Ever since Mark Pope stepped in after John Calipari, people haven’t stopped comparing the two. It’s natural, Calipari ran the program for so long that anyone who followed him was bound to be measured against that legacy. And when someone like Bruce Pearl, who spent years coaching against Calipari, shares his thoughts, people pay attention.
“Interesting perspective! Cal’s teams always played hard and usually great on D. Mark runs great stuff, they just can’t shoot, are soft inside, and banged up. In coaching, when you winning, they afraid you going to leave, and when you losing, they packin your bags,” said Bruce Pearl, giving his honest opinion on the whole scenario.
Pearl is not the first to approach the comparison, though.
Darius Miller, too, a national champ and a Kentucky native himself, also broke down what sets Mark Pope apart from John Calipari in June of this year.
Praising Pope’s intentional game and analytics, Miller said, “I love Coach Pope, I do. I love his approach to the game — I think he’s a genius when it comes to basketball.”
“Everything is very intentional,” he said. “The game’s changed a lot since back in the day — now, you have analytics and a lot of different things that go into the game. I can just tell and see his approach, he treats it like a science.”
“Everything is down to the minor detail, but it puts you in a good position to showcase your game inside of a structured environment.”
Calipari’s style, on the other hand, trusted his high-end recruits to read the moment and play with creativity rather than rigid structure. “There was a lot of freedom inside of Cal’s system,” Miller added. “That allowed you to see some of the greatness of John Wall, Eric Bledsoe, Jamal Murray — different guys that could express themselves on the court.”
Now, Calipari had a record of 35-3 in his first season, and Pope took the team to a sweet sixteen with a 24-12 record. It wasn’t bad for his inaugural season. However, coming into 2025-26, expectations were higher, especially because of $22 million the program spent on the roster. A 5-4 start, losing to Gonzaga, Louisville, Michigan State, and North Carolina, is simply unacceptable for fans who only care about a championship now.
Not to forget that one thing most Kentucky fans still appreciated about John Calipari, long after the relationship had clearly run its course, was how reliably he beat Louisville. He owned that rivalry. Calipari went 13–3 against the Cardinals, and his last two wins in the Battle of the Bluegrass were blowouts that added up to a 42-point margin.
That’s part of why the first major test of the 2025–26 season hit so hard. Mark Pope’s team fell behind Louisville by 20 at one point and eventually lost, 96–88. Now, there are losses Kentucky fans can tolerate. A stumble in November? Maybe. A tough road game? Sometimes. But losing to Louisville is never one of the acceptable ones, and it never comes without a statewide meltdown across every corner of the internet.
And once things start spiraling on the court at a place like Kentucky, everything else becomes harder to manage. Pope didn’t exactly help himself afterward. Still frustrated by the loss, fans bristled when Pope offered what sounded like the beginning of an explanation, but not the explanation itself.
“I’m not ready to tell the story yet, but at some point, we will talk in detail about our pregame experience at Louisville,” Pope said. “It was out of character for us. I don’t want our guys to be run by their emotion; I want them to be able to focus their emotion.”
The reaction was immediate. Pope’s reaction felt evasive, and that never plays well in a program like Kentucky. And that’s exactly when the comparisons became louder, with fans even calling for Pearl to return from retirement and save the state.
The season may only get worse
Mark Pope put together a roster built around defenders and tough, physical wings, meant to rewrite last year’s story. The trade-off was supposed to be obvious: maybe the offense dips a bit, but the defense and grit elevate everything else.
Instead, what he has is a team that can’t get stops regularly, giving up 85 points per game to Power Four opponents, and a team that doesn’t move the ball, whose assist numbers fall apart in every big matchup. The Wildcats are also unable to shoot well enough to survive dry spells, sitting at a 53% effective field goal rate and 31.9% from three, even with five buy games propping up the stats.
And yes, Pope has tried a lot; sending players to run stairs at Memorial, making them do the infamous ’17’ drill, tossing guys back into blowouts to test their effort, spending 45 minutes in the locker room after Michigan State, and shuffling rotations nonstop. Yet, nothing has landed.
The same problems keep showing up: slow starts, bad shots, players driving into crowds and ignoring open teammates, no help when someone gets clipped by a screen, basically no edge, and, as DeMarcus Cousins put it, “no heart.”
Thanks to that, Kentucky is now 5–4, 0–4 against real Power Four teams, with a 35-point loss to Gonzaga and a double-digit loss to Michigan State. And with the SEC being down this season, their margin for error is even smaller because there aren’t many chances for quality wins.
Four games remain in December. If they drop even one, they enter SEC play at 8–5, and will likely need something like 12–6 in the conference just to feel comfortable on Selection Sunday. And after studying the evidence we have till now, that seems unlikely.
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