Why Kentucky coach Mark Pope decided to follow a legend

MARK POPE felt uncertain.

There was a moment, he admitted, after it was clear that he was Kentucky’s choice, when he stood alone at home and grappled with apprehension about a job that offered both spoils he knew well and obstacles, too.

Pope was the head coach at BYU, the second-winningest program in the state of Utah. If he took this job, he would be the head coach of the winningest team in men’s college basketball history — following John Calipari, whose run included a national title and four trips to the Final Four in five years.

“You never follow a legend, right?” Pope said he wondered for a few minutes that night. “You never follow a legend.”

Pope decided to anyway, even after Kentucky fans had publicly campaigned for more notable and successful coaches. But in the months since, Pope has converted a lot of the naysayers by being himself. That authenticity — and an accelerated push to build his first team — have turned concern to excitement about his first season.

But on the day of his introductory news conference at Rupp Arena, it was hard not to consider the stakes.

It was the biggest moment of Pope’s career, and he was riding on a charter bus carrying him and dozens of former Wildcats players through campus — and then through a loading dock and onto the court.

“The expectations at Kentucky are higher than anywhere else,” Pope said to the crowd. “That’s the standard and that’s the history of Kentucky. If you don’t hang a banner, then you haven’t had a successful season. And I love that.”

Arriving on a bus? That kind of flashy statement hadn’t been Pope’s style. But everything at Kentucky is exaggerated. In that moment, it was another reminder that he was no longer living in the mountains of Provo, Utah, but had now entered an active volcano that has turned up the heat on every person who has held the job over the past 30 years. At Kentucky, you usually get burned.

Once Pope descended the bus’s steps on that Sunday in April, more than 15,000 fans — many of whom had decided to embrace the hire only hours earlier — rose and cheered for the captain of Kentucky’s 1996 national title team and their new leader.

“It was like a family reunion,” Pope said.

Pope’s former teammates reminded him of the task ahead just before he grabbed the microphone to reintroduce himself to the Kentucky fan base at his first news conference.

“My former teammates were like, ‘Don’t mess it up, man … Don’t mess it up,'” Pope recalled.

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TONY DELK HAD warned Pope for the last time.

For the 1995-96 Kentucky Wildcats — a team with nine future NBA players led by Rick Pitino — every practice had been contentious leading up to their run to the national title. But five days before the 1996 Final Four, Pope had set a series of hard screens on Delk, later to be named the Most Outstanding Player of the 1996 NCAA tournament, during a team drill. Delk told Pope to stop.

Instead, on the next play — and four more times after that — Pope moved into position at the top of the key and set the same hard screen that had bothered Delk before.

“It was like maybe five minutes from when we ran the play, and I go by him and I just hit him in his midsection,” Delk said. “He drops and he’s down for the count. I said, ‘Mark, I gave you a warning.’ And Coach Pitino was like, ‘Tony, go run on the treadmill!'”

For Pope, Delk’s warning wasn’t enough to change his assignment. Pitino said Pope earned the nod as captain of that Kentucky squad for the same reasons his teammates might have resented him in the moment for the hard screens on Delk: He always did what he was supposed to do.

Pope’s attention to detail and instruction carried him throughout his basketball journey. He had left Washington and transferred to Kentucky in 1994 after coach Lynn Nance had been fired following his second year with the program. His teammates quickly noticed his detailed approach, his upbeat demeanor and his willingness to work.

Pitino said he assumed Pope would do something other than coaching in the future because of his intellect. He was a Rhodes Scholar candidate who later enrolled at Columbia University’s medical school while he was in the NBA before he considered a path in coaching.

But his teammates knew he had leadership qualities. He was Pitino’s translator and liaison. After one game, Pitino let the players know he had not been pleased with their performance, but before he could get through his monologue, Pope stood up and addressed everyone.

“He’s like, ‘We’re being complacent,'” Delk said. “And we’re like, ‘Wait a minute? What the heck? What do you mean complacent?’ You know, we were working our butts off. We’re doing everything the coaches asked for. That stuck in the back of my mind. The main reason I was mad was that I didn’t know what ‘complacent’ meant. I had to go to the library and look the word up.”

Added Pitino: “Every little thing that I would say, he would back it up to the team. He just had that quality of loyalty and leadership that made a team great. I’ve coached very few Mark Popes in my life.”

