NEW YORK — Sixteen days into the men’s college basketball season, the sport’s most expensive roster is already feeling the heat.
Any cover that Kentucky bought with its late rally to make things respectable in a rivalry loss to Louisville vanished Tuesday night when the Wildcats got run off the floor 83–66 by Michigan State at the Champions Classic. It was a drubbing at the hands of a team that lacks the offseason flash Kentucky’s reported $22 million spending spree created, and one that rightfully has just about everyone in the Bluegrass State on edge.
“I know there was one team that was really, really well coached [tonight] and one team that was really poorly coached,” a seemingly shell-shocked Mark Pope said in a postgame news conference delayed more than 45 minutes after the final buzzer as Pope presumably addressed his shattered group.
Year 1 of the Pope era was the perfect honeymoon. His on-the-fly roster build last April and May came together as a team almost immediately. A year ago, Pope was celebrating his true arrival as Kentucky’s head man with a win over Cooper Flagg’s Duke in this same event. Postgame that day, Pope talked about his players (all senior transfers from winning situations) solving most of the team’s issues at halftime before he even entered the locker room.
Compare that to Year 2, where Pope called his team “completely discombobulated” and ESPN sideline reporter Kris Budden was reporting on bickering during huddles that eventually got shut down by the coach. Every positive thing you’d have said about last season’s group: smart, skilled, connected … better than the sum of its parts? It’s the opposite thus far.
This high-priced roster, built on the backs of unprecedented booster commitment hoping to help Pope elevate from a promising first year back to Kentucky’s championship ways, is drifting aimlessly right now. Kentucky invested significantly to get bigger and more athletic across the board, intent on matching up better with the elite teams in the sport. But doing that also raised expectations (and rightfully so) to near championship-or-bust levels. The moment that $22 million number was public, every Kentucky failure or even mild struggle would be instantly framed with that number attached. Sure enough, it didn’t even get to Thanksgiving before the Wildcats felt the heat.
Offensively, they lack the patience, nonstop player movement and overall savvy that were a mark of Pope’s teams at BYU. Some of those bumps were to be expected with projected starting point guard Jaland Lowe sidelined with a shoulder injury, though more structural problems with the lack of shooting and skill level seem to be popping up.
But the bigger concern? All the added size, athleticism and physicality that have made the Wildcats a much improved defense didn’t show up in Kentucky’s two marquee games. The Wildcats successfully locked down Nicholls, Valparaiso and Eastern Illinois, but Louisville and Michigan State combined to post better than 1.2 points per possession against their defense.
“I feel like the identity that we felt like we carried has been stripped away,” Pope said. “Maybe we’re facing some reality right now, and that can be—that’s an incredibly, incredibly painful process. It’s a terrifying process.”
Senior leader Otega Oweh’s answer about identity was perhaps even more revealing.
“I feel like this group has the capabilities to be that physically imposing team, playing for each other, just playing our hearts out, but we haven’t shown that yet,” Oweh said. “We all know our identity. It’s just a matter of it translating.”
An identity not translating isn’t an identity, at least yet. Oweh’s sentiment put simply:
The best illustration of that lack of toughness came fewer than four minutes into Tuesday’s game and from one of Kentucky’s few returners: starting center Brandon Garrison, who has been thrust into a bigger role with potential Top 10 pick Jayden Quaintance sidelined. Video of Garrison barely even attempting to snatch two rebounds essentially in front of his nose have gone viral postgame. Your identity can’t be “playing your hearts out” if one of your veterans is letting things like this happen:
Perhaps that one lowlight overly picks on Garrison, who is one but certainly not the only problem the Wildcats are dealing with. But if playing at Kentucky alone didn’t invite enough toxicity when things are bad, the fact that plays like that are the face of a $20-plus-million roster is bound to raise the temperature even further. Early losses, especially when you play the schedule Pope has opted for, were inevitable. Performances like these? Not so much.
And that has rapidly brought Pope to his first true critical juncture as Kentucky’s head coach. From his opening news conference bringing back former players and showing the true passion Kentucky fans desperately wanted from one of their own, Pope had met the moment at every turn in his first 18-ish months on the job. He delivered big early wins, got Kentucky back to the second weekend of the NCAA tournament and largely proved he could move with the big dogs in the SEC. For the first time, Pope seemed dumbfounded as to the right buttons to press. He told The Field of 68postgame that he “thought he had a better pulse” of his team than he does right now and told reporters that the character of the organization was being tested right now. Those are strong words for the third week of a season with two starters out and eight new players, but they accurately represent the state of emergency in Lexington, Ky.
But in the face of his most adversity yet, Pope remained steadfast that he would find a way to instill the edge this team sorely lacked Tuesday night, all while trying to deflect any blame that’s sure to find his players’ Instagram DMs over the next 24 hours.
“If you build an organization the right way, then your identity is not about an individual person,” Pope said. “Your identity is about a collective group, and it shouldn’t matter if we had built a great organization and a great culture, which I have clearly failed to do up until today. But we won’t fail this season. We just have failed up until today.”