When the Kentucky Wildcats and men’s head basketball coach John Calipari parted ways after the 2023-24 season, it marked the end of a 15-year partnership that saw the Wildcats return to prominence.
Calipari took the team to three Final Fours, seven Elite Eights, and won the 2012 NCAA Championship. The title was Kentucky’s first since 1998.
While Calipari is gone, he didn’t go far. Days after parting ways with Kentucky, the 65-year-old signed a deal to become the head coach of the Arkansas Razorbacks, one of Kentucky’s rivals.
The Wildcats didn’t wait long to fill their coaching vacancy, luring Mark Pope away from the BYU Cougars and naming him the head coach. Pope played for Kentucky from 1994-96 and won the NCAA Championship under Rick Pitino. Despite not necessarily having the lineage and pedigree of a coach like Calipari, who had achieved success with UMass and Memphis before joining the Wildcats, Pope knows what’s at stake and is ready to lead Big Blue Nation.
“I’m really working hard to learn the job because there’s no job like it. One thing I know for sure, it’s the greatest job in all of basketball, and there’s no place I’d rather be,” Pope said earlier this week at his first Kentucky media day.
In his five seasons as BYU’s head coach, Pope went 110-52 and took the team to the NCAA Tournament twice.
Despite the challenge of being Kentucky’s head coach, Pope is ready to face it head on.
“I know those things for a fact, and I think it is going to be certainly the most challenging thing I’ve done in my career as a player or a coach; even more challenging than surviving Coach Pitino. which is saying something. But I’ve definitely learned that that’s true. I expected that to be the case when I got here,” Pope added.
Kentucky opens its season on November 4 against the Wright State Raiders.
