LEXINGTON, Ky. — Mark Pope rides the elevator at Rupp Arena to the third floor, takes the stairs to the upper deck and keeps climbing. He stops at Row Q in Section 213, turns to his left and settles into Seat 17, right at center court.

“This,” he says, ”is one of my favorite places in the world.”

Pope says he doesn’t get up here nearly enough, but every recruit on an official visit gives him an excuse to make the climb. They press pause on all of the meetings and pictures and promises and just … talk. About what this place means to the people who watch games from the upper deck. About the way those people will love you if you come here and win.

Pope’s first college coach Lynn Nance had been an assistant for two seasons at Kentucky under Joe B. Hall, and when Nance was fired by Washington in 1993 after Pope’s sophomore year, he had an obvious preference for where Pope should play next: There’s nowhere like Kentucky. His stories seemed too good to be true. But Nance was a no-nonsense kind of guy, a former FBI narcotics agent who also worked for the NCAA.

“I exaggerate everything,” Pope says. “He never exaggerates anything.”

When Pope got to Lexington, it was everything Nance said it would be. “Times a thousand.”

When Pope returned 30 years later as the Wildcats’ new head coach, his introductory press conference turned into something more like a religious revival. A curtain was hung as a backdrop, with the assumption that less than half of Rupp Arena’s 20,500-seat capacity would be needed. The event had no police presence because UK officials weren’t anticipating the crowd would eclipse the 8,000 minimum required to secure one. They were very wrong. Fans started lining up at 8 a.m. for a 4:30 p.m. event on the Sunday of the Masters. Eventually the curtain came down. Every seat was filled, with people pouring out into the concourse and the Hyatt Regency next door, which offered a live stream.

“That was as good an atmosphere as you see at the ball games,” says 76-year-old Charlie Wallin, who has had season tickets since Rupp Arena opened in 1976. Section 214, row P. Wallin’s usual plus-one, Jerry Barker, 75, drove in that day from West Liberty on a whim with his wife and arrived at noon. They couldn’t find a parking spot and ended up a mile away. It was worth the trouble. “Best atmosphere I had ever seen,” Barker says.

Pope wants his players to feel that passion. Look up, he’ll tell them. Listen. Pay attention. He tells his latest visitor to turn the phone recording an interview off and take a deep breath.

“You can go anywhere else in college basketball and never see this,” Pope says. “You’ll never be this high. You’ll never see all those banners. This is a one of one.”

Pope’s start in one of the most scrutinized positions in college basketball has gone better than anyone anticipated. Ranked No. 23 in the preseason, Kentucky is up to No. 12 with six wins already against top-15 teams, the latest coming at No. 8 Tennessee on Tuesday while down two starters. The Wildcats have shown the ability to play with any team in the country and done enough to make everyone believe the magic is back. As former coach John Calipari makes his highly anticipated return to Rupp on Saturday with an Arkansas team currently sitting just above last place in the SEC, there will be no one secretly wishing he was still in blue.

But Pope’s sky-high approval rating isn’t a product of his team’s ranking, or even a trickle-down effect of national championship dreams. It’s because he gets them. He’s one of them. He knows what it means to them. He’s back in Lexington for the first time since 1996, but they can tell his heart never left.

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Just about every college basketball coach in America has weekly radio show obligations, and Pope used to have an assumption about the role he needed to play while on air: entertainer. No one wants to talk hoops for an hour.

Except at Kentucky.

“I think this is the only fan base in the country that if we just talk the details of the game for hour after hour, it feels like an extension of our staff meetings,” he says. “If we did a basketball seminar, I think we would have 20,500 people in here and it could go all day long and nobody would ever leave.”

Pope’s proof lies in what happens about an hour following every home game. After his postgame speech in the locker room and his press conference, Pope returns to the arena floor and sits at half court between the giant UK emblem and the sideline, and a few thousand fans usually stick around to listen to his radio interview. A few weeks back, after his first home loss as UK’s coach to fellow SEC contender Alabama, he accepted blame for his team fouling too often and explained how the Crimson Tide’s defense was different than the others Kentucky had seen recently, all in front of roughly a thousand fans listening politely.

