Mark Pope’s first game as UK coach was even more special with 41-point win, his number as a Wildcat

It was a perfect debut for Mark Pope and Kentucky with a 41-point win.

Mark Pope and the Kentucky Wildcats wasted no time by winning in a blowout fashion on Monday night against Wright State. The final score was 103-62, and from the very beginning, Kentucky never looked back after having the lead.

After the game, the team, along with Pope, Lee Anne Pope, and Mitch Barnhart, all met at halfcourt, where Barnhart presented Pope with a bourbon barrel top to remember Pope’s first win as the Kentucky men’s basketball head coach.

The team took pictures with Pope to remember that big moment, but the team even celebrated a bit more by throwing water onto Pope. What made it even more special was that Kentucky won 41 points, and Pope wore the No. 41 jersey while in Kentucky.

“I’m telling you these guys, our guys, I’m pretty sure they cooked that up, but we talked about that after the game,” Pope tells the media. “41 [is] really special to me, and so that is really sweet. It’s Kentucky magic, nothing like it.”

Not only that but that was also Pope’s first win at Kentucky, and he talked to Tom Hart and Jimmy Dykes after the game to discuss the big win.

“It’s been — come on. I’m not going to start crying right now, but we have these experiences in our lives that change us forever. They change what our insides are, and you get to do that with people, right? So here I am in a place that changed me forever with all the people that we got to go through that experience together…there’s nothing like it.”

Although it was Pope’s first win as head coach, he thought it was special because it was also the first win for the players who joined Kentucky

“We talked about this the other night. Walking into Rupp is like walking into your house, it’s just that 22,000 people are there and it’s a brilliant thing and it means everything to me. We’re excited about trying to represent this program and this state in an epic way.”

Pope knows it was a great moment to get his first win here, but he knows it might take a while to realize the magnitude of tonight.

“They asked me this on TV postgame, and I’m just going to give you bad answers because we’re just lost in the game. You know, at some point, Lee Anne and I are going to find some quiet moment to sit back and drink a soda sometime in the next month or two, or nine months or sometime, and we’re just gonna…I just look forward to that moment because we’ll really take it in then. And it’s so deeply special to me. But right now, we got work to do, so we’re pretty locked in on the game.”

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