Grading Mark Pope’s first regular season as the Kentucky basketball head coach
Mark Pope and the Kentucky Wildcats finished up the regular season on Saturday with a massive road win over #15 Missouri, locking up the number six seed in the SEC Tournament.
The Wildcats finished the season 21-10 overall and 10-8 in SEC play. Kentucky’s win over Missouri was their eighth over a top 15 team, which tied Duke and Indiana for the most in a season ever.
Kentucky also beat Duke, Louisville, and Tennessee twice in Coach Pope’s first regular season, giving the Wildcats massive wins over their biggest rivals.
The only negative this season was some of the letdown games throughout the year. The Wildcats lost to Ohio State, Georgia, Texas, Ole Miss, Vanderbilt, and the most frustrating of all of these losses was to John Calipari’s Arkansas Razorbacks.
This shows how much of an up-and-down season it was for the Wildcats, but there were more positives to take away than negatives.
Knowing all of the injuries this Kentucky team dealt with all season and how Coach Pope continued to find a way to win big games and put his team in a spot to likely be a three-seed in the NCAA Tournament, he has to get an A for his first season in Lexington.
If Pope’s team had cut out a few of those ugly losses in SEC play, this would have been an A+, but Coach Pope did a heck of a job with a team he put together in barely over a month.
The future of Kentucky basketball is very bright, and Coach Pope has a lot of prove during the postseason.
