Mark Pope, the former Rhodes Scholarship candidate and Columbia University medical student, is widely regarded as smart. So yes, he’s aware that Kentucky fans, as much as they loved him as captain of the Wildcats’ 1996 national championship team, initially hated the idea of him replacing Hall of Famer John Calipari as head coach. He harbors no ill will about that knee-jerk reaction, but it is why, despite a dizzying to-do list, Pope prioritized one thing on Day 1.
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Before he went into warp speed filling out a staff and roster, adding four assistants and nine players in his first three weeks on the job, Pope needed to address the program’s most pressing need: a reconciliation.
“The first 96 hours for me was almost dedicated entirely to our fan base,” Pope told The Athletic last week, hours before his two most recent transfers announced their commitment to the Cats and the new coach could finally come up for air. “It was individually reaching out to donors and former teammates and people that are movers and shakers in the program. And then on Sunday, I felt like I had this incredibly unique opportunity to reach out to every single member of the fan base and just connect. Not just connect me with them, but try and connect them to each other. That was it, that was agenda No. 1, beginning and end. That was the whole agenda, and it was a massive task.”
We’ll get to the magic that followed, but first all the dominoes that dropped before Pope’s unforgettable introductory press conference.
On Saturday of the Final Four, April 6, Pope happened upon two national championship-winning Kentucky coaches in his hotel lobby in Phoenix: Calipari and Tubby Smith. “I just went and fan-boyed them,” Pope said. “I took a selfie of the three of us. We had no idea the insanity that was going to ensue. Within 24 hours, the whole world had turned upside down.”
Later that day, Calipari met in his hotel room with Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek, who needed a new basketball coach. By the next night, Calipari had agreed to take the job, bringing a 15-year run with the Wildcats to an abrupt end. Four days later, after Baylor coach Scott Drew turned Kentucky down and Connecticut coach Dan Hurley made it clear he wasn’t leaving a place he’d just won back-to-back national titles, word leaked that Pope was the choice to replace Calipari in Lexington. At least on social media, fans reacted harshly to athletic director Mitch Barnhart hiring a man with zero NCAA Tournament victories in nine years coaching Utah Valley and BYU.
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“This was such a stunning event for the fans,” Pope said. “And the only coach that’s qualified for this job at Kentucky should have five national championships. I really believe that. I’m a Kentucky fan myself, and I’m sitting there like, ‘Who can we hire that’s actually deserving of this job?’ Well, needless to say, that’s not my resume. So I think all of that together threw fans into kind of like a tailspin. Mitch was taking bullets. Everybody was taking bullets.”
But this is the part of the story, as he recalled those whirlwind first days, where Pope’s eyes lit up. While everyone involved in this hire could sense “a lot of consternation,” the coach said, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that it lit a fire in his new boss. Barnhart called early on the morning of April 12, the day Pope’s hiring was made official, and he was hot.
“He said, ‘I’m so mad, we’re having this press conference at Rupp Arena.’ Like, we’re going full steam ahead,” Pope said. “He was upset that people were taking shots — he could feel everyone’s consternation — and I think in that moment, Mitch Barnhart said, ‘I’m taking control of this and I’m going to let people see what the vision is, because they might not understand it right now.’ It was as bold a response as I’ve ever been a part of in any organization. That’s what leaders do, though, right?
“When nobody knows what to do and everyone thinks this could be really bad, a leader makes a bold move, brings everyone together and gives them a vision moving forward.”
GO DEEPER
'We are here to win banners': Mark Pope makes Kentucky fans believers in rousing intro
That is not, however, what Pope thought in real-time. He thought what a lot of people probably thought about the decision to introduce an initially unpopular hire to the public in a 20,000-seat arena on a Sunday afternoon.
“There might be six people there,” Pope said. “And they might all be mad.”
