Kentucky has been a second-half team for majority of the 2025-26 season. In the two comeback games against LSU and Tennessee, they erased a 17-point deficit to take home the win. First halves have seen some of the worst of Kentucky basketball. Last game, Mark Pope’s team got beat 19-12 on the glass in the first half, but also 10-0 on offensive rebounds.

Tennessee also had 16 points in the paint and 10 points off turnovers to Kentucky’s zero. This has been a trend for Kentucky as they have scored only 37.1 points in the first half this season, which ranks outside of the top 100. To fix the slow starts, coach Pope is considering a change in the pre-game routine.

“We actually felt great going at halftime down 11,” Pope joked after the Tennessee game. “It’s the first time we’ve only been down 11 in like a month, right? So, we felt like we won the first half which is weird, but it’s the Kentucky way right now.” The reality is, the second-half magic won’t sustain for the rest of the season, and Pope needs some solutions regarding their first halves. To start with, he mentioned considering changing the pregame routine.

“We would love to have better results in the first half,” he said on the “Mark Pope Show”. “We think it’ll help us long term, but some of the strengths of this team actually lead them to disrupting a team as the game goes on, and so we’re attacking from both those scenarios. I think we’ll get better and better and better, but yes, all those things are on the table. We’ve actually talked to the team about changing.”

In January last year, Pope laid out a pretty straightforward pre-game routine that his squad follows. “We’re pretty consistent. It involves a bunch of prep for shoot-around, a bunch of meetings with staff, and then a step away. We’ll all take an hour and kind of just do something non-basketball completely, and then have a pregame meal. I still try to squeeze in a power nap, a 27-minute NASA power nap,” Pope said.

That sleep can be a pro as well as a con. Research has shown that the NASA nap, which Pope mentions, causes 54% increase in alertness and a 34% increase in performance on the job. However, it can also cause sleep inertia for some people. That is short-term grogginess immediately after waking up.

Each player requires different things to mentally and physically prepare for the game ahead. And the schedule should be tailored with that in mind. “Just the way we do our 40 minutes before tip, and so we’re considering all those things, and I think we’ll get better and better,” Pope concluded. There is no point in working inefficiently, especially after the program spent a reported $22 million on building this roster. Even after these wins, the return on investment is still not enough. Yet even as their first-half performance raises questions, another part of Kentucky’s game has quietly begun to stabilize.

Mark Pope Unsurprised by Their Three-Point Success

Mark Pope has had multiple problems to deal with this season, one of them being their 3 point efficiency. In December, they were a poor shooting team. Against the top teams, they were even worse. Mark Pope‘s squad was a combined 24 % from downtown against Louisville, Michigan State, North Carolina, Gonzaga, and Indiana.

Cut to today, they are now starting to flower as far as their shooting is concerned. Slowly but surely, the Kentucky team is catching up to what Mark Pope hoped it would be.

“The numbers work themselves out over time,” he said. “It doesn’t really help you in any particular specific moment in a particular game, but, listen — we can make the numbers say whatever we want them to say. We can dive so deep into analytics you chase your tail for days, but there are some pure things like that where you just expect that guys that can make shots eventually make shots.”

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Even when they weren’t making shots, Pope maintained that it would eventually come. “We have guys that are (making shots) consistently in the mid-70s, that have not exploded onto the scene in games yet. That’s just a matter of time,” He had said. The team employs the Noah system, which calculates the shooting accuracy in practice. At the time, that had not yet translated. Pope knows the law of averages and its now time to collect what he lost.