Mark Pope Points to Body Language and Discipline in 'Decision-Making Spaces' as Issues in Kentucky's Loss to Louisville

Kentucky coach Mark Pope made headlines on Thursday when he talked about an “out of character” pregame moment at Louisville. However, that wasn’t the only critique of his team during Thursday’s press conference. There were a couple of other key areas he’s looking for improvement.

One of those areas is body language. He said that the team grades the body language of players on the team every game. Before Kentucky’s loss to Louisville, only one player had a game with a net negative in body language. Tuesday’s loss featured three players.

“We had three guys that were underwater on our body language for the first time this year, including exhibition games,” Pope said. “That was disappointing.”

Body language is a nuanced attribute to track during the games. However, Pope does it for a specific reason.

“Sometimes, we think about body language criteria, and we think that someone’s body language says something about their intent or their effort. It doesn’t. It really doesn’t. In genuine, it doesn’t,” Pope said. “It says something about their focus or lack of focus. Our body language communication was poor in the game. And it’s something that’s incredibly fixable. We have all guys with great hearts, great passion, who care and want to win, so we can fix that.”

Pope took some of the blame for Kentucky’s body language struggles. That was mainly on the communication side of things.

“My communication to the team wasn’t as good as it needs to be, for sure,” Pope said. “In our scout prep communication, there were some things that we didn’t follow things until the end. I could get really specific on that, actually. My game plan, the introductory idea was really good. For example, in one little slice of the game, but I didn’t follow it all the way to the end, where there was clarifying stuff for my guys at the end of a possession, at the end of a branch of thinking. That’s a place where we take it really seriously, we need to get way better, and we will.”

Kentucky Was Distracted in Decision-Making

Kentucky not only lacked in body language but also in decision-making, according to Mark Pope. Pope said that’s an area that he’d like to see progress as well.

“We’re distracted, lost discipline in some of our decision-making spaces,” Pope said. “Instead of using the skills and the techniques we’ve learned to buy yourself more time to make a decision. We kind of raced into forcing ourselves to put ourselves into positions where we had to make split-second reads and decisions with no bailout, no safety.”

That led to poor shots and was a big part of Kentucky’s early deficit in the game. Distraction was a word that Pope continually came back to during his press conference

“It’s distracted effort and distracted focus. When you’re under pressure and duress, sometimes you just fall into bad habits, default habits, distracted actions,” Pope said. “So we spent a lot of time the other night being really, really distracted in a disappointing way, but it’s human nature. It’s what it is. It’s what you fight as an athlete. It’s the ability to just get back to focus on this moment. We didn’t do it very well.”