Mark Pope on Kentucky's comeback vs. Gonzaga: "The people that went to sleep at halftime will be so sad"

For the second game in a row, Kentucky got off to an awful start against a physical team and dug itself into a hole. After trailing Clemson by seven at halftime on Tuesday, the Cats came back to make it a game before coming up just short, prompting Tigers fans to storm the court. On Saturday night, they clawed back from a 16-point halftime deficit vs. No. 7 Gonzaga to not only force overtime but pull off the 90-89 upset, after which “Go Big Blue” chants rained down on Climate Pledge Arena until staffers turned up the music and forced BBN to exit the building.

I think fans would rather this team not get off to such slow starts, but man, the comebacks sure are thrilling. Given the late tipoff time, some of the most disgruntled fans probably even went to bed when the Cats trailed by 16 at half. As Mark Pope said after the game, they missed a heck of a show.

“I think the guys have just been like, ‘Man, we feel like BBN is a little bored so we just want to make it super, super exciting’ and they’re doing it,” Pope quipped. “Late night game. The people that went to sleep at halftime will be so sad.”

After Kentucky’s loss to Clemson, Pope said he was actually encouraged by how hard his team fought in the second half. The same goes for Saturday night’s and then some. The Cats didn’t look like they belonged on the same floor as Gonzaga in the first half, allowing the Bulldogs to score almost at will and coming up empty on the offensive end. The three-point shots still weren’t falling in the second half, but Kentucky was able to get back into the game by driving to the basket, a huge focus of Pope’s halftime talk.

“It was interesting,” he told Tom Leach. “We talked about it at halftime. It takes some courage to get downhill and make plays and kind of get in the guts of the game and play off two feet. It actually takes courage and our guys did it much better.”

Otega Oweh was one of those guys, scoring nine points in the second half and overtime after only scoring four in the first half. After the game, he gave Goose Givens a glimpse into what the halftime locker room was like.

“Just coming together as a group and just saying, we didn’t come all this way out here just to get punked and for us to get embarrassed. Like, we had to have some pride, and we definitely had to show that in the second half and I think we all did.”

“We just had to stay even keeled,” Oweh added. “In games like this, the whole entire world’s watching. So, not a lot of people will believe, but as long as the people in the circle have belief and just want to go out there and win and just play hard, just forget about the score at the time being, just go out there and do the things that we do and just play hard. And by the time you look up, you’ll see either we won or we put up a fight.”

Against Clemson, the Cats put up a fight. Against Gonzaga, they put up a fight and won.

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