A week ago, Kentucky suffered a humiliating loss. Here’s what happened the next morning
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The last time Mark Pope’s Kentucky Wildcats stepped onto the basketball court, things got ugly.
They traveled to Nashville with the goal of bringing the SEC Tournament championship trophy back to Lexington. Instead, they left town humiliated. The Cats were eliminated by way of a 99-70 loss to Alabama in the tournament quarterfinals.
It was the program’s most lopsided defeat in the history of that event, one that Kentucky has traditionally dominated. It was one of UK’s most uneven losses — anywhere — in years.
That night, Pope — a head coach who projects positivity and has typically told his team to emotionally move past any game, big wins and bad losses alike, immediately — said he hoped his Wildcats let this one linger.
“I hope it’s really hard,” he said of the grieving process that would follow.
A couple of days later — at the team’s Selection Sunday watch party — Pope was asked about how that process had been going since Friday night.
“I’m glad none of you were there Saturday morning,” he said. “... Friday night was really, really hard. Saturday morning was really, really hard. And you go through a grieving process. You do. And there’s so many things that I’m not good at. I’m not a good loser. I’m just not good at it. I’m not mature about it. And it hurts, man. And it hurts our guys.”
Pope explained that some of his players were “literally” hurt — Lamont Butler, Collin Chandler, Otega Oweh and Travis Perry all endured various injuries in Nashville, though all will play in the NCAA Tournament starting Friday night — and everyone on the team was “emotionally” hurt.
“But the one thing about this group is (they’re) really resilient, and we’re very intentional about it,” he said. “So we suffered together that night. We suffered together in a huge way that morning. And then we closed the door on it. We resolved it.”
So, what exactly happened that morning?
The Wildcats had an open locker room Thursday — about 24 hours before their first NCAA Tournament game with Troy — and the very mention of that Saturday morning drew looks that ran the spectrum of emotion.
Jaxson Robinson, who has been ruled out for the remainder of this season with a wrist injury that ended his college basketball career, remains a locker room leader for these Wildcats. He’s the only player on the team that had played for Pope before this season. Robinson was with the coach for two years at BYU before following him to Lexington.
Robinson knows Pope better than any player in that room. His eyes widened when the subject of Saturday morning came up. Asked if he’d ever seen Pope quite like that before, Robinson paused a second to think. He ultimately shook his head, a slight grin on his face.
“Ummm. I don’t think so,” he said. “I think that might have been the maddest I’ve seen Coach Pope.”
Moving past the Alabama loss
Typically — no matter how far they are from home or how late the tipoff — the Wildcats fly back to Lexington the same night as a game. But the loss to Alabama in the SEC Tournament was an exception.
The Cats played the late game — it wasn’t finished until after midnight Eastern time — but, more importantly, they weren’t prepared to leave.
“If you win you keep playing,” Chandler said. “So nobody had packed their bags.”
Chandler’s point: the Wildcats expected to win, even though they were shorthanded — with Butler sidelined due to a shoulder injury — and even though Alabama had already beaten them twice before this season. When they not only lost, but lost badly — outscored 54-32 in the second half — the feelings were raw.
The team stayed in Nashville that night. Pope said he and the coaching staff were up talking and looking at film until 3 or 4 in the morning. After a few hours of restless (if any) sleep, they gathered the team for breakfast. And then came the airing of grievances.
“He was very upset,” said sophomore forward Brandon Garrison. “Just because I feel like we didn’t put up the fight that we’ve been putting up for the fans this season. So (he was) very disappointed in us. … So we had a tough team meeting. He got on us a little bit.”
Garrison referred to the scene as an act of “tough love” — one that he said was necessary for the moment. That was a sentiment shared across the locker room. Yes, it was difficult to sit through. That doesn’t mean the Wildcats didn’t deserve to hear it.
“It was definitely intense,” Perry said. “But I feel like it was definitely needed for us, just to kind of come out there, refocus, not really sulk on it, recognize what we did wrong, and get focused for this next game that we have.
“Obviously, we wanted to win that game. We wanted to win the whole tournament over there. But the next morning, there’s nothing you can do about it. So we were just trying to focus on the next week.”
