LEXINGTON, Ky. (KT) — Kentucky coach Mark Pope isn’t returning to the drawing board after his team’s 82-69 loss to Georgia earlier this week.
Instead, the Kentucky coach wants his squad to stay the course and focus on improving, rather than switching gears in mid-season, following the first Southeastern Conference loss of the year.
“It’s not triage, where we have a bad team,” Pope said Thursday. “We have a really good team. We didn’t play particularly well and so there’s a lot of things that were a little bit anomalous, where we just didn’t play great. And certainly, Georgia had some contribution to that.”
An immediate concern, Pope said, is rebounding, a strength for most of the season, but not lately.
“We’re continuing to work on the glass right now,” Pope said. “That’s been something interesting because we had been one of the top defensive rebounding percentage teams in the country, and that’s kind of bit us, a little bit.
“We’re rethinking some approaches there that hopefully will see immediate progress on, because we’ve been really good.”
Along with rebounding, Pope and his staff also have addressed the importance of becoming a better team physically, especially against conference foes.
“We’ve just got to be good in this league right now, with the physicality and the way this is being played.”
The Kentucky coach said there’s a fine line when it comes to determining how physical the Wildcats need to compete in a league that traditionally has been a physical conference.
“The game always gets more and more physical in the league, and so our guys understanding — and there’s also a part of understanding where you can be really, really physical and where you can’t,” he said. “That’s part of our determinations. There are a lot of facets to that. One is just the physics aspect of it, of having a low center of gravity and kind of being the hit-first guy and a first hit and second, there’s all the schematics and the skill of it.
“There’s also the mentality of it, and the IQ of it,” he added. “The mentality of it is kind of this aggression side of it where you’re always thinking about contact, contact, contact, and then the IQ of it is understanding when and where it’s appropriate and where it can be utilized and where it’s important.”
Pope added the team’s 14 turnovers also were a concern. Kentucky’s assist-to-turnover ratio (1.94) ranks No. 3 in the nation but had letdowns in losses to Clemson, Ohio State, and Georgia in that category.
“We’ve been really good in terms of ball protection,” Pope said. “I think we’ve been number one in the country. I think we’re close, so I don’t think it’s reinventing the wheel for us on the ball protection side. We just didn’t do it well in this game. There are certainly areas that we’re going to continue to grow and fine-tune, but there’s not a lot of total restructuring going on.”
NEXT GAME: Kentucky at Mississippi State, 7:30 p.m., Saturday. TV/Radio: SECN, UK Radio Network SuperTalk 94.3 WKYX and WiLLiE 102.
Coach Mark Pope made it 3-0 against AP Top 10 opponents with a win over Florida on Saturday. (Photo by Les Nicholson)
