As will be the case throughout this SEC season, you are not going to have any real stretch of easy games for the next two months. Yes, an LSU or South Carolina (or Arkansas) might give you a slight breather, but Kentucky is facing the hardest gauntlet of conference games in its history — and potentially college basketball history.

But after digging through the record books, I was somewhat surprised that the game against Alabama will mark just the seventh time in the last 25 seasons in which Kentucky has faced three consecutive ranked opponents. And Kentucky has actually played five in a row as Georgia is now ranked, although the Bulldogs were not when they played Mark Pope’s team on Jan. 7.

So my question is this: simply based on ranking alone, is this the toughest three-game stretch in modern UK history?

THE 7 INSTANCES

2024-25 (COMBINED RANKING: 25)
at #14 Mississippi St: WIN
#11 Texas A&M: WIN
#4 Alabama: ?????

2020-21 (COMBINED RANKING: 38)
at #9 Alabama: LOSS
at #18 Missouri: LOSS
#11 Tennessee: LOSS

2000-01 (BEST COMBINED RANKING: 43)
#25 Notre Dame: WIN
#4 Tennessee: WIN
at #21 Ole Miss: LOSS
at #18 Alabama: LOSS

2018-19 (COMBINED RANKING: 49)
at #18 Auburn: WIN
#22 Mississippi St: WIN
#9 Kansas: WIN

2003-04 (COMBINED RANKING: 49)
#9 North Carolina: WIN
#20 Vanderbilt: WIN
at #20 Mississippi St: WIN

2002-03 (COMBINED RANKING: 49)
#10 Notre Dame: WIN
#24 Auburn: WIN
at #15 Alabama: WIN

2005-06 (COMBINED RANKING: 52)
at #24 LSU: LOSS
at #11 Tennessee: WIN
#17 Florida: LOSS

I don’t think there is any way around it. This is, at least based on ranking, the hardest three-game regular-season stretch we have faced in the last quarter century. And the fact Kentucky could potentially sweep those games shows this team has elite potential. It seems as if this team faces the hardest challenges the best. Which is good, because basically every game is hard.

By now, you’ve probably heard Mark Pope throw around the phrase ‘autopsy’ after games. It’s his version of film review, dissecting a 40-minute battle for the Kentucky Wildcats from start to finish, figuring out what worked and what did not leading to a win or loss. That’s what he uses to prepare for future opponents and follow important trends, deciding what needs to get fixed with urgency and what his team can build upon.

What does that look like for Pope and his staff following a game, though? What answers are they searching for when they put on the rubber gloves and safety goggles? He gave a thorough description of his version of a basketball ‘autopsy’ when previewing the team’s matchup vs. No. 4 Alabama on Thursday.

What is an autopsy?

“It’s pretty extensive,” the Kentucky head coach said. “We have our own formatted report that (assistant video coordinator) Matt Santoro puts together. Over the years, we’ve developed all of the things that we really care about. We’ll get that report, we’ll get an HDI report, we’ll get the box score — we get the whole thing — and then we’ll each individually break down film, then we’ll do it together as a staff, then we’ll do it together as a team.”

It may make sense for some to find the glaring flaws in hopes of fixing them right away. That’s what everyone does, hoping to make wrongs right — especially after a loss. For Kentucky, it’s the exact opposite.

Instead, they put a pin in those issues and dive into everything the team did well.

“The first thing we look at is, what did we do well? You cherry pick the stuff you did well,” Pope said. “If you want to get better at something, find yourself doing it well and focus on it and show it over and over and over again. Like, that’s really true. It’s way different than I’ve ever experienced approaching the game.

“As coaches, we’re so good at — we watch 10 minutes of film and we find the 17 mistakes, and it feels like a victory. That’s actually — it’s not the way we do this. We work really hard because the things that are mistakes are glaring. They just shout at you, it’s like, everything’s fine, and you see the mistake, but I think the real skill in coaching is finding guys doing it great. Sometimes, as a coach, you just gloss over that stuff because there was nothing wrong. There’s nothing to fix, and we’re fixers, it’s what we do. We go fix the problems.”

Focusing on the good, not bad

Among the questions asked when the staff first begins an autopsy?

“What are we doing well?” Pope said. “What did we do great? What part of the game plan did we execute well? Where have we really grown? Where can we show our guys something we didn’t do well before, but we’re doing it great now? What are things that our guys didn’t even realize that they did well, that we did really well? We’ll spend a lot of time on that. We’ll spend very minimal time — certainly on video — on the things that we’re doing wrong, but we’ll take that in as a staff and really digest that as a staff.”

Then when it comes time to finding and correcting the mistakes, they actually circle back to moments when they did those things correctly to drive those points home. If they’re rebounding poorly, the staff finds all of the times they attacked the glass with force and intensity to come away with boards and try to recreate that magic.

That’s how they determine the next steps and how to continue to improve.

