Mark Pope might be persona non-grata at Kentucky right now, during a week in which coveted grad transfer Matt Haarms chose Pope’s BYU squad over Kentucky. But it doesn’t change the fact that long before Pope was a college head coach recruiting against the Wildcats, he was in fact a former Kentucky Wildcat himself. Pope transferred to the school in 1993 after two years at Washington, sat out a season and played two more in Lexington, becoming a key cog on the Wildcats’ 1996 title team.
That title team of course will go down as one of the greatest in college basketball history, a juggernaut that went 34-2 (one of those losses coming to John Calipari’s UMass team) won it’s games by an average of 24 points and eventually put nine different players in the NBA.