Mark Pope won't ask BBN to stop the L's Down because he likes his new job
Mark Pope plays the hits every time he gets in front of a microphone as the new head coach of Kentucky Basketball. So far, he has said everything the Big Blue Nation wants to hear, from teasing a return to the Maui Classic and striving to win SEC Championships in Nashville to the importance of defensive adjustments, appreciating the Kentucky uniform and much more.
Pope touched on another hot topic in his Monday evening comments with Tom Leach on Pope’s first call-in radio show. The same question was submitted to the show twice: What is Pope’s stance on L’s Down?
Before we go further, we go back to January when Pope, then the head coach at BYU, made headlines for his stance on Horns Down, a gesture mocking the Texas Longhorns’ Horns Up. When BYU hosted Texas, Pope spotted a group of BYU students wearing t-shirts spelling HORNS DOWN and had those shirts removed after the first media timeout.
Pope said afterward: “From The ROC, and from our players, and from our student body, that’s just not us. It’s not how we roll and it was just a miscalculation on just a couple of eager kids… We love the eagerness of these fans, but this is not what we do here. We love all 18,000 people in this gym. They were incredible tonight. Just so you know, that’s not something we’re supporting.”
So, did that same mindset travel from Provo to Lexington, where L’s Down is widespread throughout Big Blue Nation, from several of the fans to student-athletes on the football and basketball teams? These days, L’s Down is as much a Kentucky hand gesture as L’s Up is to Louisville.
Pope isn’t going to ask those Cats to stop. Laughing, he replied, “You’re trying to get me in trouble here. Let’s go. Here’s the thing: the one thing I know about Big Blue Nation (is) if I said anything about the L’s Down, I would get run out of town, and I’d like to stay here for a long time. So, I’m going to keep my mouth closed on that one.”
“You’re a smart man,” Tom Leach added.
So, Go Cats and L’s Down.
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