As college basketball heads toward the Final Four next week, much of the sport’s focus will be on the simmering uncertainty at several of the sport’s blue bloods.

North Carolina’s transition plan from Roy Williams to Hubert Davis went bust. Kansas could be facing just its second coaching search since 1988, caught between cross-pressures to elevate current assistant/former NBA coach/alum Jacque Vaughn or cast a wider net if Bill Self retires. And Kentucky’s discontent after 15 years of John Calipari has put Mark Pope, another alum, on the hot seat headed into next year. 

Meanwhile, four years after the retirement of Mike Krzyzewski, Duke is in its third straight Sweet 16, has won 83.7% of its games under Jon Scheyer and seems poised to continue contending for national titles as far as the eye can see.

Over the history of college sports, few tasks have been more vexing for schools and administrators than keeping things both successful and sane around a prominent program once their forever coach leaves. 

Duke has made it look easy. It might even be the most well-executed coaching handoff there’s ever been from legend to successor. 

“The following of one of the very best coaches of any sport, arguably one of the very best basketball coaches in the history of the game, to a young, up-and-coming assistant coach that was a very good college player, there was a lot of room for that not to work,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told Yahoo Sports. “In my experience in college athletics, which is over 30 years, I've not seen a more seamless transition than what's taken place.”

Given what a towering figure Krzyzewski became on his way to 1,202 wins and five national titles across his 42 seasons, it’s remarkable how drama-free the Duke program has been the past four seasons under the 38-year-old Scheyer. 

Lance King via Getty Images

While the last two seasons have met rough endings — an upset in the 2024 Elite Eight to NC State and a last-minute collapse in the Final Four against Houston 12 months ago — Scheyer has earned enough benefit of the doubt with three ACC tournament titles and an unrivaled recruiting operation to quiet the noise that typically consumes young coaches who have to learn on the job in high-profile environments.  

“You’re always on edge because you know sitting in that chair, replacing that person, the expectations are so high it’s hard to have a good night of sleep,” said UNLV coach Josh Pastner, who took over for John Calipari at Memphis when he was just 31 years old. “It’s like having success is a relief because you have to meet a certain bar. You’re always looking over your shoulder. It’s on your mind 24/7, 365, knowing that’s what you’re being compared to and as human beings, one of our great enemies is comparison to others. It’s hard to disassociate yourself from that. It takes a lot of discipline because the fan base and your bosses are comparing.”

Taking over for a legend

Even though he made four straight NCAA tournaments, the heat of failing to make the second weekend ultimately chased Pastner to Georgia Tech, which is more typical of what happens when a legend leaves and someone else has to deal with unrealistic expectations. 

Just consider: 

• After John Wooden retired, UCLA cycled through five coaches over the next 13 years. 

• Jim Calhoun’s successor, Kevin Ollie, won a shocking national title in 2014 but was responsible for the program falling apart amidst poor performance and NCAA violations.

• There was plenty of drama around Bill Guthridge, Dean Smith’s handpicked successor, who stepped down after three seasons. 

• After Bob Knight’s firing at Indiana, Mike Davis (and several subsequent coaches) had to deal with the drama of being caught between his backward-looking loyalists and those focused on the future. 

• And in more recent vintage, the three years since Jim Boehiem’s retirement have been a disaster for Syracuse, with Adrian Autry fired after going 49-48 with no postseason appearances.  

Jim Livengood, who was Arizona’s athletic director when Lute Olson retired in right before the 2008-09 season amid health ongoing issues, said the year leading up to the announcement followed by a season-long coaching search was among the most difficult situations he had to manage in his career. 

Not only was Livengood dealing with the bizarre circumstance of assistant coach Mike Dunlap refusing to serve as interim coach because he wasn’t offered the full-time job, Russ Pennell ended up leading Arizona to the Sweet 16. Meanwhile, Livengood was trying to pursue some of the biggest names in the profession and felt significant pressure to hire someone who would both excite the fan base and be acceptable to stakeholders who were wary of a significant pivot away from the Olson era. 

He ended up prying Sean Miller out of Xavier, which was considered a big coup for Arizona at the time. Miller made three elite Eights and two Sweet 16s in his first eight years before the FBI inquiry into college basketball and subsequent NCAA investigation derailed the program yet again. 