Face time with fans remains a part of Pope’s game day schedule even in defeat, including after Kentucky’s 102-97 loss to Alabama two weeks ago. (C.J. Moore for The Athletic)

Kentucky fans love that Pope seems obsessed with the game. Most fans are respectful when they talk about Calipari, almost like they’re following the lead of the new boss. But if you’re looking for reasons the relationship soured between Cal and Big Blue Nation, the way he talked about the game in these settings would be high on the list. Calipari’s term for fans who fancied themselves students of the game — “Basketball Bennies” — did not come across as endearing.

“It was almost like he was mocking people for caring,” says Matt Jones, whose wildly popular Kentucky Sports Radio show and website have captured the pulse of UK fans for the last two decades.

Jones was once considered an ally of Calipari’s, but his relationship with the Hall of Fame coach got sideways toward the end of his tenure, as nearly everyone’s did, for public discussion of the program’s obvious shortcomings. Once a regular guest on KSR, Calipari didn’t make a single appearance over the last four years. Pope came on the show his first week on the job, and he told Jones in private that when he lost, he wanted Jones to let him have it on the air.

“He was like, ‘If you don’t rip me, then this isn’t Kentucky basketball,’” Jones says.

Pope is excitable by nature. To create an accurate transcript of his thoughts, every other word would need to be italicized. But he really gets rolling when he talks about Kentucky’s love affair with hoops.

“It’s actually amazing,” he says. “It’s amazing.”

Calipari’s unparalleled ability to land five-star recruits was certainly fun for fans, especially when that brought them four Final Four appearances in his first six years, but Pope’s ability to outscheme more talented teams falls more in line with their love language. That’s why Jones believes the kinship reached another level after early season wins over Duke and Gonzaga, during which Pope made critical in-game adjustments to turn the tide, one of which was caught on in-house video.

Mark Pope called that Cooper would try to spin back middle and made sure we had a guy there to get the steal in the timeout before it happened

I can’t put into words how much I love this man https://t.co/26Uw8neuKq pic.twitter.com/R5M2fvyaj8

— Grant Peters (@Real_GP) November 18, 2024

Pope’s aesthetically pleasing, modern offense has been catnip for Cats fans. Similar to Rick Pitino, who embraced the 3-pointer before anyone else and used it as a weapon in his storied eight-year run as Kentucky coach, Pope has tested the limits of how far he can take the deep ball. His last BYU team took more than half of its shots from 3-point range — just the fourth high-major team ever to do so. Kentucky’s 3-point rate is not that high (43 percent) because its offense has gotten more out of cuts to the rim than any other team in college basketball.

This first group Pope has built — from scratch, in a matter of weeks — doesn’t have a gravitational star. The top eight guys in his rotation have all had multiple games scoring in double figures. This is another throwback to the Pitino era. The Wildcats’ 1996 title team, for which Pope was captain but not a starter, was maybe the deepest college team ever assembled, with nine players who would play in the NBA, more than any national champion ever.

Calipari also had some deep teams, but his stated goal was often to showcase the abilities of his future pros and win because UK could simply out-talent everyone. He was making millionaires and proud of it. No Kentucky players appear in The Athletic’s latest 2025 NBA mock draft, but Pope’s offense is operating more efficiently than any of Calipari’s in his 15 seasons in Lexington.

“I think the fans love the whole being greater than the sum of the parts,” Jones says. “This is a blue collar state, right? This is a state where we’re ranked at the bottom of everything, right? This is a state where we get underestimated. And we’re very proud of being better than people think. And this team kind of showcases that.”

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It’s 9:30 on a cold Saturday morning in Lexington, and KSBar & Grille, where Jones hosts his pregame radio show 2 ½ hours before tip-off, is standing room only.

Identical twins Meghan Roberts and Danielle Crosman are positioned near the front. Crosman was initially skeptical of the hire — most fans were; they wanted a name — but Pope won her (and nearly everyone) over at his introduction. “The way that he speaks to the fans, he cares about Kentucky,” she says. “It’s not about himself or about specific players. It’s just about Kentucky and what the program means to our state.”

The twins went to the Louisville game in December, stayed after to watch Pope’s postgame radio interview and then marveled at how long he spent mingling with fans. “Like he has nothing else to do,” Roberts says.

Roberts had stopped religiously watching every game by the end of the Calipari era. Now she doesn’t miss any. Jones understands, because he nearly quit his lucrative radio show last year.

“It had become so unenjoyable,” he says. “There was this generation of fans who liked Kentucky basketball, but it didn’t drive them like it did when I was a kid.”

