
So, he shouldn't get another chance to build it
Yes, Pope’s plan was derailed by injuries to Lowe and Jayden Quaintance, who appeared in just four games after suffering a devastating knee injury as a 17-year-old freshman at Arizona State. But even with its full complement, this team, which ranked 165th in three-point shooting, had its three-point attempt rate drop nearly two percent from last season.
With Lowe out, Denzel Aberdeen was shoehorned into a point guard role after he served as a secondary ball-handler off the bench on Florida’s national championship team. Without much movement shooting, outside of Collin Chandler, Aberdeen, and Oweh were reduced to isolation creators, and the movement that made Pope’s offenses so special evaporated.
With a hefty buyout and a lame-duck AD, Pope is likely going to stay put in Lexington, but that shouldn’t stop Kentucky from making major changes to the program because allowing Pope another shot to spend Kentucky’s revenue-sharing money and hefty NIL budget again after this debacle would be malpractice.