Kentucky coach Mark Pope hasn’t had much success against Mark Few and Gonzaga, but that hasn’t changed their friendship.
Pope is 1-9 as a head coach against the Few-coached Zags. The first encounter was the 2016-17 season opener in Pope’s second year as a Division I head coach at Utah Valley. The last eight meetings were during Pope’s five-year tenure at BYU.
Gonzaga was ranked in all nine games, including four times at No. 1 in the 2020 and 2021 seasons and three times at No. 2 in 2020 and 2022.
Pope hopes to change his luck in his first season leading the fourth-ranked Wildcats, who tangle with the Zags on Saturday at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle.
“I’m really familiar with them, coach (Few) is really familiar with me and the way we approach the game,” Pope said during a news conference with Kentucky media. “We’ve had some epic battles, and he’s come out on the winning side of too many of those so, hopefully, we’ll start to even that out a little bit.”
The outcome of the first meeting (92-69) wasn’t exactly memorable, but Pope will never forget what happened after the final buzzer.
“He’s been a great friend. He’s one of the best people in the business. He’s just a special person,” Pope said. “We did a buy game at Gonzaga and I’d known coach Few as an assistant coach. We’re kind of in the game and then it got away from us, as you’d expect it would at the end.
