Blame game? Mark Pope is a refreshing contrast from John Calipari after Kentucky loss

The good vibes from Kentucky's thrilling 106-100 win over previously undefeated Florida on Saturday lasted all of 48 hours or so, as the Wildcats started slow and failed to recover in an 82-69 loss to Georgia in Athens on Tuesday night. It was a confounding setback for a team that appeared to be ascending at the start of SEC play; Koby Brea came crashing back to Earth with a 2-of-9 effort from 3, while UK shot less than 40 percent overall just two days after looking unstoppable against the Gators.

But for as frustrating as the loss was in the moment, it also taught us a whole lot about the state of this program in its first year under head coach Mark Pope. A bump in the road or two were inevitable, especially in the toughest conference in the country. But the way Pope and his players appear to have responded bodes well for the rest of the season — and couldn't be further from the way things worked in the final years of John Calipari's tenure in Lexington.

Mark Pope's no-nonsense response to Georgia loss bodes well for Kentucky

The Cats didn't bring their A game on Tuesday, but they also didn't get much help from the refs: A total of 45 fouls were called over the course of a 2.5-hour slog, and a disproportionate amount of them went Georgia's way, with the Bulldogs doubling up Kentucky at the foul line on the night. Free-throw disparity aside, it also wrecked the flow of the game, short-circuiting the Wildcats' typically up-tempo style.

After the game, though, Pope didn't want to hear any of that.

“Listen, that doesn’t have anything to do with this game," Pope told reporters. "We leave all that stuff. We’re working on the next play. We’re gonna go control the stuff we can control and we can control enough factors in this game to win the game. That will always be true, so we refuse to be distracted by that.”

Pope's players sang the same tune. Forward Andrew Carr, one of a whopping four Kentucky players with four fouls on the night, only wanted to talk about how his own team could improve in its response to adversity.

“I felt like sometimes tonight we got — you know, Coach talks about energy all the time, but our energy was drained from foul calls and things like that, some things that we can’t control necessarily was pulling away from our effort,” Carr said.

Which is exactly what fans should want to hear. Not because the officiating was fine and dandy in Athens on Tuesday; far from it. But this is college basketball in 2024: bad officiating is the cost of doing business. The only thing that Kentucky can control is how it responds, and how it plays moving forward.

Pope seems to be focused on exactly that, which is a refreshing change of pace from his predecessor, John Calipari, who never met an excuse he didn't like when speaking with reporters after a loss. Of course, none of it matters if Kentucky doesn't rebound in a matchup against No. 14 Mississippi State this weekend, but so far it seems like Pope is the real deal.