On Friday, April 12th, 2024 BYU coach Mark Pope was hired by the University of Kentucky to become the 7th Head Coach of the University. Mark Pope is a former player for Kentucky, he played in 1994-1996, winning the 1996 National Championship and being the team captain that year. Pope started his playing career at Washington, where he won PAC-10 Freshman of the Year. Two years later, he transferred to Kentucky and cemented his legacy. Pope had a short-tenured career in the NBA, playing ten years for four different teams.
After his playing career ended, he went into the profession of coaching. His coaching career started in 09-10 as an assistant coach at Georgia, he continued as an assistant in 10-11 at Wake Forest before becoming an assistant at BYU from 2011-2015. He would get his first job as a Head Coach at Utah Valley State from 2015 to 2019. Then in 2019 he was offered the Head Coaching position at BYU, and took it. He coached at BYU from 2019-2024 and led them to multiple NCAA tournaments.
Over the last couple of weeks, the Coaching carousel has been in full effect, notably with Arkansas head coach Eric Muscleman leaving Arkansas to become the Head coach at USC. This opened up the Arkansas job and surprisingly Kentucky HC John Calipari expressed interest and eventually got hired by the Razorbacks. This started the biggest head coaching search in College Basketball. Kentucky started by reaching out to coaches like Danny Hurley (UConn head coach who has won back-to-back national championships) and Scott Drew (Baylor head coach who won the 2021 National Championship) and speculation that they reached out to Billy Donovan (former Florida coach who won back to back Championships in 2007-2008). Eventually, though, in a turn of events, Kentucky reached out to Mark Pope, and he didn’t hesitate one bit, taking the job almost immediately. It wasn’t the most popular hire among Kentucky fans when it was first released, but the next morning Kentucky fans rallied and got behind him.
With the news of new head coach Mark Pope taking over, the University of Kentucky released that they would be doing a press conference for him on Sunday, April 14th at 4:30 pm. They originally said sections 11-17 would be open to the public and that they would provide more seating if needed. They had only anticipated 6,000-8,000 people attending, little did they know it would be much more than that.
The doors were planned to open at 3:30, and they were expecting a little bit of a line. However, people started to line up at the doors as early as 12:30. My family and I got there at around 2:30 and the line was already lined up all around downtown Lexington. When they finally opened the doors, sections 11-17 filled up almost immediately. It was insane. Shortly after, the rest of Rupp arena started to fill up as well. The expected crowd of 6-8 thousand people shortly rose to over 20,000. The whole of Rupp Arena was filled up, with people even having to sit on the stairs and stand at the entrance of each section. There were so many people that others had to be turned away. When the conference started, Pope entered the arena on a Bus with multiple former players and coaches, he came out holding up the ‘96 national championship trophy, and Rupp Arena exploded. The atmosphere was almost greater than any game I have ever attended at Rupp. Pope said all the right things that Fans wanted to hear, and quickly became more beloved than he already was.
However, we fans cannot be too quick to give him high expectations and need to be patient with him and how he builds this program. If we get behind Pope and encourage him, we can bring Kentucky back to the true Blue Blood program that they are.
