Mark Pope explains what’s gone right during Kentucky’s 5-game win streak
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Mark Pope has gone from the outhouse to the penthouse in a very short time and so has his team. Such is the life of being the Kentucky basketball coach, with one of the most demanding and passionate fan bases in any sport breathing down your neck.
Right now, after an 0-2 start in SEC play, Pope and the Wildcats are breathing a lot easier. On Saturday afternoon, Pope and his team delivered a 5th straight SEC win, outlasting Ole Miss, 72-63, to improve to 14-6 overall and 5-2 in the league.
The picture was totally different after those SEC losses to Alabama and Mizzou that had Big Blue Nation up in arms. Pope, who played at Kentucky and knows that extreme fan passion first-hand, was feeling the heat and so was his team as things hit rock bottom on Jan. 7. But they’ve responded with a vengeance over the past few weeks, and Saturday was another example of that growth.
“We have guys that are falling in love with making the dirty, non-scoring, massively important winning plays of the game,” Pope told reporters after Saturday’s victory. “We have guys stepping up and doing that all over the place.”
The only way to maintain that rosy picture in Lexington is to keep winning, and Kentucky will have a huge challenge on its hands in trying to do that on Tuesday night, when it heads to No. 15 Vanderbilt for a 9 p.m. ET tipoff on ESPN.
The spotlight, primetime game will be another measuring stick for a Kentucky team that is methodically getting itself out of that early season hole.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
