Mark Pope on Kentucky's 20-point loss to Ohio State: "We're going to lose a lot of sleep over this"

Of all the possible outcomes for tonight, this was by far the worst. Kentucky went to New York with a 10-1 record and No. 4 ranking, riding high after a storybook start to the season. The Cats are leaving with a 20-point loss to Ohio State, which lost to Auburn by 38 a week ago and Maryland by 24 ten days before that.

You could almost hear the wheels turning in Mark Pope’s head as he tried to figure out what went wrong vs. the Buckeyes. Kentucky shot a season-low 29.8% from the field, 18.2% from the three-point line. The Cats weren’t much better on the defensive end, allowing Ohio State to score at will most of the game. The Buckeyes controlled the pace almost from start to finish.

Now, Kentucky has ten days off before hosting Brown on New Year’s Eve, the final non-conference game before Florida tips off SEC play in Rupp Arena on January 4. The players will get a few days off to be with their families before reconvening in Lexington on December 26. Tonight showed they could use the break to toughen up, but that’s a lot of time to marinate on a bad loss; for Mark Pope, it’s the worst he’s experienced as a Wildcat in terms of point margin. The 1994-95 team lost to UNC by 13, 74-61, in the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament.

“We’re going to lose a lot of sleep over this, man,” Pope told Tom Leach. “It’s really hard to go into a break this way. We will lose a ton of sleep, but we just have to translate that into great, constructive work with us getting better. And we’ve got to be super specific, and we’ve got to find answers, and we’ve got to learn how to function at a better level when we’re under this particular type of duress.”

When the game got out of hand, Pope said his players reverted to bad habits, particularly on offense (shooting off one foot instead of two is one of them).

“We’re going to get better,” Pope said in his press conference. “These guys are going better, and we’ve just got to keep trusting what we do. We had some defensive struggles tonight and we just fell to pieces offensively, and we just went to our default and our default is not right yet. Our default is still bad habits. And it’s not bad habits coming out of a bad place in guys’ hearts, it’s coming from a great place. It’s coming from a desperation to help their team but we don’t do that by ourselves, and we do it discipline, and we do it the way we do it, by making plays for each other and that’s still not our default, and that’s just a that’s just a trust-building process.”

How long will it take to build that trust? You could hear the urgency in Pope’s voice when he spoke to Tom Leach a few minutes later.

“Well, it can’t come with too much more time; we need to win,” he said. “We have beautiful kids, but it takes an insane amount of discipline when you’re under all the duress that a game like this provides, it takes an enormous amount of discipline to force yourself to not fall into your default and kind of keep making decisions that we make as an offensive team. And we did not do that tonight. We didn’t do it, and I failed to help the guys do that and that’s an issue. It’s an issue we’ve got to solve.”

As bad as tonight was, Pope believes his players will respond, potentially making this a moment we’ll look back on as a catalyst for growth.

“We have an unbelievable group. We have brilliant kids, and we’ll respond in a great way. And if we do this right, then this will be one of the lynchpin moments in the season that changed us and made us get better.”

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