Pope couldn’t land a 20 cent hooker with a 20 dollar bill!
Rippey to duke
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Morg and that other idiot told me he was going to an adidas school and Tyran Stokes was coming here. Funny how a few months changes things.
It would be fun to know what RR would do if UK and Pope ever signed a top kid, huh? Alas, we wait. And wait. And wait.
Yeah…eff that. I want the next Cal or Rick. Give me the maverick. Give me the dude that wants to wag his middle finger at the NCAA and the rest of college hoops. Keep your choir boys and nostalgia hires. Winning feels better than this.
I think this is a perfect time to shield Mark Pope again and blame everything on JMI so we can pretend that things are actually competent in Lexington.
Great post. I'm convinced that we have some people that troll as fans here, but actually hate our program. "Fans" like UKcowboy and Barefoot Beach stand out to me as people who have no respect for Kentucky or understanding of what we are.
Barefoot Beach laughed at this post. I'm convinced that he's either Leadbelly or someone like him. That is to say, a non-kentucky fan who is only here to troll. He's offered nothing of substance since he logged in for the first time except for mocking truly passionate fans. He's horrible. I do hope he gives me a
emoji though since he's never been able to actually debate. Inferiority will do that to someone.
Umm….. Moreno and JJ both play a solid amount of mins. Not really sure what you are complaining about here.
I’d rather have a guy the ncaa likes and also wins like a Jay Wright or Billy Donovan.
I think part of Cal’s slide was that he made the wrong people hate him. It’s really unfair because he’s never been the bad guy or villain the media painted him as. But i believe that had an effect on how our games were officiated. and how situations were handled by the ncaa(youll never convince me Enes would have been ruled ineligible had he went to Duke or stayed with Washington).
Yeah it's puzzling.
There is plenty to criticize Pope for, but not playing freshman seems lame. It's based on 1/3 of a season with JJ minutes minutes fluctuating. That's all really. Moreno took the starting position from an upperclassman. JJ minutes weren't really anybody's concern until he played quite well recently. Popular sentiment on the board was that he was a disappointment and should play less given his poor shooting and playmaking in his limited minutes against top teams.
This is it. I’m not really mad or anything just yet, but desperately hope we can recover quickly from this horrible Mark Pope experiment.
No, the one they should have kept, was Kelvin Sampson. They fired him for trying too hard to get recruits.
Crean is garbage and is still an analyst for a reason.
Sampson was prior to Crean, so I’m only talking about in the timeline as it relates to post-sanctions.
I think the 2 guys you pointed out here, are UK fans, but I get the feeling they haven't been fans very long.
Any UK fans that were into it in the 80's, 90's and 2000's, don't run around telling people they are overreacting when we are losing games due to lack of effort. These are fans that really aren't that invested, losing isn’t a big deal, they just go about their day.
In the 90's, the city of Lexington slowed way down during games and losses hurt like hell.
Cal lost so much the last few years of his tenure that it became normal and guys like these 2 think it's fine......it's not fine.
Right, but they screwed up when they fired Sampson, he would have had them back on track. There wouldn't have been a Crean timeframe if they kept KS.
For years here I saw posters predicting that Duke would fade away after Coach K is gone.
But, unfortunately, that ain’t happening at all. Nearly four years after K’s retirement and Duke remains the favorite destination of the highest rated recruits.
But, unfortunately, that ain’t happening at all. Nearly four years after K’s retirement and Duke remains the favorite destination of the highest rated recruits.
They should have hired Kelvin stallings after Crean... would have been perfect
lol.All jokes aside, poor Indiana had a worse AD than Mitch Barnhart for all the bad hires they made for head Basketball coach. They should have swallowed pride and hired Kelvin Sampson back at some point... there were times they could have hired Pitino for a stop gap as well, as could we,.
Hell, nobody talks about it , but we could have hired pitino back after tubby was done but alas, holier than thou, high ground, perfect moral mitch barnhart was our AD.
Cal definitely normalized losing at Rupp. That took a lot of our shine off.
And not leaking any of it to the media! Truth be known, I’d bet a LARGE sum of money blindly on the fact that, I believe they easily outspent UK this past recruiting/ roster retention class as well (and will continue to do so), but a lot of fans are stuck on that ridiculously fictitious $22 million number that was clearly floating by UK to deflect from the impending stories that were about to drop from KSR about said recruitment blunders.
And when you get the stud freshman Scheyer is getting, you can! JQ might be the only stud Pope ever gets, and that took a lot of other coaches passing on him because of his injury, yet still asking for top $$$!
I'm not stuck on the number. Like you said, I'm stuck on the fact that UK put it out there. Horrible, HORRIBLE miscalculation on their part. All that does is give opposing teams chalkboard material. Probably cost us 1 or 2 games
If it's not his fault, then the responsibility lies with Pope to fix it. He can do that through three steps:
#1. Confront Mitch and demand an alteration of the JMI contracts.
#2. If Mitch rejects him, go to JMI and do the same.
#3. If both #1 and #2 fail, go public (like Cal or Pitino would) and put pressure on the situation from outside JMI/Mitch.
This is Pope's ship and he's the captain of it. He can only deflect so long without fighting back before the fan base will begin to resent him. You're basically saying he's too weak to fight back if nothing changes, in which case we're dealing with an incompetent head coach.
Pope will absolutely NOT do any of those things and that's why Mitch hired him.
At the end of the day, winning is what matters and it won’t matter if Pope gets the 5 stars or transfers if he wins. When I say win he has to at least go to some FFs and title games or he won’t stick around. He must win.
And Branch! Duke is just a well oiled recruiting machine that eventually is going to reap the rewards of their own efforts!
Meanwhile at UK, Mitch is preparing his latest “get off my lawn” word salad response, and Pope is still using talking point words/ phrases like, special, very promising, outstanding, when answering questions about UK’s position in the ‘26 recruiting cycle, as if no one is aware that he has struck out on 27 straight 5 stars, going back to when he was first hired and, currently is leading for exactly none of the other uncommitted players!
Some of these guys on here, are starting to remind me of Dutch Van Der Linde from Red Dead Redemption.
Duke/ K/ Scheyer have always had a trio of mega-boosters in their back pockets the entire time, that were “allowed” to get key recruits to Duke, and this was way before NIL, and now that it’s open season so to speak, they will literally continue to funnel as much $$$ as needed to keep Duke going as yearly contenders.
Duke has adapted better than Kentucky for decades. It's why they consistently kick our *** on the recruiting trail.
We have the resources. We've just had morons on the top misallocating those resources.
Mitch is the common denominator. Our fans need to start making his life miserable by letting him know we're not happy.
If JMI is killing our program by hurting our recruitment of elite players, why was Cal able to load up on 5 stars each. ear? It is not JMI, it is our coaching staff being horrible recruiters. What was Cal selling that our current staff seems to have no clue of what it takes to get elite talent to buy into. JMI has been at UK since 2014 or close to that time.
Can’t see any quality assistant coaches sticking around if this NIL deal keeps them from recruiting HS guys here.
LMAO, do you ever deal in facts or is it all just bullcrap with you?
Moreno plays the 5th most minutes on the team and the most of any big. 3rd string LMAO
K is still around the program. Duke is a huge brand now regardless of him as well. Also team USA is ran by Duke guys as the nba is. That stuff matters a ton.
Am I missing something? I thought the deal with JMI was just signed, like a month ago.