Of course Mark Pope went to a referee symposium (and other Pope thoughts)

After a lopsided season-opener and two lopsided exhibitions before that, we’re basking in the glow of the beginning of the Mark Pope era. It’s not just the basketball on the court that is refreshing; the postgame press conferences are almost as fun as we learn more about Pope as a coach and his unique approach to the game. Last night gave us some more great examples, starting with the moment he sat down at the podium.

“Does this seat feel super short?” Pope said as he looked out at reporters with the mic at mouth level. “Can you guys see me? All right. I like it. I feel smaller!”

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That wholesome moment was just the start. During his opening statement, Pope said he was proud of his team’s “intentional” start to the game, breaking out some fancy terms from his three-year stint at Columbia Medical School.

“We always talk with our team about kind of operating their frontal cortex and not their limbic system; sometimes that’s a really important balance. These guys certainly did that well. They had exactly the right kind of makeup to start the game.”

Google tells me that the frontal cortex is the region of the brain responsible for many complex cognitive functions, including decision-making, reasoning, and social appropriateness, whereas the limbic system is dominated by emotion. You don’t really get a lot of heated moments or questionable calls in 40-point wins, but Pope gave a good example of how he uses his frontal cortex when they arise. He attended a referee symposium several years ago and said that after sitting in on a training session, his perspective on officiating changed.

“I started maybe 10 years ago, maybe eight years ago, going to the referee symposium. The West Coast referees. It’s like two days and they sit in a room and they watch some of the most difficult clips that they’ve faced from the last season to kind of prepare them. It’s their training session. You sit there and you watch a block-charge call, for example, the low-hanging fruit example. They will watch it in slow motion, watch it five times, watch it 10 times. They will take a poll on whether it was a block or a charge and invariably 150 people would raise their hand and say it was a block and 149 people, referees, these are usually the best referees in the world, would call and say it’s a charge. 

“For me, I’m going to – and sometimes I lose my mind. I got a couple of Ts last year — but for me I want our players to feel the same way that I do, and that’s the referees actually have no power over whether we win or lose the game. The calls are really hard. If I can be disciplined and keep my focus on the game, I think it helps our players be disciplined and help them focus on the game, come what may from the refs.”

It also helps that Pope can leave the yelling to someone else: his wife. Lee Anne is famous for giving the refs hell if the foul count is uneven, a practice she learned from her mother.

“What we’ve done is all had a serious meeting with all the players and all the staff and we just agreed that we are going to let Lee Anne handle the refs and we will just work on the game,” Pope quipped.

Speaking of Lee Anne, Pope said he’s too locked in to fully appreciate his first win as Kentucky’s head coach, but he’s looking forward to processing it with his wife over a soda pop once the dust settles.

“They asked me this on TV postgame and I’m just going to give you bad answers. We are just lost in the game. At some point, Lee Anne and I are going to find some quiet moments and sit back and drink a soda sometime in the next month or two or nine months or sometime. I just look forward to that moment and we will really take it in then; it’s so deeply special to me. But right now, you know, we’ve got work to do.”

And let’s use our frontal cortexes while we do it.

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