Mark Story: After Gonzaga debacle, some advice for Mark Pope: Scrap everything, start over

Mark Story, Lexington Herald-Leader on Dec 7, 2025

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LEXINGTON, Ky. — For Kentucky, the highlight of the 2025-26 Music City Madness matchup with Gonzaga came as the Wildcats took the court for the final time before tip-off.

A heavily-partisan UK crowd all but lifted the roof off the Bridgestone Arena with the exuberant roar with which they greeted the Cats.

“We walked into a heck of an environment,” Gonzaga coach Mark Few said. “That was impressive.”

Alas, it was all downhill for the struggling Wildcats once the game tipped off.

No. 11 Gonzaga humiliated No. 18 Kentucky 94-59 Friday night before a heavily pro-UK crowd of 18,507 in the home arena of the NHL’s Nashville Predators.

On Tuesday night at Rupp Arena, Mark Pope’s Wildcats (5-4) ended a come-from-ahead 67-64 loss to North Carolina by missing 14 of their last 16 shots.

In the Music City, the Cats picked right up where they left off. Kentucky missed its first 10 shots of the game and 18 of its first 21 en route to a horrid 5 of 31 first-half shooting performance.

It’s likely you would have to go back to the infamous 3 of 33 UK shooting in the second half of the Wildcats’ 53-40 loss to Georgetown in the 1984 Final Four to find a worse half of offensive basketball by a Kentucky team.

At halftime, the crowd in Bridgestone Arena, which had begun with so much energy and enthusiasm for the Cats, booed Kentucky off the floor.

By the end of the game, the rump crowd that remained in the stands booed the Cats into the locker room again.

“All the boos that we heard tonight were incredibly well-deserved, mostly for me,” UK’s Pope said.

Added UK guard Collin Chandler: “It is disappointing. We care about BBN and the people that come and support us, because they come in every night. So we’re going to do a better job at showing up for them.”

For the third straight year, Gonzaga big man Graham Ike toyed with UK. The 6-foot-9, 250-pound super-senior finished with 28 points and 10 rebounds. The 10 two-point field goals that Ike hit were one more than Kentucky made as a team.

We haven’t even reached the second week of December, and it feels like a Kentucky basketball season that began with talk of pursuit of the Wildcats’ ninth NCAA championship is already off the rails.

As UK launched errant shot after errant shot into the Nashville night, a loud-voiced fan sitting to my left at the Bridgestone Arena bellowed “Bring in Will Stein!,” a reference to the newly hired Kentucky football coach.

On the social media platform X, UK’s woes invoked in @Charles77618872 a case of John Calipari regret. “Maybe running off Cal wasn’t such a good move after all,” he tweeted at me.

By game’s end, a third member of the Big Blue Nation was calling out media members by name, then asking “What is this? What is it? This is not Kentucky basketball.”

With the loss to Gonzaga (8-1), Kentucky is 0-4 vs. teams ranked in the AP Top 25.

In UK’s 96-88 loss at then-No. 12 Louisville, the Wildcats’ defense was atrocious. Kentucky’s rebounding was AWOL in the 83-66 loss to then-No. 17 Michigan State in the Champions Classic.

It was lack of rebounding and errant shooting that cost the Cats in the loss to North Carolina. Against Gonzaga, it was pretty much an all-systems meltdown for UK.

One thread that has run through all four Kentucky defeats vs. ranked foes. The Cats are now 27 of 111 combined on 3-point shots vs. Top 25 teams.

In nine games, many basketball observers have come around to a view I first shared with you May 30: that Kentucky’s 2025-26 roster is ill-constructed.

The individual parts on the UK team are not complementary. For a coach with Pope’s reputation as a high-level offensive tactician, there is a shocking lack of offensive skill and shot-making capacity on the current Kentucky team.

“We were really tentative, and that’s something we got to figure out,” Pope said of the offensive woes vs. Gonzaga. “It’s almost like we got ourselves paralyzed offensively. You know, I don’t have a lot more than that right now.”

Look, I have won exactly 216 fewer games as a NCAA Division I men’s basketball coach than has Mark Pope.

But it seems apparent that Kentucky just needs to start this season over.

Back to ground zero, a reexamination of every assumption of how this team needs to play.

Barring something unforeseen, there’s no way to address in midseason the unfortunate roster construction.

So Pope’s task is to find something his roster of ill-fitting parts can do well, and create a playing approach around that.

“We’ve kind of diminished a little bit to a bad spot right now,” Pope said. “We have to dig ourselves out, and it’s going to be an internal group thing. We feel the responsibility to this university and this fan base.”

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