Those qualities also made him an endearing figure throughout his basketball career. Pope, according to those who’ve witnessed his journey for decades, has always had the ability to connect with people from a variety of backgrounds.

Although he averaged just 1.9 PPG in a six-year NBA career, Pope managed to find a spot in pro basketball for nearly a decade (he also played in the CBA and overseas) because of his personality.

“I always thought Mark was going to be a leader,” said George Karl, who was the head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks when Pope was on the team in the early 2000s. “He had a respectful fear but a tremendous amount of courage in almost everything he did. And I think he understands his challenge at Kentucky is going to be difficult, but I think he’s also excited about the challenge of getting it done.”

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AT THE FINAL Four in Phoenix last April, Tubby Smith sat down for breakfast at his hotel just as Calipari walked into the room. Moments later, Pope — who was staying at the same hotel — appeared after a workout. The trio talked, and Pope asked for a picture with a pair of coaches he’d always admired.

Just 24 hours later, Calipari announced he was leaving Kentucky to take the Arkansas job, which opened when Eric Musselman left for USC. Days after that random meetup, Pope emerged as an unlikely candidate for the Kentucky job.

“It was really surreal,” Smith said. “Now that I look back on it, I can see how people might have said, ‘They must have been plotting something.'”

Smith, perhaps more than anyone else on the planet, can relate to Pope’s plight. In 1997, the former Kentucky assistant was hired to replace Pitino, who had won the national title in 1996 and made a run to the title game in 1997 before bolting for the Boston Celtics. Smith won a national title in his first season, then spent nearly a decade attempting to repeat that feat to no avail. He left Kentucky in 2007 for Minnesota.

“Well, you’re always on at Kentucky,” Smith said. “You have to win and you have to be productive. And even when you win, sometimes it’s not enough. Obviously, every coach wants to win championships. We all want to win. But it’s not as easy as it looks or as it seems to win. And at Kentucky, you have the tools, you have the resources, but even with that, you’ve got to have some luck. But I think [Pope] will do a great job.”

Pope is not an outsider listening to cautionary tales about the Kentucky experience. He has lived it — and loved it. Pope had the option to temper the anticipation after he accepted the gig. He never did.

“You think about how Coach Pitino changed the game with the 3-point line,” Pope said. “You think about how Coach Tubby revolutionized the game in terms of being a great citizen for the game. You think about Cal revolutionizing the game in terms of recruiting. Kentucky is a great program. Kentucky is a leadership program. So how do we continue this beautiful [legacy]?”

Calipari, who arrived prior to the 2009-10 season, injected optimism into the program when future NBA stars John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins led the team to the Elite Eight in 2010. Two years later, Anthony Davis won the Wooden Award and carried the Wildcats to their first national title in more than a decade. Overall, Calipari reached the Final Four in four of five seasons from 2011 to 2015.

But he slowly lost his grasp on the top young players in America, and once the transfer portal became the most important hub for talent in the country, Calipari’s knack for luring elite freshmen to Lexington no longer mattered as much. In his last four years with the program, he waded through a nine-win season and failed to escape the first round of the NCAA tournament twice, unforgivable sins to Kentucky’s fan base. But those mishaps opened the door for a new voice.

Pope has already begun to sculpt the program in his image and personality. By the end of his tenure, Calipari had left his news conferences to his assistants and mostly refused to do interviews with local and national outlets. After the 9-16 season in 2020-21 and three first-weekend exits in the NCAA tournament in three years, Calipari seemed to shut down.

Not Pope, who has literally kissed babies and taken pictures with hundreds of Kentucky fans. He also has crisscrossed the country and even made an international trip to assemble his first team. He flew to South America to watch Jasper Johnson, a five-star recruit from Lexington, compete in the FIBA U18 AmeriCup, and circled the United States to construct a roster from scratch through the transfer portal. A few weeks ago, he sent a signed jersey to Dolly Parton, the country music superstar. And he and his team also built a house with Habitat for Humanity and attended the Kentucky football season opener against Southern Miss, which was delayed for two hours because of lightning. Instead of sneaking the group through a VIP entrance, he and the players waited with everyone else outside the gates. Every move Pope made this offseason — locally, nationally and internationally — was documented by the Wildcats’ social media channels, including a recent trip to the US Open, where he sat in a VIP box.

