BBT Take · Opinion · Original
Mark Pope Is Right: Picked Seventh in the SEC Is Just Fuel, and Football Just Showed How
The SEC media picked Kentucky basketball seventh in the league this week. Mark Pope's answer at SEC Tipoff in Birmingham was the best thing a Kentucky coach has said all month.
Our Take: Pope is right to brush off the poll, and he picked the perfect example.
"We're very, very focused on the only opinion mattering is the opinion in our locker room," Pope said, per Kentucky Sports Radio. Then he pointed at Will Stein's football team, which got dropped out of the AP Top 25 after winning on the road at South Carolina, then came home and beat No. 10 LSU. "The guys came back and proved that the polls didn't matter to them either," Pope said.
That's the blueprint. Football is 5-1 with two wins over top-10 teams and is in the College Football Playoff conversation because it played with a chip on its shoulder. Stein is still leaning into it, saying this week that "everybody that we beat seems to be a really bad football team."
Even Kenny Brooks noticed, joking that Stein has "done a good job of making us think about football right now."
Seventh is a fine place to start for a men's team that tips off its first exhibition Friday. Let the outside world sleep on them. If Pope's group plays with the same edge Stein's has, that preseason poll is going to look as silly as dropping football out of the Top 25.