Michael Shrout, a postal worker, comes to these shows when his schedule allows. He has experienced UK basketball up close. From 2000 to 2010, his wife, Marcia, was the director of the Wildcat Lodge, where the players live. The Shrouts lived there with them. Shrout goes by “Big Mike,” a nickname given to him by former UK guard Keith Bogans.

Two days before Marcia died after a battle with cancer, four former players from the Tubby Smith era came to visit her in the hospital. On the day she died, Bogans called to check on Michael. Two days later, he got a call from Smith.

“Kentucky is just family,” Shrout says. “And I think Mark has brought that back.”

The Shrouts used to attend every home game, but without Marcia, Michael had been making it to maybe one a year. This season, he’s already been to three games and Big Blue Madness. He feels connected to the program again, like those days living with the team.

Dan Spalding fell in love with Kentucky basketball in the 1990s. When he went through Army officer training for eight weeks in 2010, he wasn’t allowed to have his phone. That was Calipari’s first team, and his girlfriend (now wife) and dad would write him letters, giving him updates on John Wall and the rest of the star-studded roster. “That’s how I coped being away from my family,” he says.

Last June, Spalding’s 7-month-old son, Harry, needed open-heart surgery. Two days after that surgery, as Spalding sat with his son in the pediatric cardiac ICU, he found an email address for Kentucky basketball and sent a note. “If you are so inclined,” he wrote, “any thoughts/prayers and/or positive vibes are always welcome as Harry continues his recovery!”

Three days later, Pope showed up at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, the same day he had a father-son camp and a name, image and likeness event. He spent 45 minutes with the Spaldings, learned about their family and told them about his own.

“He made us feel like we mattered and that it was important enough for him to come see Harry because of what we were going through,” Spalding says. “He kept saying, ‘You’re part of the family. You’re part of Kentucky’s basketball family.’”

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Pope is uncomfortable talking about these private kindnesses, because that’s all they’re meant to be. But there are too many of them for word not to get out.

One went viral, when Pope bolted into the stands to visit with a Kentucky fan in a wheelchair who couldn’t come down to the floor to meet him alongside other fans after a win at Mississippi State.

“He’s so good about giving his time,” says Robyn Leach, wife of longtime UK play-by-play announcer Tom Leach.

Hey @DrewFranklinKSR @KySportsRadio So after the game tonight @CoachMarkPope comes out to meet some fans. Takes pictures and even FaceTimes someone but the best thing is what happened next. There was a UK fan in a wheelchair that couldn’t come down and he went up there to him pic.twitter.com/sCnHexY5Np

— Adam Townsend (@Adamdtownsend33) January 12, 2025

But it’s hardly a one-way street. Pope knows the power of the people he’s connecting with. He knows what they can do for his program. That’s why he takes recruits to the top of Rupp Arena. Everything good about Kentucky basketball, he tells them, can be found up in these bleachers.

Conversations up here always lead to one important message.

“If this is just going to be about you, then you won’t like Kentucky,” Pope says. “The demands will be too high on your time. If this is a race that you want to run solo, then don’t come to this gym. This is a place that is so much bigger than any one of us, and it will always be bigger than any one of us. And the best we can hope for is to come be a part of this monstrous thing and leave a mark and hang a banner and forge some incredible relationships and serve so many people that you probably never even know their name, right?”

That’s the mentality he believes is going to win at Kentucky, but its message runs counter to the trends of college basketball’s new era. How can Pope avoid letting the changes to the sport sidetrack his program?

“I think you listen,” he says. “I think you listen just to this community, this fan base. It’s Field of Dreams-ish. You listen to these voices from the past, right? … You just have to listen for two seconds, and you get that this means something.”

Pope is just over halfway through his first season, and March Madness looms as the next big test of the relationship. Every once in a while Jones will get a caller who admits he loves Pope, “but let’s remember he still hasn’t won an NCAA Tournament game.” (Pope went one-and-done in both tourney appearances with BYU.) Pope expects tournament success because this is Kentucky. That’s the job.

And when that March (and April) success eventually comes, it will be a shared experience. That is Pope’s grand vision.

A few months back, he even did the math. There are 4.25 million people in the state. He figured out how many days it’d take him to have some kind of interaction with each one.

“It’s not lost on me that there’s only one human being in the world who gets to be the coach at the University of Kentucky right now,” he says. “It feels like we’re supposed to be here, and it feels like there’s just not enough time.”

(Top photo: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)