Just when things were looking up for Kentucky, and you felt Mark Pope had reset the team to factory settings, tragedy struck. Vanderbilt popped up, pulled them off the track with a sudden jerk, thrashing them 80-55. However, the result did not surprise NCAA analyst Jeff Goodman, who felt this was a long time coming, looking at the team’s composition.

“Vandy has an elite-level point guard in Tyler Tanner, and Kentucky doesn’t have a point guard. It was going to catch up with them. Like a lot of look at who they beat. Look at who Kentucky beat over this five-game stretch, and a lot of it other than the Tennessee win, kind of like myeahh, and even the Tennessee win, like I think Tennessee is a good team, but they’re not what they’ve been.”

“So for me, Kentucky beat the teams they needed to beat for most parts. That LSU game I mean, LSU’s not very good, and they had to come back from whatever it was 17,18,19 down to beat LSU, so this was what I thought was coming at some point, and this was the night,” said Goodman without flinching.

Vandy does have an exceptional point guard in Tyler Tanner. He is an all-around player who leads the team in points and assists – 17.5 and 5.2, respectively.

Tyler is the top scorer for the team in 7 out of the last 9 games, so you need someone on your team to counter that. And Mark Pope just doesn’t have that option on his team and is hopelessly looking at players to fill that gap. Tay Kinney and Ikenna Alozie’s name is doing the rounds in Pope’s discussions, but nothing concrete has come up yet.

Mark Pope has had his share of victories, but those came against teams that were struggling. LSU 13-7, Ole Miss 11-9, Texas 12-8, and Mississippi State 10-10 aren’t teams that give you that weighted edge, and so when it comes to facing a team that’s on the upper echelon of the conference like Vanderbilt, you get an unpleasant reality check that brings you out of the protective mesh you covered yourself in.

This imminent failure takes us back to the Billy Gillespie era, which had seen a similar debacle. It was head coach Billy Gillespie’s final season in 2008 when No. 24 Vanderbilt hammered Kentucky, 92-53, some 18 years back. And Pope is now reliving that dark past with his roster.

Strategies are not working, and Mark Pope is well aware of that and why his team is suffering, which is why he is taking accountability for what’s going wrong.

Mark Pope owes up to the mistakes made by Kentucky

After getting completely dismantled by Vanderbilt, Kentucky would have to do some serious reassessing of the situation that led them into this predicament. The loss was embarrassing to say the least, and Kentucky literally had to spend its minutes on court trying to catch up to a team that was in no mood to relent.

“It’s important, but we just need to do that to actually engage our team in the game,“ Pope said on the UK Sports Network after Kentucky’s 25-point loss.

“It’s been a space where we’ve been fighting a difficult battle all year long to get our guys to kind of embrace this idea of like being incredibly physical and forceful to earn possessions for teammates. And we didn’t do that at all. (Vandy’s) Switching hurt us. Their physicality hurt us. Their heavy bottoms hurt us. Their volume at the rim hurt us, and we just failed to make the plays that you need to make in that situation, actually combat that,” went on Mark Pope.

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And that was clearly evident. Vanderbilt outplayed Kentucky across every department: FG 40%-32%, 3PT 38%-25%, FT 80%- 56% and so on. There wasn’t one area where Pope got the better of Mark Byington’s team, and that was scary.

Kentucky has made a habit of trailing in games, and that has to change cause the big teams don’t give you the chance to get back. That quote by Mark Pope tells that his team lacks engagement with physicality in games, with a lack of intensity being a result of that. The team now needs to get its act together because its upcoming game is against someone who knows the team like the back of their hand – John Calipari.