Want to silence the 'noise'? Mitch Barnhart says to 'go win some things'

The losses are piling up and the criticism is growing louder and louder with every basketball industry source looking to take shots at Mark Pope and the Kentucky Wildcats. KSR reported that contract language, a lack of clarity in NIL, emotions at the closing table and negative recruiting have led to some struggles in the staff’s pursuit of high school and portal targets, leading to some of these roster construction concerns.

Mitch Barnhart’s response to all of it? Just win games.

“We all want to win. I don’t know there’s anybody out there that wants to win more than I do,” Barnhart said before the UK vs. IU game. “Our coaches and our student-athletes, we’re invested in it daily, and that’s important because we know what it represents, the Commonwealth of Kentucky. We know how much this place, this program, these teams mean to this Commonwealth. We want to win and do it at a high level.

“The noise? There is a lot of it. Part of it is the responsibility to go win some things. We’ve got to go do that. We’ve got some teams doing that incredibly well. We got a couple that are — they’re struggling, and we got to get them going.”

As for his confidence in the programs’ leaders — including Pope — that remains sky-high. And he feels the JMI deal gives them the best chance to build competitive rosters and win championships in Lexington.

“No one would disagree that we’ve got a great set of head coaches at the University of Kentucky — I would hope they wouldn’t. I think we’ve got great head coaches at the University of Kentucky,” Pope said. “We’ve got great people that have done an amazing job in the JMI world that are providing us resources for our program, and they are concerned it doesn’t benefit them to restrict us or to hurt our program. They want to give us the best chance to put the best roster we can on the court or on the field or wherever that happens to be.

“It is our best incentive to give us the best chance, to give our program the best chance to win so we can do the things everybody wants us to do. We’re competitive people. We’ve won — I think in last bit, we’ve won over 70 conference championships and some national championships along the way. We’ve made amazing runs in our sports programs, and that’s what we’re all about. We’ve talked about making deep runs and being competitive and putting rings on fingers and diplomas and hands.

“We love doing that, and the only way we get there is if we make sure we bring the best student-athletes in here.”

JMI is helping them get there, Barnhart believes, but it’s up to the coaches to do the bring student-athletes in here part. Any concerns about how this Kentucky basketball team was built and if it’s capable of being the title contender Pope hyped it up to be?

Direct those concerns to the head coach.

“We’re very pleased with how we’re operating in the functions of that day-to-day (with JMI),” Barnhart said. “It is then on our coaches to make sure that they are navigating their roster spaces the right way.”

TBD on that part with this group. A win tonight would go a long way in deciding that.