“I was told by my colleagues probably three or four years prior to Lute getting ill that the transition of who’s going to be that next coach would be the hardest thing in the world,” said Livengood. “And it was really hard. There were so many conversations, so many things nobody understood or knew about. There were people in all different camps. Like the Duke situation, [the result] had everything to do with the person coming in. I don’t think they could have done it if [Krzyzewski] hadn’t been so insistent that Jon be the guy.”

Kevin C. Cox via Getty Images

Why Duke’s plan worked

Duke’s succession plan was nothing if not well laid-out. In January 2021, longtime Duke athletic director Kevin White announced his plan to retire. Four months later, his chief operating officer Nina King was elevated to athletic director. Two weeks after that, Krzyzewski made public that 2021-22 would be his final season, concurrent with an announcement that Scheyer, who had been on staff for seven seasons, would be the head coach-in-waiting and take over the following year. 

At the time, there were critics who felt Krzyzewski’s farewell tour was self-serving. In reality, it was part of an orchestrated sequence of events intended to give both King and Scheyer the best possible chance of a clean handoff while having time to adjust to new roles. And Duke has succeeded where others failed for three reasons. 

The first is resources. Krzyzewski’s retirement took place at the beginning of the NIL era and Duke jumped in with both feet, hiring former Nike and NBA marketing executive Rachel Baker as general manager in June 2022 (long before most programs were doing it). Part of that role was helping organize NIL opportunities, which helped Scheyer get ahead of the game in recruiting right away with the nation’s top-ranked recruiting class.

If anything, NIL taking hold right as Scheyer got the job played to his benefit. Without that infrastructure, it would have been much more difficult to land a steady stream of Dereck Livelys, Cooper Flaggs and Kon Knueppels without having a track record as head coach. 

“Everybody talks about athletics being the front porch of the university but Duke is one of the few that really gets it,” one rival ACC administrator told Yahoo Sports. “They understand what the brand means to the school and weren’t going to let it decline.” 

The second factor is Krzyzewski himself. Though he continued his weekly radio show after retirement and does sporadic media appearances, he is mostly in the background, highly aware of what his presence means and always careful not to overshadow his successor. Krzyzewski rarely attends games but is always available when needed.

“Coach K has given me amazing room to be myself,” Scheyer said at last year’s Final Four. “Really the only advice he gave me from the beginning was to be true to me, to be true to myself. I already knew that. But for him to remind me of that from time to time has been important. I think he understands when he's around just the gravity and the people looking at him and all that. But we've gotten to a point, one, our communication has been the same all the time. I'll tell you for me, in the toughest moments that I've had as a head coach my first three years, the person that I call is him.”

And the third factor is that Scheyer has proven to be a highly effective coach. No matter how much talent he has amassed thanks to the Duke brand and NIL organization, going 69-6 over the past two seasons does not happen by accident. He has given cynics no reason to question his ability to organize the program, manage players or trade X-for-O with more experienced coaches.

“Jon Scheyer is clearly a generational talent who was mentored by perhaps the very best coach ever in any sport,” White told Yahoo Sports. “Pretty darn good recipe for high-end success.”

Legends do not always leave a disaster in their wake. Bud Wilkinson’s retirement at Oklahoma opened the door for another seminal figure to follow in Barry Switzer. Though there were some turbulent moments after Adolph Rupp was pushed into retirement, Joe B. Hall won a national title in 1978 amidst a long run of success. And despite the significant pain and hard feelings between Bobby Bowden and Florida State when the school finally forced him out, the coach-in-waiting plan with Jimbo Fisher was ultimately validated when he won a national title in 2013. 

But in the entire history of college sports, it’s hard to find a situation with blowup potential that was navigated as well as this one. All Scheyer needs is a national title — and it’s probably just a matter of time at this point. 

“I think it’s a credit to everybody involved,” Phillips said. “It’s a credit to Coach K knowing he was getting ready to retire and preparing Jon. There was a strategy behind it, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to work out. The person who deserves the most credit is Jon Scheyer. To understand the assignment and be incredibly comfortable with who he is and understand that he was not going to be Mike Krzyzewski 2.0 takes incredible maturity.”

Midnight came early again for Cinderella.

All 16 teams that advanced to the second week of this year’s NCAA tournament hail from one of the five power conferences.

The only double-digit-seeded upstart that managed to crash the party is a Sean Miller-coached Texas team with a $22.4 million operating budget and an enviable NIL war chest. The closest thing to a charming underdog story left in this year’s field is a Big Ten runner-up Nebraska team making its first Sweet 16 appearance after decades of basketball irrelevance.

