Cardiac Cats? Mark Pope says they haven't earned anything yet -- but hitting rock bottom allowed Kentucky to prove its heart

Kentucky had its heart questioned loudly after getting steamrolled in Nashville to make it four straight losses in four tries against real competition to begin the year. Then the Wildcats started SEC play with back-to-back losses, dropping down to bubble status for a team thought to be a serious championship contender going into the year — the nightmare of all nightmares for Mark Pope, who took the majority of the blame for assembling a roster that didn’t look to A) fit together or B) care, sitting at 9-6 overall.

Their response? Three straight wins, all after overcoming double-digit first-half deficits. They got down by as many as 12 in the first five minutes vs. Mississippi State and went on to win by 24. It was a 16-point halftime deficit at LSU that grew to 18 to begin the second half, followed by a historic comeback leading to Malachi Moreno’s game-winner at the buzzer. Then came the trip to Knoxville, the Wildcats falling behind, again, by 17 before heading to the locker room down 11. You know the drill by now.

At the podium coming off the 80-78 victory at Tennessee for the program’s fourth straight in Knoxville and sixth of seven, Pope couldn’t help but joke about the ridiculousness of the slow starts turning into massive comebacks.

“We actually felt great going into halftime down 11. It’s the first time we’ve only been down 11 in like a month, right?” he said. “So it feels like we felt like we won the first half, which is weird, but it’s the Kentucky way right now.”

Then he dug deeper into his team’s late push, bringing it back down to single digits for the first time with 18:05 to go, two scores at the 15:12 mark, one score at 7:52, one point with 1:46 and taking the lead for the first time with 34 seconds on the clock.

That brings us to a combined 1:44 of game clock with Kentucky leading in back-to-back SEC road wins for this group. Whatever it takes, right?

“I think the gift we have, and I will treasure this with this group — and we really feel it,” Pope said. “We actually talked about it in our team meeting last night. It’s like, we’re coming into halftime down 20. We’ve done it multiple times now and we come back and win every single time. It gives you so much confidence as a group because you can walk in the locker room and nobody’s sideways. It’s like, ‘Yep, this is what we do. We’ll come out and win the second half.’ These guys have proved to do it, man.”

Nobody enjoys falling behind early and leaving it to chance the way these Wildcats continue to do — we know that playing with fire gets you burned. Ideally, Kentucky destroys teams for a full 40 minutes instead of just the final 20, but would you rather be on the other side suffering through the collapse the way Matt McMahon and Rick Barnes have had to with their teams this week, then answer questions about what went wrong afterward?

Maybe Pope would panic about the data-collecting portion of games in the past, but this group has earned the benefit of the doubt. When you overcome what this team has, halftime speeches are a little less chaotic and trusting than they would be otherwise.

“I think this team, like I said, I would much rather have it this way than the other way around, guys. It’s awesome,” Pope continued. “And it’s awesome to watch guys just grinding, grinding, grinding. I actually, I love it. I’m so proud of these guys’ fight and their just commitment to just keep going and refuse to get discouraged. 

“So I’m breathing a little bit more in the first half because they’ve given me so much confidence about what they do in the second half, and it’s fun to watch, man.”

The second-year coach used that moment to reflect not only on this individual comeback or even this week, but the season as a whole. That 9-6 start was real and where this group was mentally during all of it was real. There were real struggles in that locker room as they worked through their issues, desperately searching for fixes. They had to find reasons to dig in and believe any of this was possible.

That can’t be faked. It took genuine self-reflection and accountability to start the growing process where legitimate confidence could be found.

“Guys, are you enjoying that?” Pope said, turning toward Denzel Aberdeen and Collin Chandler at the podium. “I think so. I think you have to earn confidence. You don’t just get it, right? You have to earn it. You gotta go do the gritty, hard, miserable work of earning confidence. And you have to take the heat and take the hate. These guys, all of us, have had a lot of stuff cast on us, for sure. And you gotta look it straight in the eye and go earn it. These guys are starting to earn their confidence. They’re starting to earn it.

“They’re starting to earn the fact that maybe things don’t go perfect on a play, or perfect in a four-minute stretch, or perfect in a half. But they’re starting to earn their confidence through the hard, gritty work that they’re doing, the refusal to give in to fatigue or frustration and just turn it into a fight. They’re earning the confidence they have, and it’s a good feeling. And we gotta go earn it again next week. And that’s why this game and these seasons are so great.”

It would have been just as easy to let go of the rope and punt on what was thought to be a lost season — especially when Jaland Lowe went down for the year while waiting for Jayden Quaintance to get his knee right just four games after his debut. What does it say about this group to fight through the outside noise and internal doubt to reach a mini breakthrough, giving yourself a chance to make a move the rest of the way?

Patience may have been worn thin by the midway point, but regular seasons are 31 games for a reason, along with whatever comes in the SEC and NCAA Tournaments. Your story isn’t written through 15 games. Pope wants his team to make the back-half reward worth the front-half frustration and fans to enjoy everything that comes with it.

These guys didn’t flinch, so you shouldn’t either.

“What it says about these guys’ resilience and toughness is that I hope nobody’s missing it. I hope people aren’t missing it,” he said. “I hope they’re not missing what this group is going through, what this group is trying to endure, what this group is trying to become. And what this group is actually doing on the court for three straight SEC games now, coming to halftime, down heavy, and things looking bad, everybody being discouraged — except for the players in our locker room. 

“That’s really special, man. So don’t miss it, because it’s a tribute to these guys. … It’s fun to watch these guys grow, man. It’s just inspiring. I hope BBN’s not missing it.”

Is it time to give this group a nickname — say, Cardiac Cats, as Darrell Bird of The Cats’ Pause suggested at the podium — for short- and long-term comebacks in games and the season overall? It’s only fitting.

In Pope’s eyes, though, they’ve got a long way to go before he’s comfortable claiming anything like that. For now, he’s just happy his team gets to see their misery turn into joy and get the snowball rolling down the hill for good, not an avalanche of bad.

“I’m not sure, I’m not sure (about a nickname),” he said. “We have a lot of work to do before we get to carve our name into something historic like that, but I like this group, man. I’m proud of them. This has not been an easy road. If we do this right, then at the end of the day, we’re gonna be so grateful that it wasn’t an easy road — because it gives them a chance to show what’s inside of them.

“We have so much work to do, so much along the way, but this has been a fun run by these guys so far.”