Mitch Barnhart claims former BYU recruits would join Mark Pope at Kentucky

Kentucky’s hire of Mark Pope as the new head basketball coach came with plenty of questions, especially when it comes to the massive difference in recruiting needed to win at Kentucky vs. BYU.

The BYU gig is unique in the recruiting aspect, since the school is able to sign the overwhelming majority of Mormon athletes but can often struggle to reel in elite talent from outside the state. With Mark Pope having spent the last chapter of his coaching career with the Cougars, there’s worry he could be behind then ball as a recruiter.

When asked about that concern by Matt Jones while appearing on Kentucky Sports Radio, UK athletic director Mitch Barnhart answered that Pope will have a much easier time getting players to a brand name like the Wildcats.

“Yeah, well, I think I think that the proof’s in the pudding, obviously, and we gotta go get that done. So I get off the phone with him last night and already talked to me about two players that he couldn’t get to come to have a conversation with him at BYU that already called him back and said, ‘Coach, I’ll come to Kentucky,'” shared Barnhart.

“So it is about the name on the front. It’s about the name on the front of the jersey, right? And there’s something about that brand,” he added, noting that even during a year that went poorly for Kentucky in March, the Wildcat program was still the No. 1 story on the day of the national championship.

“So if you go back and you look at — if you look at just in the social impressions from Monday, at 3:00, until Tuesday at 3:00, the University of Connecticut won the national championship, obviously, and they had 17 million impressions in that 24 hour period. Kentucky basketball, coming off of something that everyone would agree is not where we want to be, in a same 24-hour period of time we had 37 million impressions. Over double.”

That’s just more evidence of how strong the Kentucky brand is right now.

“So my point is, the brand is real. And it is really, really important and we’ve got to effectively use it and we use it, we combined some things in recruiting with the tenacity in recruiting, the staff in recruiting, the brand that we have.”

All of that plus what Barnhart confirmed as a massive donation from a few individuals to Kentucky’s NIL pot to build out Mark Pope’s first roster.

“And then the NIL space, we’ve got some people that have already stepped up over the last 24 hours. We’ve had several donors who have stepped up to put over $4 million in our NIL portfolio for Coach to work with to get started. … I can confirm that’s true.”

With an influx of NIL money plus the branding power of Kentucky behind him, Mark Pope ought to hit the ground running on the recruiting trail, according to Mitch Barnhart.