One of the best games of the college basketball season took place on Saturday as Nate Oats and No. 4 Alabama went on the road to Rupp Arena to take on Mark Pope and No. 8 Kentucky in Lexington. The two teams battled back and forth in a high-scoring affair before Alabama eventually made a few more plays to come out on top 102-97.

Mark Pope will be the first to tell you he would not be coaching at all had he not transferred from Washington to become a Wildcat in 1994. He nearly didn’t anyway, enrolling in medical school at Columbia University as a Rhodes Scholar candidate before he quit to ‘fold laundry and hand out water’ as ‘the assistant to the operations guy’ under Mark

Pope inherited a team that had zero returning players from the previous season’s rotation and was tasked with filling out an entire roster through the transfer portal as well as

Lately, especially in SEC play, fouls have been an issue for this Kentucky team, and it reared it's ugly head against Alabama as the Crimson Tide got to the free-throw line 34 times, essentially at will.