Mark Pope grades his first season as Kentucky head coach: 'We didn't get our end result'

Most Kentucky fans would give Mark Pope somewhere around an A grade for his first season as the Wildcats’ head coach, but he doesn’t see it that way.

After quickly putting together a roster almost entirely through the transfer portal, Pope led Kentucky to a school-record dozen Quad 1 wins in 2024-25 and the program’s first Sweet 16 since 2019, all this despite non-stop injuries. A pair of Wildcats, Koby Brea and Amari Williams, went on to be NBA Draft picks while Otega Oweh, who might just be a preseason All-American in 2025-26, broke out as an All-SEC guard. All in all, it was about as much as the fanbase could have asked for out of their mostly unproven first-year head coach.

All that being said, it still wasn’t a perfect season, and Pope is his own harshest critic. If we have to poke holes in Kentucky’s 2024-25 campaign, we can point to bad losses against Clemson and Ohio State. Losing to John Calipari and Arkansas at Rupp Arena was tough to swallow. Losing to Tennessee in the Sweet 16 after sweeping the Volunteers in the regular season was equally as hard.

Taking all of that into account, Pope can’t give himself anything better than a B on his freshman year report card. While still proud of the work his team did, he believes he failed at creating a consistent standard in specific areas, which he plans to rectify in year two.

“If I was going to grade myself, I’d probably grade myself at a B or a B minus,” Pope said last week on the Eye on College Basketball with Matt Norlander. “Clearly, we didn’t get our end result. Our job is to go win it. We didn’t get that done. I felt like we did a lot of things really, really well that I’m very proud of.

“I felt like as a head coach, I failed our team a little bit in terms of picking and choosing the places where we’re going to have a relentless standard, where anything less than it was going to be successful. So one of our big keys going into the season is we’re going to have a standard that we will refuse to accept anything less in some facets of the game that are controllable. I think we’re going to do a much better job with that.”

It won’t be much longer before he can prove it, either. We’re already less than 100 days away from the start of Pope’s second season. It feels like just yesterday we were cramming into Rupp Arena for his introductory press conference on that random Sunday in April. A lot has happened in the 500-ish days since then.

And Pope has seemingly loved every second of it.

“My heart’s full of gratitude, in a really sincere sense,” Pope said when asked to reflect on life as Kentucky’s head coach up to this point. “When you think about how many days since I took the job, the fact that we had 27,000 people show up for my press conference, which didn’t really have much to do with me, but had to do with what BBN is. Forever in my life, I’ll be grateful for all those people that trekked from all over, from wherever, stood in line forever to come here. It’s hard to explain how grateful I am for that.

“And then I think about, from day one, that being the environment here. And then I think about these graduated super seniors, and what they did for us last year and the ride that they took us all on and how they were willing to jump in with their whole hearts into, not just being great players here and committed on the court, but also embracing this community.”

Pope clearly has a full understanding of what it means to hold the position he does. He knows that a self-assessed B grade isn’t going to be acceptable moving forward. We’ll bet on him making the necessary changes in year two.

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