At least one team from outside the power conferences reached the round of 16 for 49 straight years after the NCAA tournament expanded to 32 teams in 1975. That streak ended last March when none of those schools advanced beyond the NCAA tournament’s opening weekend. Now the mid-majors have been eliminated early for a second consecutive year.

Why is March Madness becoming less mad? Why are the NCAA tournament’s giants swatting aside the giant slayers more consistently than they did just a few years ago? Jeff Eisenberg and Dan Wolken of Yahoo Sports examined what’s behind this trend and offer differing theories below.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Cinderella teams worried about NCAA tournament future can blame NIL

(By Jeff Eisenberg)

When his team opened conference tournament play earlier this month, Queens University men’s basketball coach Grant Leonard glanced into the stands and was surprised by what he saw.

Sitting courtside, Leonard said, was an SEC assistant coach who was there to get a head start scouting and recruiting a Queens player who had not yet entered the transfer portal. The SEC assistant wore school-branded apparel just like coaches do when trying to make their presence known to high school prospects while attending Peach Jam or other AAU tournaments.

“I don't think it is the right thing ethically to go to our conference tournament, sit on the floor and try to interact with my player in an elimination game,” Leonard told reporters Thursday on the eve of Queens’ first-round NCAA tournament game against Purdue. “That is my opinion; it is not a fact. Is it permissible? Maybe, maybe not. Is it ethical? In my opinion no.”

Stories like that help illustrate why the Cinderella runs that have long been the lifeblood of the NCAA tournament are rapidly becoming more scarce. The gap between college basketball’s haves and have-nots is rapidly widening because top-tier programs can offer massive NIL payouts to the best available talent and because transfer rules no longer prevent players from switching schools as often as they want without penalty.

The name-brand programs who have advanced in this year’s NCAA tournament have treated mid-major teams like their personal farm system. Their rosters are littered with players who began their college careers at a lower level, from Michigan’s Yaxel Lendeborg, to Louisville’s Ryan Conwell, to UCLA’s Donovan Dent, to Tennessee’s Ja’Kobi Gillepsie.

Mid-majors struggling to keep best players

Those player retention issues have eaten away at the biggest advantage that small-conference programs used to have in March. The Loyola Chicagos, Wichita States and Butlers of the past overcame the talent gap with older players who developed superior cohesiveness through years of playing together. That’s harder to pull off today with wealthier programs sliding into players’ DMs or making life-altering offers through back channels.

The ability to offer NIL payouts well into seven figures has also allowed high-majors to recruit guys who in the past would be playing professional basketball. Teams at the top of this year’s NCAA tournament bracket are loaded with prized freshmen, international prospects and proven veterans who can earn more playing college basketball than they can in overseas pro leagues, the G League or even on an NBA two-way contract. There are teams who are paying six figures to players coming off their bench.

The concentration of talent at the top of college basketball is exemplified by how the past two NCAA tournaments have unfolded. Not a single team seeded 13th or worse has advanced out of the round of 64. Every team that has made the past two Sweet 16s has come from a power conference.

Thirteen of 32 first-round games in this year’s tournament were decided by more than 20 points. The average margin of victory in the first round was 17.4, the highest since the tournament expanded in 1985, per ESPN research.

Impact of regular season

Two NCAA tournaments may be a small sample size, but regular-season results also reflect the growing chasm between top-tier teams and everyone else. There were 378 matchups this November between high-majors and non-Gonzaga teams from other conferences. The little guy won only 22 of them, according to research by Yahoo Sports.

“In the past, if you did a good job evaluating and a good job recruiting and you found guys who were a notch above your level, they wouldn’t leave because they’d have to sit out some place,” former Fairleigh Dickinson and Iona coach Tobin Anderson told Yahoo Sports in November. “Now with the portal and nonstop free agency, a good low-major or mid-major team for the most part is going to lose its best players every year.”

By the numbers, Duke, Arizona and Michigan entered this year’s NCAA tournament as three of the strongest No. 1 seeds in recent memory. Each boasted KenPom adjusted efficiency margins of at least 37.59, meaning that’s how many points that college basketball statistician Ken Pomeroy would project them to outscore the average Division I opponent by over 100 possessions.

Since the KenPom era began in 1997, only 10 teams have ever finished a season with adjusted efficiency margins higher than 35. Four of those are last year’s No. 1 seeds.

