If there’s anyone out there who didn’t tune in for the first 30 games of this Kentucky basketball season, the 84-77 loss to the Florida Gators on Saturday served as a pretty fair synopsis.
Playing the No. 5 team in the country in Rupp Arena, the Cats got off to one of their signature starts. For this UK team, that hasn’t been a good thing.
Florida’s Rueben Chinyelu scored a bucket at the rim on the opening possession. And then came a layup from fellow Gators big man Alex Condon. And then a Boogie Fland 3-pointer. And a Condon free throw. And a 3 from Xaivian Lee.
Meanwhile, UK missed its first seven shots from the field. The score: Florida 11, Kentucky 0. Another early double-digit deficit for the Cats in a season that has been filled with them.
“We’ve done that sometimes to start games, where we’ve been a little bit sticky and a little paralyzed, and they went to the post two straight possessions. … We did a poor job on both those defensive possessions,” UK coach Mark Pope said afterward. “And then we just didn’t have any pace on the offensive end. So that was the start of the game.”
That’s been the start of a lot of games.
And then, like they have so many times this season, the Cats fought back.
Kentucky star Otega Oweh — playing in his final home game — scored 11 points in less than five minutes, part of a 19-9 run that put the Cats within one point of the Gators.
It was 20-19 Florida at that point, basically a brand-new ball game in front of a red-hot Rupp crowd. And then it turned again, thanks to one UK breakdown after another.
The Gators went on a 13-0 run that took exactly 123 seconds to materialize. The Cats committed three turnovers in that stretch. Those turnovers led directly to six Florida points.
Stretches like that have been commonplace for this Kentucky team, too.
“We make poor decisions when we’re tired on the floor. We just do,” Pope said. “We make poor decisions when we’re tired on the floor. So we’re trying to find out how to ameliorate that and fix it, and that’s been a problem for us the last couple games. And we’ll perform better than that.”
And there’s another staple of this UK basketball season, especially in recent weeks.
Sure, these Cats are playing shorthanded. Jaland Lowe, Jayden Quaintance and Kam Williams all remain sidelined due to injuries — none has played since January — and any team with three starter-level players watching from the bench is bound to have its struggles.
But Pope’s constant talk of “fatigue” as an excuse for his team’s lapses grew tiring long ago. And, in this instance, it didn’t hold a lot of water. These plays happened midway through the first half, and two of those three turnovers were committed by bench players Brandon Garrison and Jasper Johnson, who had played fewer than five minutes apiece at the time they occurred.
Florida’s 13-0 run was a little ways removed from its 11-0 flurry to start the game, but put it all together, and it was just a continuation of the poor first-half performances this UK team has suffered time and again.
“When we lose, we have bad starts to games, bad starts to halves,” UK forward Mouhamed Dioubate said. “It’s almost like a disconnection at some point in the game, when we lose. … It’s obvious. The fans see it. Everyone sees it. So we just got to do a better job at starting games off better.”
The Gators led 33-19 at the end of that 13-0 run, and the game was basically lost at that point.
Florida took a 49-32 lead into halftime. The Cats trailed by 20 with fewer than 10 minutes left.
And then another hallmark of the 2025-26 season: the second-half comeback.
Led by Oweh, the Cats stormed back down the stretch.
Down 18 with 7:15 remaining, Oweh initiated a 13-3 run. That made it 73-63 with 3:53 left.
A bucket from Dioubate narrowed the deficit to eight points with 2:30 remaining. Completing this comeback would be improbable, but these Cats had done similarly improbable things before.
Kentucky got as close as 80-75 with 29 seconds to go, and the Rupp crowd was in a frenzy after a missed out-of-bounds call on Florida’s ensuing possession went without a whistle.
The Cats would get no closer. The finish, like the start, was a testament to the season.
Kentucky Wildcats guard Otega Oweh (00) walks off the court following a loss to Florida on Saturday at Rupp Arena. Oweh scored 28 points in his final home game at UK. Ryan C. Hermens [email protected]
This Kentucky team, as it has so many times over the past four months, offered just enough of a glimmer of hope at the end to suggest that maybe, if the Cats can put it all together, they can also make good on a season that seemed so promising when it started back in November.
This was, in fact, a Florida squad that came to Rupp riding a 10-game winning streak. The Gators were the hottest team in all of high-major basketball. They beat Mississippi State by 34 points the previous game, playing that one without star forward Thomas Haugh, who torched the Cats for 17 points in the first half Saturday. The game before that, Florida beat Arkansas by 34 points, too.
There’s no shame in a seven-point loss to this bunch — the defending national champions, mind you — and that margin was exactly what the Vegas oddsmakers and computer models projected coming in. A silver lining for these Cats to take into the postseason?
“I feel like we are not far away,” said UK forward Andrija Jelavic. “It’s just like I said, if we can have our concentration the whole game, I feel we can be a problem for anyone, especially the guys that are ranked top five, top 10. If we can play our best, everyone should be afraid of us.”
But that’s been a line all season long. And Florida coach Todd Golden discounted that finishing flurry by Kentucky as fool’s gold. From his point of view, the Cats’ comeback attempt had more to do with his Gators.
“I just didn’t think we played with enough pace or force late,” Golden said. “We were kind of just trying to hold on, as opposed to continuing to extend and play. And they were getting real physical. They were selling out defensively. The refs were letting them play physically. And I thought we didn’t counteract it with playing with enough tension in our bodies and being on the attack.
“You know, we always want to play to win. I thought we were playing a little bit not to lose — to just get to zeroes on the clock — the last five or six minutes.”
The Gators got there in the end. They finished the conference season at 16-2 and had wrapped up the SEC regular season championship before they even came to Lexington.
That was expected. Florida was picked in the preseason to finish No. 1 in the league.
The preseason pick to finish No. 2? This Kentucky team.
That wasn’t going to happen, no matter what took place Saturday evening in Rupp Arena.
But the Cats could still salvage quite a bit with one last win on their home court. Thanks to other results around the league earlier in the day — old friend John Calipari leading Arkansas to a win at Missouri, and rival Tennessee dropping one at home to Vanderbilt — Kentucky would have secured the No. 4 seed and a double bye into the SEC Tournament quarterfinals with a victory over the Gators.
And thanks to other results around the league, a loss would drop them outside the top eight seeds, meaning a Wednesday start to the SEC Tournament and the challenge of winning five games in five days to bring a trophy back to Lexington. The Cats, as the 9 seed, will play LSU at 12:30 p.m. ET in the first round.
So a regular season filled with disappointment ended with a little more of it, Kentucky finishing with a 19-12 overall record and a 10-8 mark in the conference. And a regular season filled with poor starts, bad luck and excuses came to a fitting end.
How does Pope think his team has handled the attention and expectations of this season?
The coach was asked that question Saturday night.
“I think it’s still a work in progress,” he said. “Ask me when it’s over.”
It’s not over yet, but the time for these Cats to put it all together is almost up.
This story was originally published March 7, 2026 at 9:47 PM.
Ben Roberts
Lexington Herald-Leader
Ben Roberts is the University of Kentucky men’s basketball beat writer for the Lexington Herald-Leader. He has previously specialized in UK basketball recruiting coverage and created and maintained the Next Cats blog. He is a Franklin County native and first joined the Herald-Leader in 2006.
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