What's up with these early deficits? Mark Pope singles out fatigue, focus and Vanderbilt 'turning up the heat'

Kentucky has earned a bad reputation for digging early holes, the Wildcats finding themselves down big before fighting back in the second half. No matter how frustrating, it’s been a successful strategy at times with some wildly entertaining and joy-filled wins. Others haven’t been so favorable, ugly starts turning into uglier finishes and losses.

The numbers are all over the place:

• Duke – Down 9 (HALF), 77-72 W
• Clemson – Down 7 (HALF), 70-66 L
• Gonzaga – Down 16 (HALF), 90-89 OT W
• Ohio State – Down 9 (HALF), 85-65 L
• Florida – Down 11 (11:13 1H), 106-100 W
• Georgia – Down 13 (HALF), 82-69 L
• Texas A&M – Down 7 (8:22 1H), 81-69 W
• Alabama – Down 8 (14:31 1H), 102-97 L

Win, loss, win, loss, win, loss, win, loss. That brings us to Saturday when the Cats found themselves down 14 points at halftime following a back-and-forth start inside Memorial Gymnasium. Up two (23-21) with 7:49 to go, drowning going into the break as the game flipped on its head.

Two different teams out there with two opposite levels of success.

“Kind of the flow of the game, I thought we were solid. We were really solid,” Pope said of the opening segments in Nashville. “(Number) one (Jason Edwards) got going early, but aside from that, we were really solid kind of on both ends of the floor and the game had a flow to it. … I wasn’t disappointed with how it got started, I thought there was good focus.

“I wish we had an answer to (number) one earlier, but the flow of the game was still okay.”

What went wrong from there to put Kentucky in yet another overwhelming hole?

“We haven’t started slow, it’s that second 10 minutes of the first half that has plagued us a little bit,” Pope said. “I think we get a little fatigued. We’re really — our bench is a little bit disintegrated, so we’ve got some fatigue out there. That’s an issue. Maybe some focus issues, some credit to Vanderbilt for turning up the heat.

“… Then we got punished a little bit on the offensive glass, I’m disappointing that happened. Then the pressure — the pressure of their pressure kind of kicked in. The second 10 minutes of the first half, that was a debacle.”

To their credit, the Cats stormed back to not only make it a game, but take a seven-point lead with 8:39 to go. They had all of the momentum, then unraveled again down the stretch to miss out on the comeback win, leading to a 74-69 loss.

After a 4-4 start in games Kentucky fell behind by as few as seven and as many as 16 — 18 if you count the early second-half bucket for Gonzaga out in Seattle — the loss at Vanderbilt broke the tie on Saturday.