Kentucky prepared for the NCAA Tournament with Jeff Ruby's and 'Remember the Titans'

Today, Mark Pope’s first Kentucky team starts its NCAA Tournament run. To prepare, they took a little inspiration from the T.C. Williams High School football team.

On Tuesday night, the players went to Jeff Ruby’s, where they had dinner and watched “Remember the Titans,” the 2000 Disney movie starring Denzel Washington loosely based on the 1971 T.C. Williams High School football team, which integrated and went on to win the Virginia state title. It’s a movie that surely they have all seen before, but Lamont Butler said that ahead of their first and only NCAA Tournament run together, it hit differently.

“Tuesday night, we had a team dinner thing where it was just all of us at Jeff Ruby’s. They catered the food for us. We were in there and watched a movie. We watched ‘Remember the Titans.’ It was a good movie, a motivational movie for us. Another chance for us to get together and bond as a team. Could be our last moments, but hopefully not. Gave us a lot of motivation going into the next tournament.”

At times, this season has followed a Disney-like script, with a team assembled in a matter of weeks from the transfer portal winning a record eight games against AP top-15 opponents. Injuries have hampered the Cats down the stretch, but with Butler returning to action tonight, there’s still hope for a special run. After all, Butler knows a thing about the NCAA Tournament, to the point he earned the nickname “LeMarch.” The fifth-year senior has played in 11 NCAA Tournament games, the most memorable being in the 2023 Final Four when he hit a game-winner to send San Diego State to the national championship game.

Butler said that when he transferred to Kentucky and got to know his teammates over the summer, he knew even then that they had the potential to go far.

“I kind of expected us to be in a good position from the summer to go win a National Championship,” Butler said yesterday. “That’s on our mind. That’s what we’re going to do.”

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“We still have so much more to do”

In fact, Butler thinks that the fact that most of Kentucky’s players came from lesser-known programs will help them keep that underdog mentality on the sport’s biggest stage.

“I think everybody is hungry this year. I feel like a lot of us came from smaller schools or different places and we were able to compete at one of the best schools ever. We all wanted to be remembered here.”

His teammates agreed, all saying they’re not content to be satisfied just with what they’ve done until this point.

“To be here is rewarding, the effort and everything that we did this whole year to end up here now,” Koby Brea said. “We know that there’s a lot more to do. So that’s ahead of us, so we’re excited for it.”

“I mean, it’s probably been the most fun that I’ve had playing basketball in a long time,” Otega Oweh said. “So just it being at Kentucky and playing with the guys that are up here, and, I mean, everyone that’s on the team. It’s been fun. Definitely has surpassed my expectations in the sense of what we’ve done and, like, we still have so much more to do.”

“We all know how good of a team we are and so this year, have been able to prove that time and time again and we’re excited to be able to prove that again here in the tournament,” Andrew Carr said.

“Just how together we’ve been,” Amari Williams said of what he will remember the most about this season. “We’re all in a group. The games we’ve been able to pull out this year have been tough and we’ve been able to do it. That’s the kind of team we are. Thankful for that.”

Pope on how Kentucky is staying focused

As the team captain of Kentucky’s 1996 national championship squad, Mark Pope knows a thing or two about the NCAA Tournament as well. He said he’s taking cues from his former coach Rick Pitino in helping his team focus this week.

“What you can lean into is your focus. If Coach P, who led us through both of those — he led us through the disastrous Elite Eight game against North Carolina, and then led us to the championship in the Meadowlands, it’s his ability to focus. His ability to focus on right now and not be distracted by any of the stuff.

“That doesn’t guarantee wins all the time. It doesn’t. But it gives you the best chance and we’re pretty good at that. We’re pretty good at staying focused and locked in.”

After Kentucky lost to Alabama by 29 points in the SEC Tournament quarterfinals, Pope may have channeled Pitino in what he described as a “brutal” postgame locker room and a “long, animated, intense truth-telling film session” the next morning. One week later, he believes the team is “exactly where we want to be.”

“I have a lot of confidence in our guys. I’m blessed that I get to coach guys that I believe in, that are unbelievably talented basketball players that are really, really tied together, who are prepared for the moment when the big moment comes. They’ve shown that over and over again this season. My job gets really easy because I have so much faith in our guys.”