When Mark Pope took the Kentucky basketball job, he said all the right things. He talked about understanding the assignment. He talked about what it means to wear Kentucky across your chest, to play for
Big Blue Nation, to leave a legacy in a place that remembers everything. He wanted each and every player to always remember what playing in Rupp Arena was like, that they would never feel as special on a court as they did in their time in Lexington.
The 2024-25 team lived that.
That group wasn’t the most talented roster Kentucky has ever had. They heard all the jokes. They saw all the “these guys don’t belong at Kentucky” comments. And then they went out and emptied the tank every single night.
Ansley Almonor basically summed up the whole season in one line:
“I’m not really supposed to be here. … God put me in this position.”
Kerr Kriisa breaks his foot, and he’s still trying to get back in transition to contest shots. Amari Williams talked about Kentucky as the place you “always dream of going” and played like it, even on nights where he turned it over or got beat. Lamont Butler played through a shoulder injury and still loved his time here. “Thank you, God! Couldn’t be more grateful… there’s no place like it.”
Andrew Carr walked out of Lexington saying he’d “always bleed blue.”
Eight top-15 wins. A win over the eventual national champion. Every time they got punched, they got back up. When they got blown out at Ole Miss, it wasn’t because they quit. The shots just didn’t fall, but the effort never wavered. They gave it all they had, they never lost the focus of doing something special.
Fast-forward to 2025, and everything feels different.
The roster is bigger, more expensive, more hyped. The portal haul was supposed to be the upgraded, more athletic, more defensive version of last year’s group. Instead, it’s a team that too often looks casual, disconnected, and weirdly detached from the moment.
After losing to Georgetown at Rupp, Otega Oweh admitted the team would be “locked in” when the games really mattered. Then, later he said he had to work on his own effort.
That’s a massive red flag for a senior leader.
At Kentucky, every game matters. Every time you pull that jersey over your head, it’s meaningful. That’s not some old-head cliché, it’s literally the standard. There are only so many minutes in your life where you get to be a Kentucky basketball player. Only a few men and women in history and in the future will get to wear that jersey and compete for BBN. Admitting that you coasted through some of them is basically admitting that you’re inviting the same mentality to show up again later.
And sure enough, here we are. The same issues, slow starts, bad body language, lifeless stretches, keep popping up. The result? Something we almost never see: Kentucky players getting booed by a pro-Kentucky crowd in a neutral-site arena.
Some fans are fine with the boos, some hate it. That’s a reasonable debate; we aren’t here to tell you how to fan. But nobody can deny how loud the frustration has gotten from an increasing population in BBN, and now it’s spilling over nationally.
That’s where Bruce Pearl comes in.
Bruce Pearl just said the quiet part out loud about Kentucky basketball
On TNT, the former Auburn and Tennessee coach, a guy plenty of Kentucky fans wanted when the post-Calipari search started, went out of his way to praise Pope while sending a not-so-subtle message to the locker room.
“Mark Pope is a brilliant offensive coach… He’s a great man. He’s a great leader,” Pearl said. Then he pivoted to the staff and the players: the assistants are the ones with the day-to-day relationships, and those are the guys who need to sit players down and talk about who they’re really playing for.
“That name on the front of the jersey, Kentucky, has got to mean something, and it’s got to mean more than the names on the back,” Pearl added.
That’s the quiet part said out loud.
In the NIL/portal era, a lot of people assume you can’t get that kind of buy-in anymore, that players are brands first and teammates second. But if that’s true, you can’t win big here. Not at Kentucky. Not over time. And last year would have to have been an outlier, something I refuse to believe.
Because Kentucky is bigger than any one player, any one staff, any one recruiting class. It stretches from the mountains in Eastern Kentucky to Land Between the Lakes in the West. It’s grandparents and grandkids sitting in the same living room screaming at the same TV, or listening on the radio. It’s message board meltdowns, and uplifting social media moments.
It’s Rupp, Memorial, Hazard, Pikeville, Paducah, Murray, Owensboro, Elizabethtown, Ashland, and every little gym in this state where a kid dreams he’s in blue. Because they all do. They grow up in their driveways, in their backyards with a ball in their hand and a dream in their mind. They pretend they are taking that final shot to hit a game-winner in front of the fanbase that is much more than just a group of people. It’s a family.
If that doesn’t matter to you, this place will eat you alive.
Pope has shown he can get guys to buy into that. Last year’s group is proof. They weren’t perfect, but they were grateful. They were connected. They wore the criticism, used it, and played together anyway. Hit them hard, and they’d hit back as hard as they could.
This year, the question flips: Can the players meet the standard he laid out? Can they decide that their legacy at Kentucky won’t be eight months of sulking quotes, bad body language, and clips of former stars calling them soft? Because they aren’t, and they don’t have to be remembered that way.
Because Kentucky basketball doesn’t forget.
Ten years from now, fans won’t remember every stat line, who scored the most, or who had the biggest celebration. They will remember whether you fought, whether you cared, and whether that name on the front meant as much to you as it does to them. That is what elevates players to legends, it’s the difference between a one-year rental in the portal to a person etched in the greatest tradition in college basketball.
That part is still in the players’ hands. They have the talent, now the question is do they have the drive? Bruce Pearl is right, the jersey has to mean something, and this team cannot cross that line into the territory of it just being a shirt threaded with letters and numbers. Kentucky basketball is more than that, and it deserves more than that.
Will it get it?
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Drew Holbrook has been covering the Cats for over 10 years. In his free time he enjoys downtime with his family and Premier League soccer. You can find him on X here. Micah 7:7. #UptheAlbion
