The feeling around the University of Kentucky men’s basketball team right now — in many ways — mirrors the mood of 15 years ago.
Then, like now, the Wildcats were entering a new era, the program moving on from an embattled head coach, with the incoming leader promising a new direction. Then, like now, there was an exciting influx of new players and intriguing skill sets to look forward to watching on the court.
In both cases, Kentucky fans reacted with fervor, filling Rupp Arena this time around to welcome Mark Pope back to Lexington with a celebratory roar just like they had 15 years earlier when greeting a dancing John Wall, who let everyone know that the John Calipari era was going to make UK basketball matter again before his Wildcats even took a single shot.
Calipari’s team won early and often, capturing the imagination of UK fans with an exciting style led by an obscene collection of talent. And with all that winning, the positive momentum from Calipari’s first few months on the job was not only sustained, but it grew exponentially.
Pope has just as much support going into his first regular season game as Kentucky’s coach Monday night — perhaps even more — but he knows his Wildcats will have to win to keep it going at this level. And doing so in anything close to the manner that Calipari did 15 years ago will be difficult. Maybe impossible.
This has nothing to do with coaching ability.
Calipari arrived with a much more impressive résumé — two Final Fours, seven trips beyond the first week of the NCAA Tournament and one free throw short of a national title the year before — while Pope has never won an NCAA Tournament game in nine years as a head coach at Utah Valley and BYU.
But Pope’s viewed as a rising star in the college basketball coaching community, and his peers are expecting greatness from him at Kentucky.
It also has little to do with talent.
Yes, Calipari’s first team was exceptional in that department — five first-round NBA picks after the 2009-10 season, with an ultimate total of eight draft picks on that roster — but Pope has put together a group of seasoned college basketball veterans more than capable of winning big at this level.
The most glaring difference between the two teams will be the competition these Cats face. And that difference is so large that anyone expecting something similar to that 2009-10 run is setting themselves up for a major disappointment.
Calipari’s first team finished the season 35-3. Those Cats didn’t lose their first game until Jan. 26 — their 20th contest of the campaign — and they lost just once more before an upset defeat to West Virginia in the Elite Eight.
It was a cathartic experience for a fan base that had just lived through the two relatively disastrous seasons of the Billy Gillispie era (no NCAA Tournament wins) and the disappointing end of Tubby Smith’s tenure (two second-round exits in a row).
That 2009-10 team — led by John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins, Patrick Patterson and Eric Bledsoe, among others — is looked back upon fondly as a juggernaut, and they were.
But they also rarely beat anyone of note, relative to the current times, at least.
Two different Kentucky schedules
Kentucky’s first seven games of the 2009-10 season came against Morehead State, Miami (Ohio), Sam Houston, Rider, Cleveland State, Stanford and UNC Asheville. Stanford was the biggest name of that bunch, and that Cardinal team ended up eighth in the Pac-10 (and UK needed overtime to beat them).
Then came North Carolina and UConn — ranked No. 10 and No. 14, respectively — and the Wildcats managed to beat the Tar Heels 68-66 and the Huskies 64-61, two squeakers. Both of those teams ended up with losing records in their conferences. Neither made that season’s NCAA Tournament.
The other major non-conference foes that year were an Indiana team that finished 10-21 and a Louisville squad that ended up as a 9 seed in the tournament and lost in the first round — the only time in Rick Pitino’s final 11 years as coach of the Cardinals that he didn’t finish in the Top 25.
By Kentucky standards, that’s pretty easy sledding. It allowed Calipari to guide his first squad through the early going, which included the need for a buzzer-beater by John Wall in his first game to beat Miami (Ohio) and that overtime nail-biter against Stanford.
Pope’s first team will have no such luxury.
These Cats get Wright State on Monday night and Bucknell next weekend, but game three will be a trip to Atlanta to face Duke — the No. 7 team in the preseason Top 25 rankings and a squad stacked with NBA talent, including presumptive No. 1 overall pick Cooper Flagg.
A handful of expected wins will follow, and then — in a span of four days — Kentucky will travel to Clemson for its first true road game (against a team that received votes in the first Top 25 poll), and then to Seattle to play No. 6-ranked Gonzaga.
A week later, Kentucky hosts Louisville. A week after that, the Cats play Ohio State in New York City. Both the Cardinals and Buckeyes received votes in that first Associated Press poll, too.
That’s five high-major teams that could very well make the NCAA Tournament. Calipari’s first team faced one such opponent 15 years ago.
And, for Pope’s Cats, the non-conference slate is nothing compared to what comes in January.
The SEC has changed in 15 years
At the beginning of Calipari’s UK tenure, only two other SEC teams were mentioned in the preseason Top 25 rankings — Tennessee and Mississippi State.
Pope walks into the Kentucky job with much different surroundings.
A whopping nine SEC teams were ranked in the preseason AP poll last month, with the Wildcats coming in at No. 23 in the country. In both that Top 25 poll and the SEC preseason media predictions, UK is the eighth team listed from the league.
Calipari’s first team played just four league games against teams that ended up in the final AP Top 25 poll — two each against Tennessee (15th) and Vanderbilt (21st).
Pope’s team will have 10 regular-season games against SEC teams ranked in the preseason Top 25, including four on the road and two against Alabama, the No. 2 team in the country.
