Pope rues 'poorly coached' Kentucky after loss to Spartans

NEW YORK -- Following his team's 83-66 loss to Michigan State in the Champions Classic on Tuesday, Kentucky coach Mark Pope said his "message isn't resonating" with his players and called the Wildcats "really poorly coached."

Kentucky trailed by as many as 24 points late in the second half and suffered its second loss in its past three games after falling to Louisville last week. During Tuesday's broadcast, ESPN's Kris Budden reported that Wildcats players were "barking at each other" during a second-half timeout.

"We're far away from the team we hope and aspire to be, and we can't waste a second on trying to grow into that," Pope said. "We're disappointed and discouraged and completely discombobulated right now."

It took Pope more than 50 minutes after the game ended to enter his postgame news conference, and he almost immediately began to take responsibility for Kentucky's struggles.

"I know there's one team that's really, really well coached and one team that was really poorly coached," Pope said.

"My message isn't resonating with the guys right now," he added. "That's my responsibility."

Kentucky was without starting point guard Jaland Lowe, who has missed the past two games with a shoulder injury, and projected lottery pick Jayden Quaintance, who remains out following an ACL injury suffered last February. Pope was asked whether the injuries were an excuse for the Wildcats' early-season inconsistencies.

"If you build an organization the right way, then your identity is not about an individual person. Your identity is about a collective group," Pope said. "So it shouldn't matter if we had built a great organization and a great culture, which I've clearly failed to do up until today.

"But we won't fail this season. We just have failed up until today. We will build an organization where we won't be able to be disrupted every time someone steps in and steps out because we'll have a team identity, not an individual identity. Until we get there, we're going to really struggle. That's my job. That's why Mitch [Barnhart] brought me here. I'm doing it poorly. I won't be doing it poorly for much longer."

It didn't initially appear that Tuesday's game would end in this fashion. Kentucky scored the first five points of the game and took a 17-14 lead on a Mouhamed Dioubate dunk with 13:36 left in the first half. Michigan State would then go on a 30-10 run to end the half. Kentucky's 27 points were tied for the fewest it had scored in a half under Pope, and the 17-point halftime deficit was its second-largest under Pope.