According to Matt Norlander of CBS Sports, Kentucky is college basketball’s most disappointing team so far this season.
“Kentucky is CBB’s most disappointing team to start the season and Mark Pope is now facing his first crisis as the coach of his alma mater,” Norlander said in a post on X last night.
Here is an excerpt from Norlander’s article about the game:
What Michigan State did to Kentucky and its roster worth a reported $20 million-plus was no joke. The 12th-ranked Wildcats were outshot, out-hustled, out-schemed and outplayed by the 17th-ranked Spartans. Mark Pope’s had only a few head-scratching losses in his 41 games running the program. Tuesday night’s defeat was alarmingly bad, the worst of his young tenure.
It was also the first time Pope ever coached against a Tom Izzo team, and boy did it look like it.
“The No. 1 failure of communication is assuming you’ve done it,” Pope told CBS Sports prior to Tuesday’s loss, later adding, “words mean different things to all of us. Experience to attach those words to, they mean something very different.”
The words would prove prophetic, because Kentucky is out of sorts and Pope is taking on all the blame. His messaging is obviously not getting through. We’re still more than a week from Thanksgiving. Kentucky has more than enough time to get itself right.
But it is the most disappointing team in college basketball through the first two and a half weeks of the season.