After they play Georgia and Mississippi State in early January — both road trips against teams that could realistically make the NCAA Tournament — the Cats won’t play back-to-back games against teams outside of the Top 25 until they face LSU and Missouri in the last two matchups of the regular season.
That’ll be an absolute gauntlet for Kentucky, with no real opportunities to come up for air against a string of lesser opponents.
Calipari’s first five SEC games were against unranked teams — and his Cats still lost one of those, at South Carolina — and UK didn’t face a top 20 team until its 10th game of league play that year. Those Wildcats never played a team ranked better than 10th until its loss to No. 6 West Virginia in the NCAA Tournament.
The home-court pride in Rupp Arena was also restored at the beginning of the Calipari era. The new UK coach won his first 55 games in the building, not suffering a loss there until his fourth season in charge. But his Cats played only nine ranked teams in Rupp during that span. Going by the preseason Top 25, these Cats will play six home games against ranked teams — all rivals from the SEC — this season alone.
Georgia head coach Mike White played for OIe Miss in the 1990s and was an assistant with the Rebels during Calipari’s first season at Kentucky. He was the head coach at Florida from 2015 through 2022 and has been in charge of the Bulldogs since then.
So, he knows SEC basketball and its evolution over the past 30 years as well as anyone.
“We’re the best league in college basketball. We just are,” White told the Herald-Leader at SEC media day last month. “The SEC is officially now the best league in college basketball. Every year I stand up here and we’re asked these questions. ‘Is it better?’ Yeah, it’s incredible. ‘Boy, it’s better. It’s even better this year. It’s the best it’s ever been.’ We’ll say it again next year, and we’ll say it again the following year. It’s amazing.”
White noted that his Bulldogs were picked to finish 12th in the preseason media poll.
“We’re significantly better. We’re a good team,” he said. “And obviously you hope to finish higher than that, but the team that finishes 12th, whoever that team may be, will probably be on the bubble, right? Where seven years ago, 11 years ago, what have you — I know one in particular who finished second in the SEC, and teams have finished fourth in the SEC, that go to the NIT.”
To White’s point, neither SEC West winner — back when the league had two divisions — made the NCAA Tournament during Calipari’s first two years at Kentucky. In Calipari’s third season in the league, Tennessee finished tied for second place and wasn’t picked for March Madness.
The following year, UK and Alabama finished tied for second — with 12-6 records — and neither made it. The next year, Georgia — coached then by new UK assistant Mark Fox — tied for second at 12-6 and was left out of the NCAA Tournament field.
Pope’s greatest challenge
The league was, to put it plainly, bad when Calipari came to Kentucky, and that obviously made it easier for his Cats to absorb some bumps in the road and keep their confidence high in some years while running roughshod over their league foes in others.
It also gave the fans plenty of victories, many of them lopsided ones against lesser foes.
Pope won’t have such an easy introduction.
Ten SEC teams are projected to make the 2025 NCAA Tournament field. It could be more.
Calipari deserves some of the credit for that. Pretty much as soon as he entered the SEC, he lobbied both publicly and behind the scenes for the league’s decision-makers to invest more heavily in men’s basketball. Over the years, they did, with upgrades in everything from facilities to coaching salary pools to recruiting resources.
At SEC media day, the first question to Calipari was about his decision to leave UK for SEC rival Arkansas following last season. He shut that down, instead pivoting to a favorite talking point.
“What I want to do today is talk about the SEC. This league has gotten ridiculously hard,” he said. “… I can remember being in this league, we got two or three teams in the NCAA Tournament. Now all of a sudden it looks like it’s going to be 10 or 11 teams in the NCAA Tournament. Every game we play on the road is going to be ridiculous.”
Another example of how tough the SEC has become: Over the past five seasons, no team has won more games in the league than Kentucky, but some of the frustration from Calipari’s final years in charge stemmed from a perceived failure to break away in the conference.
The Cats are the only SEC team with at least 12 conference wins in each of the past three seasons, but they haven’t won a regular-season title since 2020 and haven’t won the SEC Tournament since 2018.
A repeat of the decades of domination UK held over the conference just isn’t plausible anymore, however, with so many teams in the league investing so heavily in the sport.
Pope knows what he’s getting into, at least.
He obviously lived through the craziness of Kentucky basketball expectations as a team captain on the 1996 NCAA championship squad, and he promised to raise more banners in Rupp Arena during his introductory press conference there back in April, possessing the awareness to include SEC Tournament success on his to-do list as head coach.
After beating Kentucky Wesleyan by 71 points in his exhibition opener last week, Pope reiterated his commitment to winning, while also referencing the passion of a fan base who won’t settle for anything less.
“We’re here to win. Like, this is Kentucky,” Pope said. “The first time we don’t win a game, you guys are all gonna go burn my house down.”
Pope isn’t going to temper the expectations, though he knows this season won’t be an easy one, even if his players do click on the court as quickly as possible.
UK is riding a wave of momentum into the first real game of the Pope era. Sustaining that goodwill will be important as the new coaching staff gets settled in and looks to build on the tradition of Kentucky basketball.
And while Pope won’t do anything to shy away from the expected excellence that comes with being in charge of his alma mater, fans will need to be realistic about what comes next.
A lot has changed in the past 15 years.
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