Mark Pope is a huge advocate for extending the college basketball season to 40 games, but that’s not the only major change in the sport he’s suggesting. The Kentucky head coach also has thoughts on the current state of the transfer portal.
“If I could change (the transfer portal), I would probably move it to the day after the national championship game and make it a really tight window, make it a five-day window,” Pope said this week on the Eye on College Basketball with Matt Norlander. “That way, everyone has had time to evaluate, everyone has had time to see it, and just make it a shorter window so that we can just get through the process. The process is already crazy fast.
“But I say that also acknowledging that that answer raises a lot of issues too. There’s no perfect answer.”
During the 2024-25 season, the transfer portal opened up after the first weekend of the 2025 NCAA Tournament wrapped up — a one-week bump back from the previous season. It officially opened for business on March 24 and stayed open for 30 days before closing on April 22. This is just the entry window, though, not a deadline for making commitments. But it forced coaches and would-be transfers to make decisions while the season was still being played. It’s challenging to balance coaching and recruiting during the most important stretch of the season.
“The worst thing was playing in the NCAA Tournament while the portal was open. I probably mismanaged that last year, in all honesty,” Pope admitted.
We likely won’t ever know exactly what Pope “mismanaged” about the portal this offseason, but Kentucky was still able to land Tulane transfer Kam Williams on the morning of the Wildcats’ Sweet 16 showdown against Tennessee, a game UK lost in blowout fashion. Pope added that coaching in today’s game demands going as fast as possible down multiple roads, but that he didn’t do well enough of making it happen in the spring.
“That’s something that we’ve talked in great detail about how we’re going to remedy next year,” he said.
But much like how his returning players are expected to take a leap in 2025-26 after gaining a year of experience at Kentucky, the same will be true for Pope as a head coach. Last offseason, he was starting from scratch. But this offseason, there were a dozen Quad 1 wins, a pair of NBA Draft picks, and the first second NCAA Tournament weekend since 2019 under his belt to work with.
“One benefit for us was we had been here and won,” Pope said of navigating the portal this offseason. “So that’s the big thing we didn’t have coming in the first year. Guys were kinda saying like ‘What is Kentucky going to look like?’ I mean you just had one of the great all-time coaches in the history of the game vacate this seat and you brought in me, right? So there was that question. I don’t think we had to deal with that question at all this year. Everybody had seen us play and see what our guys did.”
All of that banked-up clout allowed Pope to rebuild Kentucky’s roster through the portal and turn the ‘Cats into a potential title contender in 2025-26 — and that was with some self-reported missteps along the way.