Five games into his second season at Kentucky, the Mark Pope honeymoon is officially over. The No. 12 Cats are 3-2, reeling after a 17-point thrashing by No. 17 Michigan State in the Champions Classic. For the second time in a week, Kentucky has been exposed under the national spotlight, a pill made even more bitter to swallow by players yelling at each other in timeouts and the infamous Louisville pregame locker room incident that continues to hang around the program like a fog.
There’s no bigger indication of this team’s issues than Pope himself, who looked like a dead man walking into Madison Square Garden and in his interviews after.