Instead, Kentucky fans lined up hours before the scheduled press conference, the crowd snaking around the building on both sides, so many of them waiting to get in that the event had to be delayed several minutes as the last of them finally packed the place to its rafters. Rupp Arena was full and frothing by the time Pope rode a tour bus out onto the floor and emerged with the 1996 national championship trophy — a recreation of the title celebration in the same place nearly three decades earlier. There was an explosion of sound, a roar that repeated over and over again as Pope’s speech hit all the right notes for fans who badly needed to hear their coach say he cares about the program just as deeply as they do.
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“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Pope said. “But I think that had less to do with me and more to do with Kentucky fans getting in the arena and showing each other that this place is different than anywhere else and we’re in this together. In reflecting on that moment, it’s been really important for us. It gave us a chance. It gave us a chance in recruiting. I’m seeing every day, as you watch how fast this has all happened and the way our roster has come together, the fruits of that bold-stroke decision by Mitch Barnhart.”
There is no better way to show recruits that Kentucky is a unique and special place than to share video clips (as this new staff has done) of that remarkable day when fans filled the arena not for a practice or game — not even for Big Blue Madness — but for a speech. And a wild party broke out. Pope knows that some of it is because he tugs on the heartstrings for fans of a certain age. Those who loved Rick Pitino and The Untouchables and yearned for a reconnection to the rich tradition of the program.
But Pope bristles at the idea that his primary appeal is nostalgia. Or perhaps more accurately, he bristles at the idea that’s a bad thing.
“At its heart, maybe Big Blue Nation is nostalgia,” Pope said. “It is the emotion that you feel when you’re in the gym cheering for the team with your family, with your friends, the way you mark the moments of your life by what the Cats did that year or that night. So I don’t want to just put it out like, ‘Oh, it’s just nostalgia.’ Because that’s the essence of Kentucky basketball.”
The trick, of course, is marrying that appreciation for history and tradition with an ability to lead the program into the future.
“That’s what Kentucky has always done,” Pope said. “I got to watch Coach P do it in real-time. Coach P changed the game when he was here. He changed the way people approached the game. He was a pioneer of the 3-point line. Then think about Cal in recruiting, with the rules at the time, which have changed drastically in the last couple years, and how Cal changed the game in recruiting. Kentucky has always been on the leading edge of the next phase of the game of basketball, so I feel a huge responsibility now as the coach at Kentucky to do our part.”
That’s the hardest part. Once all the talking is over and the real work begins — first assembling a roster, then finding a way to win big with it — no amount of nostalgia or rave review for Pope’s public-speaking skills will help him if results don’t follow. That’s where Pope gets to truly demonstrate just how smart he is. What does he have in store to refresh a program that grew stale by the end of Calipari’s tenure? How does he plan to put Kentucky back on that cutting edge?
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“The biggest things confronting college basketball right now are NIL and the portal,” Pope said. “So we’re in the process of actually trying to harness what’s incredible about Kentucky, which is Big Blue Nation, right? Their ownership piece in NIL and what that means. We’re going to push really, really hard and see how our fan base can participate in this NIL process, this ownership process. With the portal, we’re trying to be cutting edge with how we use it; now, we won’t work the portal every year like we are this year, because we had to, but utilizing the portal and finding new ways to approach the portal has been super fun.”
In terms of style of play, Pope said, “We are continuing to push the envelope on this idea of forcing teams to guard more space.” And because so many other teams are doing that, too, because offenses are so good now, “the game is begging for us to change” how defense is played. That hardly sounds like someone stuck in the past. He’s just smart enough to know how much the past means to the people who matter. Some of the very same people who hated his hiring right up until they loved it, and he’s not even mad about that.
During his first interview with The Athletic since taking the job, Pope at one point referred to the fan base as “crazy,” a favorite descriptor of his predecessor. But then Pope circled back and asked to strike that word.
“I’m trying to train myself not to say ‘crazy.’ I say ‘crazy,’ and I don’t like it,” he said. “It’s the care here. It’s passion. This fan base is like nothing else.”
