Mark Pope is dealing with the same impossible job description that every senior coach faces now. He’s supposed to build a roster, manage himself, plan to win, recruit high school seniors, re-recruit his locker room every spring, and somehow keep up with a rulebook that changes every week.
On Friday, he essentially admitted that the model was broken.
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Pope confirmed that Kentucky is in advanced discussions about adding a real general manager on the basketball side; one whose job is numbers, contracts, NIL math and the calendar. He said he had had “long discussions” with potential candidates and “we have to make progress,” although there have been no formal discussions.
Mark Pope’s vision for clear division between Kentucky basketball coaches and NIL
The vision isn’t complicated: In the new world, coaches and general managers handle everything, just like the front office.
In this setup, when an agent wants to talk money, he calls the general manager. When families want to discuss playing time, shooting and roles, they call Pope. The lines are very clean.
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Now, they are not.
The school is trying to buy what Pope called “a degree of separation” from zero deals and pay-per-view charges. Third party groups, collectives and corporate partners stand between employees and money. Protect the program on paper. In real life, it can make communication with players and families a mess.
“I think sometimes that can be less beneficial to the student-athletes,” Pope said. “I think sometimes there can be a little bit of a problem with communication. That’s what it’s all about, right? Believe it or not, these student-athletes still matter, right? They still matter. Like that’s still the most important thing that’s going on.”
That’s the tightrope Kentucky is trying to walk. Pope wanted a dedicated roster architect because the job was too big for a traditional coaching staff. But he’s also seen other schools make the wrong hires or put their general managers too far away from the locker room, which backfired.
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“We’ve seen an epic disaster across the country and we’ve seen where disaster comes into play,” he said. “When things are going well, we do it. But it’s not something we want to rush into because it can be very costly. There’s an air of do no harm here.”
The “do no harm” part makes the difference in Kentucky. For one thing, Pope has begun operating in a near-front-office manner through UK’s partnership with JMI Sports and the structure established by sporting director Mitch Barnhart.
Pope talks about it like a coach who knows how lucky he is. He said he had a “whole team” working on the “contract” and the “possibility,” and he singled out JMI’s Paul Archey and Kim Shelton who worked late nights and tight deadlines to get the deal done. He joked that someone should write a “30-page New Yorker article” about Barnhart’s leadership in this area.
If you’ve been following all the drama at JMI, this might make you want to pull your hair out.
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On the other hand, everyone in the ecosystem is playing a game without a stable rulebook.
“One of the things that’s complicated right now is that there’s no clear explanation of what exactly the rules are,” Pope said. “It’s literally a dynamic process every day and we’re going to make sure we always err on the side of what’s legal and it’s a guessing game because no one knows exactly what’s legal right now.”
This is where true GM becomes more than just a luxury title.
In the perfect version of what Pope describes, Kentucky basketball’s general manager would live in that gray area so that the head coach wouldn’t have to. He’ll know the numbers on every roster, the going rate for the five-man roster on the portal, and what the latest NCAA memo on Tuesday morning actually means.
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He would tell his agent, “This is what we can do financially,” while Pope told the same player, “This is how we see you playing alongside Jasper Johnson and Trent Noah.”
No crossed wires. There’s no way to guess what conversations someone is actually having.
Pope’s warning is that if you hire the wrong person, or put that person in the wrong spot on the org chart, you destroy the one thing he keeps circling: the connection between employees and players. This arms race era is all about winning games, building rosters and winning recruiting battles. But if GM becomes a wall instead of a bridge, then you’ve just traded one problem for another.
So for now, Kentucky waits. Pope relies on Barnhart, JMI and what he calls an “incredible” internal team. In his world, his phone still rings with voices about money and minutes, although he would prefer those to be two separate conversations.
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“In these ever-changing times, my job is to land in exactly the right spot to guess the right spot,” he said.
The speculation he’s slowly heading toward is clear: The future of college basketball belongs to a program where the head coach can return to coaching, while the general manager takes on the stress and calls of everything else.
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Drew Holbrook has covered the Cats for more than 10 years. In his free time, he enjoys relaxing with his family and watching Premier League football. You can find him on X. Micah 7:7. #UptheAlbion