Mark Pope on loss to Ohio State: 'Our default is still bad habits'

Mark Pope chalked Kentucky’s 85-65 loss to Ohio State up to bad habits. Basically, it’s the continuation of bad habits that haunted Kentucky in this one over the weekend.

The Wildcats only trailed 39-30 at halftime, so the game was well within reach. But the previously No. 4 ranked squad in the country was outscored 46-35 in the final 20 minutes.

With that, Pope and his crew fell to 10-2 on the season.

“And our default is not right, yet, our default is still bad habits, and it’s not bad habits coming from a bad place in guys’ hearts. It’s coming from a great place. It’s coming from a desperation to help their team,” Pope said postgame. “But we don’t do that by ourselves, and we do it discipline, and we do it the way we do it, and we do it by making plays for each other and that’s still not our default. That’s just a trust building process. And sometimes, when things go wrong, it can build your trust, because you see this, you get to see, hey, this doesn’t work when we try and do this this way. 

“But these guys will respond beautifully because they’re incredibly young men, and they’ll come back and they’ll work like crazy, they know who they represent, and how much it means and it’s incredibly painful to lose this game, but they’ll respond.”

Otega Oweh led the way for Kentucky with 21 points and two rebounds. Pope only had two other double digit scorers in Andrew Carr with 13 points and Jaxson Robinson with 10 points.

However, Pope is not concerned about how the team operates forward.

“I know exactly how these guys respond,” Pope said. “Like, you know they’re going to really, really try as hard as they can to not let this destroy their couple days off. Their job is to get really fresh right now, and then we get back together on the 26th. 

“And I know these guys, they’ll come in and it’s not gonna be just just empty emotion. It’s gonna be like, we’re gonna get better and these guys get better, and we just got to keep trusting what we do. You know we had some defensive struggles tonight, and then we just fell to pieces offensively, and we just went to our default.”