It isn’t just the No. 1 seeds who were unusually formidable this season. A total of 20 teams seeded sixth or higher entered the NCAA tournament with adjusted efficiency margins of plus-25, compared to just four at the end of the 2022-23 college basketball season and nine the year before that.

It’s the opposite story for schools from single-bid leagues, the sorts of programs who populated the seed lines at the bottom of this year’s bracket.

That’s why this has been another NCAA tournament where the giants have swatted aside the giant slayers, where the teams that advance have deep pockets, not glass slippers.

Jared C. Tilton via Getty Images

Meet the real villain(s) behind the death of Cinderella

(By Dan Wolken)

As we endure a second straight year without much mid-major magic in the NCAA tournament’s opening weekend, plenty of fingers will be pointed at the current NIL and transfer environment for killing Cinderella.

That may or may not be true. Two years is still a small sample size, and if a couple close games go the other way — Santa Clara, Siena and Wright State all had great chances in the final few minutes to take down blue-blood programs — we’re having a totally different discussion.

But, in the aggregate, I’ll acknowledge it certainly felt like the first round of the NCAA tournament was top heavy. A lot of blowouts — the first-round average margin of victory was 17.4 points, the highest since the tournament expanded in 1985. A lot of 12, 13, 14 and 15 seeds that looked significantly outclassed.

The transfer portal is an easy bête noire in this discussion. All the power conference schools are scouting mid-major rosters, and anyone who shows promise at a lower level is being offered big money to transfer. Again, I’ll acknowledge this isn’t great for mid-major programs. From a 30,000-foot view, it is harder to maintain talent and continuity across the bottom 270 or so programs in the sport.

In terms of how it’s specifically affecting the NCAA tournament, however, there’s another factor that deserves more of the blame than it’s getting.

Conference realignment.

If Cinderella is indeed on life support, it’s far more likely that the mad rush since 2010 to draw up coast-to-coast, mammoth football conferences was what put her in the ICU in the first place.

Mid-majors had proud history in NCAA tournament

Go back 15 years and look at some of these conferences that produced the iconic mid-major teams of recent vintage like Butler, VCU, Wichita State and Loyola Chicago. They are almost unrecognizable today, and you can trace the reason directly to the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC gluttonizing themselves into amorphous blobs and creating a domino effect that significantly weakened dozens of conferences below them.

And yet all those conferences continue to get automatic bids, and the quality of teams filling those slots has undeniably gotten weaker.

Let’s look at 2016 — just 10 years ago. The average pre-tournament KenPom ranking of the No. 15 seeds was 124, the average No. 14 seeds was 105, the average of No. 13 seeds was 84 and the average No. 12 seeds was 73.

Four years ago, in 2022, we had one of the craziest tournaments ever. Here were the KenPom averages: No. 15 seeds were 140, No. 14 seeds were 134, No. 13 seeds were 83, No. 12 seeds were 61. (In that tournament, a 15 seed won a first-round game, two 12 seeds won first-round games and the 4-13 games were decided by a total of 18 points.)

This year? It’s a totally different story. The 15 seed average is around 179, the 14 seed average is roughly 142, the 13 seed average is 113, the 12 seed average is 76.

As you can see, it’s very clear in the numbers that the quality of automatic bid winners filling these Cinderella seed lines has declined over time. The same conferences that put good teams in the tournament are now producing weaker champions. And that’s happened at the same time fringe NBA prospects are staying in college longer because of NIL, making the top layer of the sport stronger.

But when you’re talking about the NCAA tournament, where a limited number of teams from that top layer are playing the cream of the crop from smaller conferences, it’s crucial to understand that many of those conferences are now a shell of what they once were due to realignment.

Realignment erodes lower-level conferences

When the Big East reformed as a basketball-only league in 2013 because it got tired of being jerked around by football realignment, it weakened the A-10 by taking Xavier and Butler, and the Missouri Valley by inviting Creighton. The A-10 responded by taking VCU and George Mason from the CAA, Davidson from the Southern Conference, then Loyola from the Missouri Valley several years later.

The Valley, having lost Creighton, Loyola and Wichita State (which bolted to the American), backfilled with Belmont and Murray State, which took the two best programs from the Ohio Valley Conference, which in turn added Little Rock and Western Illinois.

Meanwhile, the American losing SMU, Houston, UCF and Cincinnati to power conferences sparked a raid of Conference USA, which caused that league to take a grab bag of schools from the CAA, Atlantic Sun and Missouri Valley.

