College basketball rankings: Kentucky holds firm at No. 5 as Mark Pope continues to impress in first season

Nobody has ever won anything that really matters in December of a college basketball season.

It’s still early. We have a long way to go.

But — as I told the legendary Voice of the Kentucky Wildcats, Tom Leach, earlier this week on his radio show — if I were asked to submit a ballot for National Coach of the Year right now, the name at the top would be Mark Pope, whose program improved to 9-1 on Wednesday with a 78-67 victory over Colgate.

How could anybody argue against it?

Oh, sure, there are other valid candidates — among them Tennessee’s Rick Barnes, Auburn’s Bruce Pearl, Iowa State’s TJ Otzelberger and Marquette’s Shaka Smart, just to name the four men whose teams are ahead of Pope’s Wildcats in Thursday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings. But each of those coaches entered this season with key returning pieces and higher expectations than Pope, who wasn’t nearly as fortunate considering he inherited nothing from John Calipari and got the UK job at a time when most of the sport’s best incoming freshmen were already bought and paid for.

Pope had to build a competent team almost entirely via the transfer portal. Recent history shows it’s not as easy as Danny Sprinkle made it look last season at Utah State. But Pope has clearly done it. And despite his Wildcats starting the season as low as 43rd at KenPom.com, they are now No. 5 in the Top 25 And 1 — and would likely be No. 1 if they had avoided last week’s 70-66 loss at Clemson that came in a game they actually led in the second half.

How will things go from here?

Honestly, who knows?

The SEC is an absolute monster, far and away the best conference in the country this season, and basically anybody is like one rolled ankle by a key player away from hard-to-avoid losing streaks. Nothing is guaranteed. But when Kentucky fans very loudly expressed a desire to move on from Calipari and try something new, there were plenty of folks telling them to be careful what they wished for.

I understood the point.

But 10 games into this thing, and exactly eight months after accepting the job to guide his alma mater’s biggest brand, it’s hard to argue that those Kentucky fans’ wishes have been granted positively. They spent Wednesday night cheering for a fun and well-organized team that remained undefeated at home, and they’ll have a chance to do it again Saturday when their in-state rivals, the Louisville Cardinals, visit Rupp Arena for a game scheduled to tip at 5:15 p.m ET.