Among the most tiresome of modern sports media trends is the overuse of the phrase “must-win game.”
If a loss doesn’t result in the immediate end of a season for the losing team or the immediate end of the losing team’s primary goal for the season, then the use of the phrase “must-win game” is superfluous.
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So let’s make this clear from the outset: Friday night’s home game against No. 11 Gonzaga is absolutely not a must-win game for the Kentucky Wildcats.
But it certainly feels like it is.
For good reason.
Mark Pope’s first year in Lexington was sort of like a Hallmark Christmas movie: Cute, predictable, got the job done, but lacking in the substance for any viewer or fan to refer to it as one of their favorite movies or seasons of all-time.
Pope understood the assignment. Whenever there’s an unamiable parting of ways, the task for the next person up is to showcase that they’re capable of continuing to provide the good qualities of the person they’re replacing, but also that they are the antithesis of said person in the areas that had ultimately steered the relationship towards a breakup.
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Kentucky fans were upset that John Calipari seemingly refused to modernize his offensive philosophies.
Mark Pope came from BYU with an offensive game plan centered around lighting up the scoreboard with outside shots and high percentage buckets at the rim.
Kentucky fans were upset that John Calipari had seemed to believe that he had become bigger than the program.
Mark Pope was a former player who played up the notion that the Big Blue Nation WAS Kentucky basketball, and that this was a perpetual truth that couldn’t be changed.
Kentucky fans were really upset that John Calipari hadn’t been to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament since 2019 and couldn’t seem to stop losing games to double-digit seeds.
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Mark Pope’s first Kentucky team played to its 3-seed, making the Sweet 16 before getting hammered by conference rival Tennessee.
It was nice, it was refreshing, and it hit just about every necessary benchmark the fan base had for year one. It also wasn’t going to be good enough moving forward.
This is a fan base that demands the biggest and the best, and Hallmark Christmas movies don’t win Oscars and they don’t get standing ovations at Cannes.
Telling Kentucky fans how great they are and consistently referencing how lucky he is to be the most important man in Lexington was never going to be enough for Pope in year two. The bar was always going to be raised, and simply not being John Calipari was never going to be the boost necessary to clear it.
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The task got even taller when reports surfaced in October that Kentucky had spent $22 million on its 2025-26 roster, and that the number was the most in the sport “by a wide margin.” Immediately, the target that is always on UK’s back became larger than Pope’s 6’10 frame. The tolerance for another potential “cute, fun, but not special” season evaporated instantly.
Dealing with some injuries?
Don’t care, $22 million roster.
Drop a game you’re not supposed to drop?
Can’t happen, $22 million roster.
Fall short of the ultimate goal in March.
Simply unacceptable, $22 million roster.
This was the established terrain when Pope and Kentucky began their season a little over a month ago. The landmines that were seemingly everywhere have not been avoided.
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One of the few things that BBN still loved about Calipari by the time that both sides agreed it was time for a divorce was that he still dominated hated rival Louisville. Cal was 13-3 against the Cardinals and had won his two last Battle of the Bluegrass games by a combined 42 points.
In its first real test of the 2025-26 season, Pope’s Wildcats trailed Louisville by as many as 20 points before ultimately falling by a score of 96-88. Prominent members of UK’s fan media declared it as the official “honeymoon’s over” moment between Pope and the fan base. There are certain games you can lose as Kentucky’s head coach without sending the websites and the message boards and the radio shows in the Commonwealth into a full-blown 48 hour (or more) meltdown. The Louisville game is never one of them.
When the on-the-court stuff goes haywire at a place like Kentucky, the off-the-court stuff suddenly becomes nearly impossible to manage. Pope didn’t do himself any favors on that front.
With the fan base still fuming over the loss, Pope seemed to try and hint at an excuse for the team’s poor performance.
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“I’m not ready to tell the story yet, but at some point, we will talk in detail about our pregame experience at Louisville,” Pope said. “It was out of character for us. I don’t want our guys to be run by their emotion; I want them to be able to focus their emotion.”
The message did not resonate with its targeted audience.
Kentucky fans ripped into their head coach for insinuating there was a valid reason for the team not looking stellar against Louisville but not telling anybody what it was. Rumors also began to swirl throughout the Bluegrass State in a way that is typically reserved for if the Wildcats are really struggling during the heart of a season.
Was it a fight?
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Did Pope get into it with a player?
Are two players going after the same girl?
Are THREE players going after the same girl?
Three nights later, after a 99-53 blowout win over Eastern Illinois, Pope made light of the comment and the tidal wave of response it had created.
“I’m a big Taylor Swift fan and I just love to leave out these things that keep everybody wondering and guessing,” Pope joked. “It really is nothing; it’s just something about the emotional level of our team. I want to tease it and let it play for a few more days. It was just the way we felt as a team and how we responded.”
Pope quickly learned that a 44-point win in a buy game three days after a loss to Louisville didn’t earn him the right to make quirky jokes again. Not even ones with Taylor Swift references.
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The heat doubled a week after the Louisville loss when Kentucky went to Madison Square Garden for the annual Champions Classic doubleheader and got throttled by Michigan State, 83-66.
At least neither of those high-profile losses had come at home though.
Enter Tuesday night against North Carolina.
In a game where the Wildcats — playing without point guard Jaland Lowe and forward Mo Dioubate — had appeared to in control for most of the second half, UNC got two huge last-minute buckets from reserve point guard Derek Dixon to walk out of Rupp Arena with a 67-64 victory.
The loss dropped Kentucky to 0-3 against ranked opponents this season, and 1-7 in their last eight games against ranked opponents dating back to last season.
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That sort of stat is never going to play well in Lexington. It’s really not going to play well when the man behind the stat is a second-year head coach trying to fill the shoes of a Hall of Famer that the fan base happily sent packing for Fayetteville.
This leads us to Friday night’s game against Gonzaga, a team Pope was 1-9 against before last season’s 90-89 overtime victory in Seattle. That win came immediately following Pope’s first dose of adversity as UK’s front man, an upset road loss to Clemson in the ACC-SEC Challenge.
There are easy-to-understand reasons to believe that Kentucky still has the ability to ultimately get where it wants to go this season. Lowe, the team’s only true point guard, has been in and out of the lineup with a shoulder injury that will hopefully be close to fully healed in the near future. Dioubate, who’s dealing with a high ankle sprain, should be ready to return to the lineup by the time conference play rolls around. And then there’s projected lottery pick Jayden Quaintance, who still hasn’t played a second for the Wildcats as he recovers from an ACL tear that cut his freshman season at Arizona State short last February.
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Even if you eliminate those three players from the equation, the remainder of Kentucky’s roster is still being paid more than the players they’re going to go up against Friday night. Wildcat fans know it. There is no heightened level of sympathy when it comes to basketball in the Bluegrass State, not even around the holidays.
Gonzaga is good, their double-digit triumphs over Oklahoma, Creighton, Arizona State and Alabama have proven that. They also lost by 40 to Michigan the last time we saw them. The flood of BBN members making their way down to Nashville for the “neutral court” game at Bridgestone Arena are aware of all of this. They’re also aware of the fact that while the Zags have five wins over teams ranked in KenPom’s top 100, Kentucky’s best win at the moment is over No. 193 Valparaiso.
Mark Pope will continue to be Kentucky’s men’s basketball coach if the team loses to Gonzaga on Friday night. The Wildcats’ season will not screech to a halt with a defeat. Any claims, joking or otherwise, that UK is destined for the NIT will be wildly premature.
This is not a “must-win” game for Pope and Kentucky.
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“Would be really, really, really nice to win game” works though.
