Kentucky beat North Carolina Central by 36. They put up 103 points, shot 61 percent from the field and finally looked like a functioning basketball team again.
And Mark Pope walked into the postgame and basically said: that’s still not close to good enough.
All week he’d been talking about standards, effort and “resetting” after the Gonzaga embarrassment. Against NC Central, he rode guys who were playing hard, lit into others who weren’t, and afterward he didn’t pretend the blowout fixed anything.
“We just have a standard that we have to live up to and we’re not,” Pope said.