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At least in the coaching carousel, the term “blue blood” has never meant less.
That’s the only logical conclusion one can draw from the Kentucky Wildcats’ rapid-fire search to replace John Calipari, who shocked the college basketball world earlier this week by fleeing Lexington for the Arkansas Razorbacks job. Big, bad Kentucky, one of the most tradition-rich teams and potentially the most financially rich program in big-time college basketball, swung and missed at its big targets and landed on a coach who has never won a men’s NCAA tournament game.
There are many positive things that can be said about reported new Wildcats head coach Mark Pope. He’s without question a sharp basketball mind, building one of the more intricate offenses in the country with the BYU Cougars. He coached the Cougars to three top-20 KenPom finishes in five years, two more than Calipari coached Kentucky to in that period (though that may say more about Calipari than Pope, in this conversation). He has won at a place with as limited a recruiting pool as any in Division I, a feat even more impressive after BYU’s move to the Big 12 in 2023–24, He was an excellent player in Lexington, part of the 1996 national championship team that is royalty in town forever. Pope was likely due for a better job than the one he had at BYU.
But Kentucky? The same Kentucky that, not 12 hours before news of this hire broke, was rumored to be throwing around $100 million to try to sway two-time defending national champion Dan Hurley from the UConn Huskies to Lexington? A program that essentially ran Calipari, a title-winning coach who has taken three schools to Final Fours and produced more pros than anyone in college basketball over the last decade, out of town? Kentucky prides itself on being bigger, better and more serious about basketball than anyone else and wants to hire … BYU’s coach, who has advanced in the NCAA tournament as many times as this writer has?
