Mark Pope isn't going to simply put the Alabama loss behind him: 'We need to grow.'

The phrase “burn the tape” is commonly used after a bad, blowout loss. After all, what can you learn from a game where the opposing team ran you out of the gym? Wouldn’t it just be best to leave that L in the past, forget the mistakes, and look ahead?

For some coaches, yes — burn the tape and move onto the next task in hopes of bouncing back. But after Kentucky was demolished by 29 points to Alabama — the third time this season falling to the Crimson Tide — in the SEC Tournament quarterfinals, head coach Mark Pope doesn’t want his team to forget what happened Friday night in Nashville.

If Kentucky were to simply burn the tape from its poor showing against Alabama, it would be a hell of a lot harder to learn from whatever mistakes cost them a chance at advancing.

“I actually don’t believe in that,” Pope told Tom Leach during his postgame radio interview. “That’d be a waste. We need to grow. We’re desperate to grow. We’ll do an autopsy. Clearly we need to get way better than we were today. And we’re not going to waste any opportunity to get better.”

Kentucky was without Lamont Butler in the loss, but it sounds like the ‘Cats will have him back next week for the beginning of their NCAA Tournament run. In the event he doesn’t come back though, Pope has no other choice but to move forward with the group he currently has. This is the reality of an injury-riddled season. The Alabama tape can show exactly what went wrong, even if the process of rewatching it and diving into the issues won’t be any fun.

“I hope it’s really hard (to forget the Alabama loss) because this is not okay for us,” Pope said. “I hope it’s really hard. But we’re here to do hard things. Like, that’s why we’re here. That’s what we’re chasing, is hard things. I hope it’s really hard and I hope we do it.”

Winning in college basketball, especially in this new-age SEC, is very hard. Pope has done an excellent job of it in his first season as head coach. But games like this one against Alabama show there are levels of difficulty. Luckily, there’s another, even more important tournament right around the corner — one where the season won’t continue if things go south.

“This loss can’t go in vain. We gotta learn from it and have an edge,” Otega Oweh said. “Now it’s win or go home.”

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