But first, Pope — as he said Friday night at the arena — wanted that Bama loss soak in.
“When you lose in that way, I think it’s really hard to brush it off, especially as a head coach,” Perry said. “So just kind of making it a little bit personal for us — to kind of linger with us and motivate us a little bit for this week — I think was what he was trying to do there.”
Pope did a lot of the talking. But the players talked, too.
“Well, I think there were a lot of learning moments in that game for us,” Chandler said. “And so I think it was good. We got together as a team and pointed those out and talked those out. And, yeah, I mean, the environment is a little bit of tough love, but I think we’re all accustomed to that. And we’re ready to take it as a learning experience and still take the positive out of the loss we had.”
One by one, they were prompted to speak.
“Because he makes us talk, even if we don’t want to,” Garrison said. “He forces us to talk.”
The sophomore — who played his first season at Oklahoma State before transferring to Kentucky — feels like he’s grown during his time in Lexington. He credited Pope for that. He said having to speak up in those team sessions has made him a better player and a more mature person. And Garrison, who has been expounding more in recent weeks in his own interview sessions, says it’s made the Wildcats’ bond stronger.
“I feel like it brings a team together,” he said. “Coach Pope has always been like that. Since we met him, like, he always gets us out of our comfort zone. You know me. Like, I feel like I’ve been talking more, expressing myself more, just because of him. He’ll make us talk in meetings and stuff like that. And I just feel like it’s good, like, outside of basketball. Just for life.”
Ready for the NCAA Tournament
The other players did talk throughout this meeting, Robinson acknowledged. But …
“Most of it was Coach Pope,” he said.
On his radio show Monday night, Pope talked about how “frustrating” and “disappointing” the second half of the Alabama game had been. He used the words “animated” and “intense” to describe the team meeting that followed the next morning.
The point, the coach explained — and all of the players, by Thursday afternoon, had clearly taken to heart — wasn’t to rub their noses in the defeat or make them feel bad. It was a chance to learn from their mistakes and an opportunity to showcase the urgency of this moment.
“I think it was very needed, obviously, after a very tough loss to Alabama,” Robinson said. “I think the team has responded really well the last couple of days. So I’m excited for them to get back on the court, because I know they’re all dying to get out and compete again.”
Garrison said Saturday morning in Nashville was a chance to bounce back. There, the Cats exorcised the bad feelings of that Friday night so they could go into the next week rejuvenated.
“Just emptying all that bad baggage we have from that game and focus on Troy,” Garrison said.
The players didn’t just talk. They watched clips of what had gone wrong. As a group, they soaked in the feeling that — if they lose again — the season is over.
“It’s definitely win or go home now. There’s no more second chances,” Chandler said. “So that’s, I think, at the forefront of our mind. It’s kind of when the fight or flight kicks in — that it really is the end of our season if we lose. So yeah, I think that’s fueling us.”
Robinson said some of the guys were “a little shaken up” as they walked out of that room.
“But, I mean, that’s just how it goes,” he said. “That’s how teams are. It’s how basketball works. You get knocked down, you gotta get back up on your feet. It’s as simple as that.”
And now, it’s time to see how the Wildcats will respond.
It’s been a special season to this point — wins over Duke and Louisville, two victories over Tennessee, several others against ranked opponents — but this Friday night matchup against Troy, one week removed from their worst defeat, is what it’s all been building toward.
And the Cats will be going into it with fresh minds.
“It really is, legitimately, the five steps of grieving,” Pope said. “… And it’s a really important process you go through, with the main result of doing two things. One, you want to learn everything you possibly can from that experience. If we don’t take advantage of learning from every experience we have, then we’re missing out. And, two, you’ve got to get through the grieving process to get to healing and (being) constructive. And our guys are unbelievable at it.
“And by the time we jumped on the plane, there had been a shift in our hearts, in our focus, in our togetherness. There was a diminished kind of pain and anguish, and it was being refilled with excitement and passion and determination as we move forward in the tournament.”
This story was originally published March 21, 2025 at 4:00 AM with the headline "A week ago, Kentucky suffered a humiliating loss. Here’s what happened the next morning."
