Mark Pope is having 'ongoing conversations' with Braydon Hawthorne about burning redshirt

Mark Pope admits he’s in a tough spot with freshman Braydon Hawthorne, a player with arguably the highest ceiling on the team and tools that compare to former Kentucky great Tayshaun Prince. On one hand, the 6’8″ rookie out of West Virginia boasts a 7’2.5″ wingspan and a 9’1.5″ standing reach, numbers reflecting a big more so than a versatile, skilled, athletic wing.

“This kid, I don’t know how soon it’s going to happen, but I think this kid has a chance to be special,” Pope said in August. “He just might have the goods, man.”

On the other hand, Hawthorne is rail-thin at 190 pounds as the third-lightest player on the team, and there is a difference between potential and immediate production. He’s still raw and growing both physically and mentally as he adjusts to life in college basketball.

And this is a deep Kentucky team not necessarily looking to add to the rotation — if anything, it’s looked clunky at times trying to make 11 players work with only 200 minutes to go around. And that’s not even counting Jayden Quaintance‘s anticipated addition to the lineup here in the coming weeks, plus Jaland Lowe returning to game action at some point. Is it worth playing spot minutes here and there, being on the floor during Walker Horn daggers at the end of regulation, if it means you’re burning an entire season of eligibility the second he steps on that floor?

That’s what they’re working through right now, confirming Reece Potter will, in fact, redshirt this season while waiting on Hawthorne to be totally sure before deciding one way or the other.

“Actually, we’re having these ongoing conversations with our whole staff and his whole team,” Pope said this week. “The interesting thing about redshirting is, once you burn it for one second, you can’t get it back. So we’re just trying to make sure that that’s the direction we want to go.”

It’s a consensus in that building the kid can play and his future is blindingly bright. There are whispers he could be a lottery pick in 2027 if he takes this development process seriously and remains patient with the redshirt year before taking off in 2026-27 as a new-age one-and-done.

Is everyone involved willing to wait, though?

“He is a really, really, really terrific young talent, and he has an incredibly bright future,” Pope continued. “He also, right now, needs to grow — like, there’s so much growth in him. The advantage of redshirting is that he gets to be solely, uniquely focused on developing. He doesn’t have distractions of a game twice a week where he’s altering his workout program or his preparation or anything else. But there’s also the value in minutes.”

It sounds like the hope is to see the process through with a redshirt, but burning it hasn’t been totally ruled out. Either way, a final decision will be made in the coming weeks.

“We’re just trying to make absolutely sure that we’re making the right decision before we burn it,” he said. “We’ll see how that goes over the next couple of weeks.”

He finished as the No. 35 overall prospect and No. 9 small forward in 2025, actually ranked one spot ahead of Jasper Johnson (No. 36) in the final update. There weren’t many prospects in the country that rose as quickly as Hawthorne in the 2025 cycle.

Will that trend continue with Pope having no choice but to play his prized freshman? Those discussions are underway.