Tuesday Headlines: Mark Pope working aggressively to solve Kentucky’s foul issues

Posted by Admin January 21, 2025 Basketball

All of Big Blue Nation would agree that Kentucky basketball head coach Mark Pope has far exceeded expectations in his first season leading the program.

Pope inherited a team that had zero returning players from the previous season’s rotation and was tasked with filling out an entire roster through the transfer portal as well as keeping two of the school’s freshman recruits.

Fast forward from mid-April to now and the team is ranked No. 9 in the country with four wins over Top-15 teams and just gave fans what could have very well been a National Championship preview on Saturday against No. 4 Alabama.

Kentucky has been a juggernaut offensively and there are so many things to love about the direction Pope has this program headed in.

One flaw this team does have, though, is getting into foul trouble and then not drawing enough fouls.

Now, one part of shooting as many three-pointers as Kentucky does is not getting as many shots around the basket/drawing contact to lead to fouls.

However, teams like Alabama shoot as many if not more three-pointers than Kentucky yet took several more free throws than Kentucky did on Saturday.

So, what’s the solution?

Mark Pope says the staff is looking at Kentucky’s five SEC games, and are breaking down every foul and sorting them.

Adds that they have found some areas where he believes they can attack “aggressively.”

— Tristan Pharis (@TristanUda) January 20, 2025

Hats off to Pope and his staff for doing more to improve their team’s performance other than saying they need to “practice this” or “practice that” when something doesn’t go their way.

From the outside looking in, this also seems like an issue that can be solved.

Kentucky commits several fouls where they’re “halfway” committed on defense. They get caught in the middle of fouling and not fouling, leading to the opposition having a better chance of making the shot plus the foul or drawing the foul in the first place instead of having to just take a well-contested shot.

The Wildcats need to focus on either committing a clean, hard foul to prevent and-ones or tighten up their defense by cutting out a few of the careless, soft fouls they’ve been committing this season.

Players like Lamont Butler, Andrew Carr, Otega Oweh and Jaxson Robinson are way too important to this rotation to pick up a couple of careless fouls in a short stretch of the game and have to head to the bench.

Kentucky has quality depth, but they’d be much better off using that depth to keep guys rested and stick to their main rotation instead of being forced to sit one or two key players for an extended period of time in a game.

With the Wildcats having extended time off this week (don’t play until Saturday at Vanderbilt), they picked a terrific opportunity to dive into this foul issue and hopefully fans will start to see a difference when Kentucky next takes the floor starting this weekend.