Why Kentucky’s Struggles Are Putting Mark Pope on a Dangerous Path

As John Calipari thrives at Arkansas, the Wildcats are losing games, blowing leads and struggling to play with effort.

Is Kentucky head coach Mark Pope on the hot seat? / Jordan Prather-Imagn Images

It was only three months and a handful of days ago that Mark Pope referred to his 2025–26 Kentucky men’s basketball roster as “a beautiful Ferrari” that he couldn’t wait to take for a spin. 

Fifteen games into the season, it looks more like a beater sedan … with a driver still on his learner’s permit. 

The Wildcats, with what Sports Illustrated sources believe to be the highest-paid roster in college basketball, are now 9–6 overall and 0–2 in SEC play. The latest embarrassment? A home loss to a middling Missouri, blowing an eight-point lead with under five minutes to go to bring out the boo birds yet again. The so-called Ferrari has three 15-plus-point losses, two late blown leads at Rupp Arena and analytically is worse than Tulsa, George Washington and Wake Forest in games against teams outside of Quad 4. 

At this point in the season, giving Kentucky anything more than a coin flip’s odds to make the NCAA tournament would be too generous. And big picture, Pope is just 10–10 in his first 20 SEC games, with six of those losses by double figures and four at home. He also has no commits yet in the class of 2026. As cathartic as Pope’s first season was for Kentucky fans desperate for a change from the John Calipari era, Year 2 has been more car crash than joy ride. 

And all this is happening while Calipari, essentially chased out of town by the steaming temperature in Lexington after a pair of astonishing NCAA tournament upsets, has Arkansas looking more like the Kentucky teams Wildcat fans became used to in his heyday. Point guard Darius Acuff, who Calipari started recruiting while still at Kentucky, is electric to watch, the type of fast, creative NBA-caliber point guard who Cal’s best Kentucky teams always had. Sixth man Meleek Thomas might be one-and-done bound, too. Four-man Trevon Brazile is an electric athlete who plays well above the rim. The Hogs have three losses, all close games on road or neutral floors against top-15 opponents. Oh, and Calipari beat Pope at Rupp last season before going just as deep in the NCAA tournament as Kentucky did.

This is not to suggest that Kentucky was wrong in letting Calipari walk out the door. Relationships sometimes run their course, and there’s plenty of evidence that Kentucky’s and Calipari’s had. Getting out of the Lexington bubble with a fresh audience for his larger-than-life persona may well have been the best thing for Calipari’s career, too. But rewind the calendar two years, when Kentucky had perhaps the sport’s most electric backcourt and a pair of top-10 picks coming off the bench. Can anyone say confidently that Kentucky basketball is in a better place today than it was then? If not, how can Pope’s first 51 games in charge be viewed as anything other than a failure? Especially with Arkansas (coached by Calipari) and BYU (the program Pope left Kentucky for) both ahead of where Kentucky is right now? 

Kentucky forward Mo Dioubate gets double-teamed by Missouri guard Anthony Robinson II and forward Mark Mitchell. / Matt Stone/Courier Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

And if all that’s the case, it’s inevitable that things need to look different for Kentucky in 2026–27. Barring a truly catastrophic finish, that doesn’t mean firing Pope. It does, however, mean structural changes to how the staff looks around him. That starts with a general manager to help lead roster construction efforts alongside Pope. Last season, Kentucky was still playing in the NCAA tournament when its first portal addition (Tulane wing Kam Williams) committed. Recruitments happen faster than ever in the portal, and if the football cycle is any indication, the pace may ratchet up even further this year. Asking coaches already in charge of scouting, game planning and player development to also be handling all recruiting efforts isn’t realistic. 

Pope told reporters in December he has had exploratory conversations with multiple potential candidates, but was noncommittal about making a hire or the timeline that would come with that. One can only wonder if these latest setbacks against Missouri and Alabama speed up the timeline. North Carolina’s hire of Jim Tanner as its GM was made official in late February last year. If the process runs much longer than that, any new GM’s impact on the 2026–27 roster could be limited with the portal opening in late March. That timing is also impacted by who the hire is; the less in the weeds the candidate is with the current landscape (i.e., someone from the NBA), the more runway before the portal is likely needed.

Whoever’s involved in this year’s spring roster build will be tasked with a fairly significant overhaul. In a best-case scenario, Kentucky at least brings back point guard Jaland Lowe (hopefully healthier after nagging shoulder trouble) and center Malachi Moreno (who could emerge on NBA boards with a strong finish). A handful of role players seem likely enough to return around them. But the Wildcats this season lack both star power and the type of skill that helped Pope win big at BYU and succeed in his first season at Kentucky. Costly portal whiffs on targets like Yaxel Lendeborg (starring at Michigan) and Lamar Wilkerson (leading Indiana in scoring) will go down as the story of the 2025 portal cycle as much as overpaying Denzel Aberdeen or Mo Dioubate will. 

But perhaps more important than anything for Pope’s future at Kentucky is him ensuring that this season’s issues getting his Wildcats to play with consistent effort are an aberration. Pope is the head coach at Kentucky in large part because he understands Big Blue Nation and what it means to put on a Kentucky uniform more than just about anyone. This season’s roster has rarely seemed to understand the gravity of that, and blooper reels of low-effort plays have exploded on social media multiple times. For one year, that can be chalked up to the wrong guys or a bad locker room. Beyond that? It becomes a Pope problem. 

It’s usually best not to overreact to individual regular-season college basketball games. After all, Calipari lost to UNC Wilmington and South Carolina in his final season at Kentucky, last year’s title-winning Florida lost to Missouri and Georgia, the season before it was UConn that managed a defeat to Seton Hall. But it’s hard not to call what’s happening to Kentucky right now a trend, and it’s one that has the chance to quickly heat up Pope’s seat and send a once-promising tenure into toxicity. 

In 1980, Ronald Reagan famously asked voters if they were better off than they were four years ago as a referendum on Jimmy Carter’s single term in office. It won’t take long for Kentucky fans to start asking the same question about their basketball program if things don’t turn around quickly. And as things stand today, the answer to that isn’t a favorable one for Pope. 

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