“They’re having a Kentucky basketball tailgate at the next football game where you can just come and meet the players,” said Drew Franklin, a radio host with Kentucky Sports Radio in Lexington. “That never happened under [Calipari]. It was almost like a president. You had to call someone to call someone to get to [Calipari]. Now you just walk out your front door and there’s a high probability you’re going to run into Mark Pope somewhere in Lexington.”

It’s as if Pope wants to send the message to a passionate fan base that he’s willing to work harder than anyone else who might have taken this job. He’s a basketball coach who seeks the popular vote.

It helped that Pope never rejected the doubters, which was one of his predecessor’s strengths. In fact, shortly after Pope’s arrival, a prominent booster was vocal about his disappointment in Kentucky’s decision. Pope never flinched.

“Give me his number,” he told Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart. “I’ll call him.”

“We talked, and now he’s one of our top supporters,” Pope said.

“The only thing I worry about is I think he’s overextending himself too much,” Pitino said. “I just hope he doesn’t get fatigued. It’s a long season, and he’s just doing everything to satisfy the thirst of the fans. I just don’t want him to fatigue himself because it’s great to do what he’s doing and he ingratiates himself very well to the fan base, but also, he has to have a lot of energy in that tank because the SEC is really tough.”

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ON A STUFFY July afternoon near the Georgia-South Carolina border, Pope took a call as he grappled with the newfound attention the letters “UK” on a crisp white polo attracted.

As he hustled from one gym to the next at the packed Peach Jam event in North Augusta, South Carolina, spectators, coaching colleagues and friends all tried to catch the eye of the new Kentucky men’s basketball head coach in the hallway.

“Hey, Coach!” one man yelled before Pope turned for a quick fist bump.

“Coach Pope!” a boy said as Pope looked his way and nodded his head.

But Pope didn’t break his stride, and the phone stayed glued to his ear.

“At the University of Kentucky, it’s got more eyes on it,” Pope acknowledged. “It’s got more attention on it than any other program.”

Thus far, Pope has found a balance between chasing banners and building a program — and most importantly — making some time to enjoy it all. He used the portal to assemble a group that secured a top-25 ranking entering the season, and he has a collection of veterans and playmakers who bought into his pitch about what Kentucky can be.

“Well, just him as a person and as a coach,” said Lamont Butler, who transferred from San Diego State, on what drew him to Pope. “I feel like he really prioritized recruiting me, and I felt like he had a great vision for me for this year and even for the future, which I really respected and I really wanted to be a part of.”

In early September, Jasper Johnson — the five-star prospect from Lexington — announced his commitment to Kentucky over Alabama and North Carolina, a major win for the first-year head coach who had already secured a commitment from another in-state prospect, four-star center Malachi Moreno, a 7-foot-1 talent. Moreno said he enjoyed Pope’s offensive scheme at BYU, a team that shot 3-pointers on more than half of its field goal attempts last season and allowed big men to play a significant role, too.

“He was just honest with me, and he told me what I was really good at and what things I could get better at,” Moreno said.

“And then he told me he could coach me on what I could get better at.”

At Peach Jam, Pope sat at center court to watch A.J. Dybantsa, the No. 1 recruit in the 2025 class, and a selection of decorated prospects. On the baseline, Calipari mingled with his friends, including TCU’s Jamie Dixon. Bill Self laughed on the sideline, and Sean Miller searched for a seat. It’s a casual affair, a mini vacation for the coaches who attend the biggest grassroots event each summer, which often includes nine holes at a nearby golf course if they can squeeze it in.

Not Pope, who would soon hop on another plane back to Lexington the following day to watch former Kentucky players in The Basketball Tournament, the $1 million winner-take-all event. That day in North Augusta, he sat there at Peach Jam and watched every play, every dribble, every movement Dybantsa and his teammates made.

His phone was in his right hand. His notebook was in his lap.

“There are great programs all around the country with incredible fan bases, and the vast majority are in this league and in the Big 12,” Pope said. “And then there is just Kentucky and it’s almost unexplainable. It is a one-of-one in that sense.”

“I think the fans are going to fall back in love with him and really appreciate what he’s going to bring,” said Antoine Walker, Pope’s former teammate and a former All-American at Kentucky. “Because he’s going to be a hard worker. He’s going to demand excellence. I’m looking forward to it. It should be an exciting time in Lexington.”