Mark Pope will burn his suit and then Kentucky will "come back with a vengeance"

Everything that could go wrong for Kentucky went wrong on Saturday, including the postgame news that Jaxson Robinson is out for the rest of the season. Before Mark Pope shared the disheartening news about Robinson, his Wildcats played poorly against No. 1 Auburn in a 94-78 home loss. Kentucky hit a season-low four 3-pointers to Auburn’s 12, mainly by Miles Kelly, with nine by himself. Turnovers also were costly. Kentucky had a season-high 18 in the loss.

After the game, Pope acknowledged Kentucky’s disappointing performance, calling it a “brutal, terrible, horrible afternoon” in Rupp Arena. “I mean, it was awful. There’s no way around it.”

Pope told radio listeners and the postgame crowd in Rupp Arena that he plans to burn his suit when he gets home. “I know today was brutal. I feel it. You feel it. We’re all probably gonna go home and burn all of our clothes. That’s fine.”

Moving forward, Kentucky hosts LSU on Senior Night in three days, before the regular-season finale at No. 14 Missouri. That’s only two games to get right before the SEC and NCAA Tournaments.

Pope says hang on, BBN, because brighter days are ahead.

“We have a really good team, and we have beautiful kids we’re cheering for, and we’re 4-3 right now against the top five ranked teams in the country. We have a winning record against top-five ranked teams, and we have great stuff here coming up, like, this team is going to come back with a vengeance on Tuesday night, then we’re going to go play an incredibly difficult, challenging road game to finish conference season, and then we’re moving on to the SEC Tournament. We’re going to Nashville, and it’s going to be fireworks of epic proportions.

“We’ve got a really good team, and we’ve got good stuff ahead.”

“You can’t move on unless you face the truth.”

Pope and his Wildcats won’t run from reality after a 16-point home loss. He said there would be conversations about how bad Kentucky played against Auburn and the missed opportunity on their home floor.

“We talked about it,” he told Tom Leach, who asked what Pope said to his team after the game. “We didn’t play well. Incredibly disappointing for us. And there could be 100 different reasons for that, and a lot of the credit goes to Auburn. They’re clearly a terrific team, but there’s so much that we left on the table, and we have so much better basketball in us than that.

“We talk about everything,” he added. “The one thing about a locker room is it is a place of truth, and you can’t move on unless you face the truth, so we talk about everything, and our guys talk to each other about everything. So, yeah, we are in the process of having hard conversations.”

They have a couple of days for hard conversations, and then it’s back to Rupp Arena to play LSU in the home finale.