Mark Pope reveals meaning behind postgame 'autopsies' for Kentucky: “Win or loss that's dead and buried”

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.”