The tweak Mark Pope made at halftime to pull off the massive upset of Duke

The game was starting to get away from the Kentucky Wildcats by the end of the first half. They walked into the locker room feeling a bit deflated and frustrated. The body language was very evident of how the players were feeling; they'd been playing their butts off only to be trailing by nine points, 46-37. Things were looking dire, and they were on the verge of a Duke-lopsided win.

Mark Pope noticed something defensively in the first half that needed to be fixed. He felt that this one tweak would help them climb back into the game and find a way to win it. They had to fix their ball screens. Sure, there were a few other tweaks, but that was the one he needed to coach and even teach as fast as half-time would allow.

When he was being interviewed on KSR and the Tom Leach show, he said, "Our ball screen defense was bad. Just over 1.5 points per possession on ball screens. It was mostly the ball screen ball-handler just getting too deep...we needed to get our big up to the point; their roll is such a threat because they are so big. We were a little too zoned up, so our sprinter and cover was late." This led to so many Duke points as he was watching the game, and he had to help them improve this for the second half.

"We were pretty much the same look the whole first half."

He went on with Leach by saying, "We did [ball screens] better in the second half, and we also changed it up a lot. We were pretty much the same look the whole first half." He said that in the second half, they were mixing it up, doing blitzes and switches on ball screens. He said sometimes they would go under, and sometimes they would do a down-weak switch. That mix up helped confuse and didn't give the same consistent look to Duke over and over.

This is all very impressive coaching and something that makes up the best college basketball coaches in the country. The ability to make adjustments both mid-game and in-game to get wins is why you go and get top coaches. This is all fantastic, but what was maybe even more impressive was his comments about that, "I probably should've got a little more aggressive in the first half, but you're just collecting data, right?"

He spent the first half learning what would happen with his rebuilt team, adjusting what he could in the half, but collecting data to attack Duke in the second half. That's how Kentucky won the game; that's how Mark Pope turned around his team at half-time. Amazing.