Jason Marcum has been covering the Cincinnati Bengals for Cincy Jungle since 2014 and the University of Kentucky for A Sea Of Blue since 2015.
The Kentucky Wildcats are 4-0 after a dominating 97-68 win over the Lipscomb Bisons.
After drilling 12/25 attempts from deep, this became the first Kentucky team ever to make at least 10 3s in the first four games of a regular season.
That’s how special this group has been thus far, but the season is still very young, so there’s plenty of work left to be done.
After the game, head coach Mark Pope and select players met with the media to discuss win No. 4. Here is a recap of what they had to say via UK Athletics.
MARK POPE: Okay. Terrific night of basketball. This Lipscomb team is really good. They are really disciplined. They somehow managed to push the ball really hard in transition and then grind it out at half court, that’s a hard thing to put together and they are incredibly well coached. Lennie has been doing a great job for a long time. He’s a terrific–terrific coach. And you can see it. I don’t know if we’ll play teams that are this committed and disciplined to the way they play very much. It posed a real challenge. I thought our guys were great, I thought they really competed. For the most part, I thought we had pretty good results.
Q Mark, with a team this old, what was your anxiety level like this week in terms of a letdown after such an emotional game with Duke?
MARK POPE: You know, it’s interesting. We had this conversation earlier today with the broadcast team. We don’t stress, like we don’t get nervous, we don’t worry because it doesn’t actually work. You know, sometimes we think if a team has a letdown after a big win, it’s like, oh man, if the coach had just thought about the possibility of it being a letdown and prepared this team for no letdown, it wouldn’t have happened. What happens is we all just overkill, right? We just start pushing that narrative so hard with our team. We don’t actually do it at all. We are always going to be focused on what we need to do. And so, we really work hard. It’s human nature to worry about that a little bit. We really work hard to focus on what we are trying to do. Our guys are really hungry to get better, we are hungry to become a great team. We don’t have a lot of time to do it. So, you know, the last game was over and it was kind of onto like, how can we get better? How can we get better? That’s the only thing we talk about. And the biology of that, the neuroscience of that is 100% in support of that. Right? You know, we are not going to focus on what we don’t want to have happen, we are going to focus on what we do want to have happen. And our guys have received that really well. We did not spend much time on that at all, and we won’t, that’s not the way we do it. That doesn’t mean we won’t ever have bad results. It just means that we are going to always focus on what we are trying to do and we are going to try to be laser focused on that. We are not going to spend a lot of time thinking about what we do not want to have happen.
