Kentucky men’s basketball has had a rough run with injuries under Mark Pope, and the pattern has been hard to ignore.
Asked whether it’s simply bad luck or something deeper, Mark Story pointed first to the kinds of injuries UK has dealt with. In 2024-25, Kerr Kriisa broke his right foot in a non-contact moment against Gonzaga on Dec. 7 and was done for the season.
Lamont Butler injured his shoulder against Texas A&M on Jan. 14, then re-aggravated it after a collision with Tennessee’s Chaz Lanier on Feb. 11 before hurting it again against Oklahoma in the SEC Tournament. Jaxson Robinson later suffered a wrist injury on Feb. 7 in what was described as a “practice collision,” and that eventually led to season-ending surgery on March 1.
The season before, Jaland Lowe’s shoulder problem came from a collision with Otega Oweh in the Blue-White Game. Kam Williams dealt with a Jones fracture in his left foot on Jan. 21 against Texas. And Kentucky brought in Jayden Quaintance knowing he was returning from surgery to repair a torn ACL suffered while he was at Arizona State.
Story’s bottom line was straightforward: conditioning can play a role in pulled muscles or torn tendons, but it doesn’t explain non-contact broken bones or shoulder injuries that come from collisions. In his view, Kentucky under Pope has simply run into rotten luck.
On the preseason SEC poll, Story said he was surprised Kentucky landed at seventh. He acknowledged concerns about rebounding and physicality, but he likes the Wildcats’ offensive upside and thinks this roster has more complementary pieces than the 2025-26 team. If he had been voting, he said he would have put UK no lower than fourth in the league.
He also pushed back on the idea that the expanded 24-team College Football Playoff is automatically a safety net for coaches. A bigger field may slightly help job security, he said, but not if a high-expectation program like Texas or Ohio State stumbles into the playoff at 9-3 and then loses immediately. In that kind of scenario, he said, a coach could still be fired.
On Louisville football’s stadium expansion, Story said the move to 60,800 seats in 2018 was probably driven more by revenue than by pure ambition, with premium areas like field suites, loge-level boxes and a new hospitality space playing a major role. Still, he said Louisville may have overestimated demand, using his grandmother’s phrase that U of L had “eyes bigger than its stomach.” Since the expansion debuted, and excluding the 2020 season, Louisville has played 51 home games, and only 20 of them have drawn announced crowds above 50,000.
Finally, on the Kentucky Sports Figure of the Year Award, Story said there has never been a unanimous winner since the Herald-Leader began handing out the honor in 1981.
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Kentucky Has A Vanderbilt Problem Will Stein Wants Solved Now
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Stein also knows the atmosphere should help, and he has pushed fans to turn the home crowd into a factor for a sellout game with a Blue Out theme. Kentucky has already shown it can handle pressure and momentum this season, but this one carries a different kind of edge because of the opponent and the recent results between the schools. For a team trying to keep its footing in the SEC race, ending the pre-bye stretch on the right note would go a long way toward quieting a problem that has lingered a little too long. [Read more 🡒]