Mark Stoops addresses narrative that Kentucky plays better ‘under the radar’

For as good as they’ve been over the past few seasons, Kentucky is a team that has received pedestrian buzz at best at SEC Media Days. However, Mark Stoops isn’t interested in where anyone expects his team to be as long as they play how they need to in the moments that present themselves.

Stoops answered a question about his team seeming to playing better when people expect less of them while in Nashville on Wednesday. He said that sort of storyline is out of his hands. To him, that’s something that he’d rather leave to the media to decipher.

“That’s not anything, really, that I can control. Whether it’s above the radar, under the radar, or any of that,” Stoops said. “That’s the narrative that you all can write or do. Sure, I think sometimes it’s right in front of you, one way or another.”

With that said, Stoops does think that all comes back to how Kentucky deals with or does not deal with adversity. How that script flipped on them last season did not please him whatsoever. That’s why they put in plenty of work this offseason to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

“I think it’s the way we handle adversity,” explained Stoops. “When things are going good? We played good. And the minute we hit some adversity? I didn’t like the way we responded to that. That can’t happen.”

“That, quite honestly, hasn’t happened a lot under my watch. I wasn’t very proud of that,” said Stoops. “I need to do some things different to make sure we’re prepared and just handle any and all situations the right way.”

Kentucky opened last season in the Top-20 in the AP Poll. They eventually reached No. 7 in the nation, their highest AP ranking in the Stoops era, after opening at 4-0. Then, after losing their first game of the year at Ole Miss, the expectations seemingly toppled them from there. That loss in Oxford was the first of six that they would suffer over their final nine games of the year.

Last year was a significant opportunity that the Wildcats squandered based on how quickly things fell apart. That’s why Stoops is focused on what matters most, which is consistency from game to game, in order for Kentucky to continue to compete how they have been.