NEW YORK — On the 25th floor of the team hotel Tuesday morning, Kentucky players went through their customary day-of film session. At the end of the 10-minute scouting report through Michigan State’s roster, a brief hype video played. The words “FIGHT NIGHT AT THE GARDEN” accompanied Kentucky basketball highlights interspersed with boxing prize-fights of yore at Madison Square Garden.
Kentucky’s coaching staff knew Michigan State was going to arrive looking for a brawl. Associate coach Mark Fox had the scout and offered succinct advice.
“Pack your switchblades,” Fox told the team. “It’s gonna be a street fight.”
Nobody checked the cargo on the way to the bus. Kentucky forgot their weapons and showed up with lemons to a knife fight.
Michigan State — a team that entered the day shooting 21.7% from deep, ranking 352 out of 365 teams — sliced UK in a most shocking way, sinking 11 of its 22 3-pointers and rollicking to an 83-66 Champions Classic win.
“Did we make more 3s today than we made all year?,” MSU coach Tom Izzo said. “That’s not meant to be funny.”
What Michigan State did to Kentucky and its roster worth a reported $20 million-plus was no joke. The 12th-ranked Wildcats were outshot, out-hustled, out-schemed and outplayed by the 17th-ranked Spartans. Mark Pope’s had only a few head-scratching losses in his 41 games running the program. Tuesday night’s defeat was alarmingly bad, the worst of his young tenure.
It was also the first time Pope ever coached against a Tom Izzo team, and boy did it look like it.
“The No. 1 failure of communication is assuming you’ve done it,” Pope told CBS Sports prior to Tuesday’s loss, later adding, “words mean different things to all of us. Experience to attach those words to, they mean something very different.”
The words would prove prophetic, because Kentucky is out of sorts and Pope is taking on all the blame because his messaging is obviously not getting through. We’re still more than a week from Thanksgiving. Kentucky has more than enough time to get itself right.
But it is the most disappointing team in college basketball through the first two and a half weeks of the season.
“We’re far away from a team that we aspire to be and we can’t waste a second on trying to grow into that,” Pope said. “We’re disappointed and discouraged and it completely discombobulated right now.”
All that preseason hopefulness, the top-10 hype and visions of improving after a terrific Year 1? It all disintegrated Tuesday night. This kind of crisis is the exact reason why Kentucky and John Calipari had to split 18 months ago — making way for Pope to restore unbridled optimism at his alma mater. Five games into the season, Kentucky sits at 3-2 with an 0-2 mark vs. high-major opponents, including the shot to the jaw last week against hated rival Louisville.
Michigan State, conversely, is 4-0 with a pair of wins against SEC opponents; the Spartans fended off Arkansas 69-66 on Nov. 8.
“I’ve clearly failed … up until today. But we won’t fail this season,” Pope said. “I’m doing [the job] poorly. I won’t do it poorly for much longer.”
It doesn’t help that Kentucky’s starting point guard (Jaland Lowe) and its best defensive player (Jayden Quaintance) are both unable to play due to injury. But this is a team with deeper problems than not having two key pieces. It paid millions and millions and millions to have the depth to overcome injuries. That depth was irrelevant against Michigan State.
Kentucky was an offseason portal champ, but that guarantees nothing.
“Their talent is obvious,” Izzo told CBS Sports after the win. “We watched the Arkansas tape and I told my staff, we’ve got the Lakers coming in. Then with these guys, it looked like the Lakers-Plus.”
Despite the praise, Izzo and Michigan State obviously saw room to exploit Kentucky on defense. Its weaknesses were evident and laid bare on Tuesday night, with Sparty putting up 1.17 points per possession. MSU point guard Jeremy Fears had a career-high 13 assists, highlighting a massive deficiency with Kentucky not having Lowe to offset Fears’ floor-general mastery. Beyond that, Jaxon Kohler put up 20 points and role player Kerr Tang had a career-high 15 points for Michigan State.
Izzo’s team played together. Played like it knew each other, trusted each other.
Kentucky looked like a team of talented players who still didn’t know each other’s full names.
Does retention mean a lot in 2025 when it comes to having a shot to be really good?
“How about 100 frickin’ percent?” Izzo said. “People playing for the front of their jersey. People that care about the place they’re at and players they’re with. … Transfer portal recruitment is almost bigger than winning games. Not at Michigan State.”
Izzo was by no means taking a dig at Kentucky, but his opinion on the portal and the transactional nature of college basketball is well-documented at this point. On Tuesday night, his philosophy won out again — definitively.
“Their loyalty to me has gotta be my loyalty to them and that still frickin’ matters,” Izzo said.
You know what’s worse than being a high-profile team that underperforms? Being a high-profile team that underperforms while being purportedly the most expensive roster in the sport. The problem with spending big money on players is, if it goes sideways, that can become a stigma. It can become the identity of a team. It can become the thing most people talk about when they talk about your team.
Right now, it is the identity for Kentucky. Because nothing on the floor can counteract it.
“My messaging is not resonating with the guys right now, that’s my responsibility,” Pope said.
I’ve never seen Pope like I saw him Tuesday night at the postgame dais. It took him almost 50 minutes from the end of the game to even show up to the presser. He looked quietly angry but stubbornly determined. He had respectful but short answers to legitimate questions. He seemed, frankly, a bit shattered. Five games in, it’s as though this is already an inflection point for the season. The UK staff knew this game was going to be a key learning opportunity, it’s just that nobody saw a pasting of this level coming.
Michigan State wanted a boxing match and Kentucky refused to engage.
“We knew it was going to be, as coach Izzo put it, a football game on the hardwood,” senior Jaxon Kohler said.
For as shellshocked as Pope seemed afterward, he knew his team was vulnerable. Prior to the game on Tuesday, I asked him what one big area of improvement was needed. He pointed out Kentucky’s huge room for growth with being a tough team, a team that knows how to play their guts out and finding how to push their limits against the best competition.
“These guys could be physical, but how do you get them to embrace it?” Pope said. “You have just got to sell it every day. You just have to have the same conversation every single day. And then you move by one degree at a time. … We may have to go through some real hell before we actually turn into what this group can be. I know we can figure it out.”
About eight hours later, Pope had few answers but maintained his faith in finding them. He promised this season wouldn’t be a failure. A promise like that will be kept to account at Kentucky. Pope knew this job would come with challenges and never shied away from the pressure and criticism that would await the moment the team underachieved.
That moment has arrived.
Now he gets his first true test to find out how to fix a problem that is entirely of his making — and an expensive problem at that. How he does it will not just define Kentucky over the next four months, but will be a telling story arc to how he handles the toughest job in college basketball.