This has happened over and over across all these realignment moves. As one league scrambles for survival by taking the best members of a league just below them in the pecking order, it erodes the strength of each conference down the chain.

For a long time, leagues like the MVC, CAA and Horizon could reliably put competitive 12 or 13 seeds in the tournament because they had a core of solid programs and good brands. Now, the membership of those leagues is totally different, but they’re still getting the same automatic bids.

You don’t even need to mention NIL or the transfer portal to see very easily how the quality of teams filling those bids could slip, which is now showing up clearly in the numbers. And if you get a year like this one where several of the No. 1 seeds in the mid- and low-major leagues lost their conference tournaments, it takes the quality of the No. 12-15 seeds down another notch and you end up with the kind of blowouts we saw on Thursday and Friday.

The NCAA tournament is not a microcosm of the sport. College basketball has never been as equal as the March Madness branding makes it look. With 350-plus teams, the gap between the haves and have-nots has always been massive.

But in a one-off event like this, how you sort the teams in the field matters significantly. If the 100th-best team in the country was a typical 14 seed a decade ago and now the typical 14 seed is the 142nd-best team, that’s a huge difference driving a decline in upsets.

Is that an issue the NCAA needs to address? Perhaps. But if we’re going to worry about the death of Cinderella, we need to correctly identify what killed her. NIL and the transfer portal are only part of the story — and maybe even the smallest part compared to 15 years of realignment shock coming home to roost.

For 15 years, Bill Self was college basketball’s most inevitable figure.

The Big 12 couldn’t beat him. The NCAA and even the FBI couldn’t take him down. Maybe he left a couple national championships on the table, but he got two — and every year when March Madness began, Kansas was usually one of the teams to beat. 

It’s an all-time run. Is it over? 

After Kansas was eliminated Sunday by St. John’s in the NCAA tournament second round, Self said “I haven’t decided” when asked if he will coach in 2026-27, citing health issues that have plagued him going back to 2023 when he was forced to miss the Big 12 and NCAA tournament after needing a stent to treat a blocked artery. 

“I’ll get back and get with family and visit and see what’s going on,” he said. “I love what I do. I need to be able to do it where I’m feeling good and healthy to do it fairly well, so I’ll get back home and it’ll all be discussed.”

Sean M. Haffey via Getty Images

Sunday marked the fourth straight year for Kansas losing in the first or second round. Over the last three seasons, Self has gone 33-23 in a conference he dominated for more than a decade. 

Draft your Yahoo Fantasy Baseball team for the 2026 MLB Season

Around the Big 12, there has been speculation among coaches and administrators all season that this might be Self’s final year given both the declining results in the NIL era and the health problems. Self had to miss a game at Colorado in January after being treated for dehydration and atrial fibrillation, a condition that causes an irregular heart rate. 

Self, 63, has taken Kansas to four Final Fours — although one of them, 2018, was stripped from the record books due to playing an ineligible player, Silvio De Sousa, after a former Adidas executive admitted in court that he paid $20,000 to De Sousa’s family to attend Kansas. 

Self escaped that case, which was part of the FBI’s inquiry into college basketball, with minimal punishments despite the program being charged with five Level 1 NCAA violations stemming from its ties to Adidas. 

“It’s certainly a year that didn’t seem like anything about it was very smooth,” Self said. “I’m probably looking at [my career] now more in [two]-year increments so I’ve tried to focus on this season and get us to a second weekend which we failed. So I’ll go back and break it down and see where that leads.”

As Kentucky fans watched their season end in emphatic fashion Sunday with an 82-63 loss to Iowa State, they saw a team that plays the way many of them probably wish the Wildcats did with an unflinching defensive scheme and attacking offense that never gives the opponent a moment’s rest. 

In fact, when you look not just at how Iowa State has played this season but across T.J. Otzelberger’s five years — this will be his third trip to the Sweet 16 — it seems absurd in retrospect that the 48-year-old from Wisconsin wasn’t atop Kentucky’s list two years ago when John Calipari went to Arkansas. 

Kentucky probably won’t make the same mistake next time. But the question of when the next Wildcat coaching search will take place is now a topic that promises to dominate the next eight months and beyond in the Bluegrass. 

