With Arkansas and Kentucky both advancing, Mark Pope must outlast John Calipari

With Arkansas and Kentucky both advancing, Mark Pope must outlast John Calipari

Mark Pope got his first career NCAA Tournament win on Friday, but he’ll need to keep winning to end his first year at Kentucky on the right note.

The Kentucky Wildcats, eight-time National Champions, have not made it beyond the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament since 2019. A five-year Sweet 16 drought led John Calipari to flee to Arkansas, and now in his first season, former Wildcats national champion point guard Mark Pope is one win closer to ending it.

On Friday night in Milwaukee, Pope avoided the dreaded first-round upset that ended Coach Cal’s tenure last March notching his first-career NCAA Tournament win 76-57 over 14th-seed Troy. But, with Cal’s Razorbacks also moving on to the second round with a 79-72 victory over Bill Self’s Kansas Jayhawks, Pope needs to keep winning.

It will take more than just one NCAA Tournament run to vindicate Kentucky for parting ways with Cal or Cal for leaving Kentucky, and the success or failure of Pope’s tenure at Kentucky will not come down to a second-round matchup on Sunday against either Illinois or Xavier, but man, will it feel like it. Then, you throw in Cal facing off against St. John’s and Rick Pitino, Pope’s former head coach in Lexington and Cal’s former in-state rival from their years battling at Kentucky and Louisville, and you have the perfect recipe for overreactions.

A Calipari win to finally get him back to the Sweet 16, with the lowest-seeded team he’s ever taken to The Big Dance, over Pitino as a No. 2 seed in his resurgent season at St. John’s with a Pope loss the very next day would be the perfect recipe to cook up some feelings of regret in Big Blue Nation. Especially when you consider that the roster Calipari is winning with at Arkansas would have been nearly identical to what he would have kept together in Lexington.

Cal’s red Wildcats got off to a very slow start, 0-5 in SEC play, but a late-season turnaround has Arkansas looking scary in March. Tennessee transfer Jonas Aidoo led the way in the first-round win over Kansas, but former Wildcat DJ Wagner had 14 points and former Kentucky commits Karter Knox and Boogie Fland played huge roles.

Presumably, things will only get better for Pope at Kentucky after this season. He was hired midway through April last year and forced to build an entire roster from scratch, almost exclusively through the transfer portal. With a regular recruiting cycle, Pope has already landed the No. 6 high school class in the country, though his three-player group ranks two spots below Calipari’s.

Coach Cal’s tenure in Lexington was beyond stale. It was time for both parties to go in a different direction, but if the veteran head coach has finally recreated his formula for postseason success, and he’s done it somewhere else, that puts massive pressure on Pope to keep any feelings of regret at bay.

Pope has proven himself to be the right hire, and that won’t change with a Round of 32 loss on Sunday, but the good feelings of his first season could come to an abrupt end if Coach Cal has a longer Tournament stay.