Kentucky wasn't Kentucky in the final minutes at Texas: "We weren't our normal selves"

Mark Pope won’t use injuries as an excuse for Kentucky‘s loss at Texas. After the 82-78 loss on Saturday, Pope said he still has players good enough to win games and that the way the Wildcats finished the game, blowing a five-point lead with a 14-2 Texas run, was “not acceptable.”

There were a myriad of problems after Kentucky led 69-64 with under four minutes to go. Pope listed many of them in his postgame press conference with a recap of self-inflicted wounds and costly mistakes.

“We’re up five, and we give up an offensive rebound, a put-back and-one, and then we come down the floor, and we make one out of two free throws,” Pope recalled. “And then we give up a mid-range jumper, which is a shot that we would traditionally be like, okay, we’re gonna live with that challenged mid-range jumper, and then we come back down, and we turn the ball over on an entry that was just a killer, that just really, really killed us at 71-70. And then we gave up an offensive rebound inexplicably on a free throw that was another dagger, and it kind of went from there.”

The botched finish was uncharacteristic of his team, Pope mentioned in his postgame frustration. Before the trip to Austin, he believed Kentucky excelled in closing out tight games and not letting mistakes stack up.

“One of the things that has been really special about our team is we’ve done a great job of kind of being in the moment, being on to the next play,” he said. “It’s been a really good character of our team, and we just weren’t our normal selves in that aspect of the game in the last three minutes and 45 seconds.

Pope takes the blame

Why did Kentucky fall apart with three minutes left in a game it led for nearly 23 minutes? Pope looked in the mirror and took the blame for not having the Wildcats ready to finish the job on a night he thought the effort was there.

“For me, I’ve got to find a way to help our guys be the way that we’ve been, which we’ve been pretty good about being really, really present in those moments, and I didn’t help our guys do that well enough tonight, and that’s, you know, sometimes things don’t go your way. Certainly, late in games, especially on the road, but we didn’t give ourselves a chance that we deserved to give ourselves with the effort that the guys put in.”

Pope called the loss an anomaly in how the Wildcats squandered the lead away late. “We’re normally so good in these moments,” he told Tom Leach. “We’ve been so good all season long in these moments.”

More from Mark Pope at Texas

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