Mark Pope arrived at his introductory press conference in April of 2024 with the entire 1996 national championship team and trophy in tow. He spent his first offseason barnstorming the country for recruits and charming the fan base with public appearances meant to emphasize that he was as much a part of Big Blue Nation as the fans who fill Rupp Arena. And at the end of Year 1, which resulted in a No. 3 seed in the NCAA tournament and Sweet 16 appearance, it appeared he was set for the long haul. 

But a lot has changed in 12 months. And after Kentucky’s season ended with a helpless performance in the second round, Pope’s job status heading into 2026-27 is going to be the most high-wattage topic in college basketball. 

IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect / REUTERS

Despite going 22-13 with a roster that cost a reported $22 million to put together, Pope is likely not in imminent danger of losing his job. There are several reasons for that. 

While the way Kentucky played this season will not be considered acceptable by the school’s stakeholders and boosters, this is nowhere near the disaster the school lived through under Billy Gillispie from 2007-09, which caused them to pull the plug after two years. There is a reasonable path to write off this season as an expensive misadventure in the transfer portal, make changes this offseason and come back with a more thoughtful and coherent roster-building process. 

Another issue, at the moment, is Kentucky’s ongoing athletic director transition after Mitch Barnhart announced his retirement at the beginning of March. Without a permanent AD in place, this is not the right moment to make such an important decision — which may have played into why Barnhart, who hired Pope, held off so long on making the announcement that much of the college athletics industry had been waiting on for months. 

Make no mistake, however: Pope is now on the clock. He has one year to fix this. In 12 months, when a new AD is in place, it will be abundantly clear whether this season was a one-off underachievement fueled by injuries and poor chemistry or a sign that Pope is in over his head. 

Draft your Yahoo Fantasy Baseball team for the 2026 MLB Season

If social media is at all representative of the mood in Kentucky, it’s remarkable how quickly the fan base has soured on a coach who is not merely one of their own but came into the job with a full commitment to embrace the 365-day-a-year, statewide intensity around the program as its central brand. 

Most coaching searches in college sports are a direct reaction to what the former coach did wrong. In this case, after 15 years of Calipari selling Kentucky as an NBA way station, Pope’s first job was to restore the idea that what mattered most was Kentucky’s one-of-a-kind fan base and honor the eight national championship banners hanging in the Rupp rafters. 

The next Kentucky athletic director, however, will almost certainly understand what Barnhart did not: Brands no longer matter in college athletics the way they used to. It would be unfair to say that Kentucky is just another program in the NIL era, but the things that used to set Kentucky apart in the chase for elite players are now tangential. That should be plainly obvious after spending $22 million on a replacement-level roster. 

If Barnhart had understood two years ago what wins in college basketball now, he might have looked at his coaching search differently. The ability to evaluate in the portal, spend wisely and build chemistry is everything. Instead, Barnhart leaned into track record and relationships, targeting Baylor’s Scott Drew and checking in with Billy Donovan before quickly zeroing in on Pope, who had never won an NCAA tournament game in nine years at Utah Valley and BYU. 

No AD can guarantee that a coaching hire is going to work out, but Barnhart’s process — targeting an established NCAA championship coach from the pre-NIL era, an NBA coach who hadn’t been in college since 2015 and an alum with a decent-but-unspectacular track record at smaller schools showed no real logical consistency. Kentucky didn’t know what it was getting two years ago because its coaching search was led by an AD who didn’t have a good basketball theory for why he wanted who he wanted. 

And now Kentucky is in the worst of all worlds. Pope is almost certainly coming back, recruiting so far looks lean and there is going to be a mass of negativity around the program heading into next season. It won’t help that Pope enters a hot-seat season with a lot of questions about his ability to communicate his message to players and fans. Many of his press conferences — including earlier this week when he stumbled all over himself trying to refute a claim by Michigan’s Yaxel Lendeborg that Kentucky offered him $7 to $9 million in the transfer portal — come off awkward and erode the gravitas a Kentucky coach is expected to have.

All of these issues can be fixed, of course, but only by Pope winning at a level he’s never won at before. More likely, this feels like a miserable 12-month, slow-motion walk toward change. 

But the way Kentucky lost Sunday should show the administrators and boosters there what’s possible with the kind of relentless competence Otzelberger has brought to Iowa State. You don’t need the faded banners or the $22 million roster to build a monster team, but you do need coherence and buy-in.

Kentucky got neither this season. If the same trends emerge next year, Pope will deservedly be out of chances to figure that out.