Mark Pope needed a pep talk before Kentucky's first NCAA Tournament game

Nerves were high in Big Blue Nation ahead of Kentucky’s first-round game vs. Troy on Friday. The Cats failed to make it out of the first round in two of the last three tournaments, and the season they did, they lost in the next game, making it six years since Kentucky has reached the Sweet 16.

Mark Pope was not part of any of those teams, but he had nerves of his own. Pope had lost his previous two NCAA Tournament games, with No. 6 seed BYU being upset by No. 11 seed Duquesne in the first round last year; however, for him, the pressure of wanting to get his first NCAA Tournament win was nothing compared to the pressure of trying to get Kentucky out of the first round to avoid a nightmare scenario. After Kentucky’s win over Troy last night, Pope admitted that at times this week, he almost cracked under it.

“It’s a battle all of us face and never totally win,” Pope said of how he tried to keep his players locked in, even when Troy kept the game close in the first half. “We talk about being present all the time, but that’s a battle. It’s not something you do 100 percent. It’s every single minute, you’re trying to talk yourself off a ledge.

“For me also. I’m fighting so hard to keep bringing myself back to not taking on the magnitude of the history and all the things that are just too big. They all turn out to be distractions.”

That anxiety was palpable. Pope credited assistant coach Mikhail McLean for helping him work through it the day before Kentucky’s first game.

“I’ll compliment my staff. Mikhail McLean grabbed me yesterday and didn’t cuss me out, but he settled me down. He’s like, ‘Coach, we’ve had more time to prepare than we normally have. We’re too much in the weeds. You’ve got to breathe right now, and we’re going to be good. Just be in this moment.’

“That’s how a team works together. That’s how a staff works together.”

The players needed a pep talk too at times last night. We’ll never know what Mark Pope told his team during the media timeout when Troy cut Kentucky’s lead to two with four minutes to go in the first half, but it worked. The Cats ended the half on a 10-3 run to take an eight-point lead into the locker room. After Troy cut it to six with 13 minutes to go in the second half, Collin Chandler and Brandon Garrison led Kentucky on a 15-0 run to push the lead into comfortable territory for good.

“I was really proud of our guys being able to just kind of lose themselves in this moment,” Pope said. “We talked about it before the game, three things. It’s true for all the guys. There’s nowhere in the world they would have rather been than to be right here tonight. There is nothing they would have rather been doing than playing in this game tonight. And there’s nobody in the world they’d rather be doing it with than these guys on this team.”

“Those moments are rare,” Pope added. “Like if I sat anybody down and said, tell me exactly your dream scenario, where you’d like to be, what you’d like to be doing, and who you’d like to be doing it with, it happens very rarely that you’re actually in it with them doing it.”

The cards feel stacked against Kentucky right now with all the injuries they’re dealing with, but let’s hope we get at least a few more of those moments before this run ends.

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