“Sometimes we’ll see something we really struggle with — which we did, we struggled in a couple areas in the last couple games. What we do is we actually go back and we’ll grab film of us doing it really well, and we’ll talk about where we’re getting ourselves in trouble, and then we’ll show them a bunch of clips of us doing it correctly, right? Autopsy is all about that,” Pope said. “The biggest part of autopsy is, like, where are we trying to grow directly over the next few weeks? What are our long-term goals? How is this new data set — how has it changed where we’re trying to head? What is it telling us about our team? What’s it telling us about our rotation? What’s it telling us about guys we have on the floor together? What’s it telling us about substitution patterns? The whole deal. It’s super fun. It’s like a puzzle.”

Games are to be ‘dead and buried’

The dictionary definition of autopsy is “a postmortem examination to discover the cause of death or the extent of disease.” If that sounds dark and deadly for basketball comparisons, it’s because it’s meant to be.

They perform autopsies because they represent games that deserve to be ‘dead and buried,’ as Pope puts it. Once one ends, it’s time to turn the page and focus on what’s next. No looking back.

“It’s really important. We always think about it like this: win or loss, that’s dead and buried. That’s done,” he said. “We’re going to take all the data, we’re going to take all the information we’re taking, but we’re moving on. We’re flipping the page, right? I think it’s two parts. I think one part is, we’re going to dig deep. We’re going to — I mean, I don’t want to get too tasteless, right? Everybody is about to go to lunch, but we’re digging really deep.

“We’re trying to uncover everything we have, and then it’s dead and buried. We’ve got to move on to the next thing. That’s important when — sometimes the wins are harder to get over than the losses. We’ve got to turn the page, bury it and let’s go.”

Any lingering issues?

What are the things currently plaguing this team, things that continue to pop up during autopsy sessions that aren’t getting fixed for one reason or another? Pope actually can’t thing of any — at least none that continue to linger with no sign of active growth.

That’s one beautiful part about this group: when adversity strikes, they find ways to respond.

“I don’t have a lot of things we’ve talked about for six weeks that we haven’t made progress on now,” he said. “We have a lot of things that we talk about every single day where we’re making progress and we want to make more progress. There are a lot of those. But one of the blessings of this team — I’m telling you, it’s a gift to coach this team. I’m so lucky that I get to coach this team because we don’t have a lot of things that we — there’s not a lot of times we’re pointing the guys in a direction.

“Sometimes we don’t see progress in a day, but over the last week or two weeks or month, there are not things where we’re like, ‘I’ve said this a thousand times’ or ‘We’ve watched this a thousand times and we’re not making progress.’ We have an unbelievably studious locker room. Like, our guys pay attention and they’re focused on growing.

“It’s super cool, man. It’s really fun to coach.”

The transfer portal phenomenon has created chaotic free agency periods in college athletics. We knew this would happen (to a degree) when the NCAA allowed players to move freely from school to school. In fact, it was considered a significant win for student-athletes who had to sit and wait their turn if they wanted to make a change, while the adults were free to move from one coaching job to the next without any repercussions.

Things can get dicey in the transfer portal, but these are young adults who can make their own decisions and live with the consequences. I’m not so sure that people realized how much this culture shift would trickle down to the teenagers in the high school ranks.

Transferring was Frowned Upon

You probably remember the name Dakotah Euton. He was a basketball prodigy in the state, billed as the next Larry Bird on the AAU circuit by the time he was 12 years old. Billy Gillispie eventually got the Ashland native to commit to Kentucky.

He started his high school career with his righthand man, Chad Jackson, at Rose Hill Christian. It was the same small school O.J. Mayo briefly attended and took to the Sweet 16. When Jackson and Euton transferred to Scott County, it was a big damn deal.

Those two were my contemporaries, so I was only privy to the whispers and not the formal talking points. But a few decades ago, the Toyota plant in Georgetown was Scott County’s key to getting the best players from around the state to play for the Cardinals. Their parents got a job on the line and the Scott County basketball team got ball-players. They were reviled by many, but hey, it worked.

The Kentucky High School Transfer Portal Numbers are Staggering

That’s how things used to work. It was an archaic way to operate. Now, the pendulum has swung in the complete opposite direction, and players can come and go freely from school to school.

At today’s Board of Control meeting, commissioner Julian Tackett said the KHSAA has formally processed 827 transfers during this 2024-25 year. Jason Frakes reports that the number only includes the transfers the KHSAA had to rule on. Many others were handled at the local level. That means roughly 1,000 high school athletes transferred schools in a 6-month period.

That number is unfathomable.

How many kids did you know that transferred when you were in high school? Sure, there were kids who got kicked out of a school for getting in trouble and had to move, but how many people do you know switched schools by choice? You can probably count that number on one hand.

The transfer portal has made transferring from one high school to the next an acceptable norm. In most of those cases, it’s because of sports. Another school might offer more playing time or a coach who yells less. Do we really want to teach teenagers that when things aren’t going their way that the best decision is to quit and move on?

Transfer portal culture has been in the Florida high school ranks for years. Now it’s becoming acceptable in the state of Kentucky.

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