Gonzaga coach Mark Few, Kentucky counterpart Mark Pope friendly rivals

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.

“Early in your coaching career and so I’m trying to collect myself in the locker room after media and everything. I finally walked out, there’s nobody left in the building, and coach Few is just waiting out there to talk. That’s just who he is.”

Pope’s second matchup against then No. 1 Gonzaga came in his first season at BYU. It ended in the same score as the first, Gonzaga 92-69. The 23rd-ranked Cougars returned the favor a month later with a 91-78 win in Provo, Utah, handing the second-ranked Zags just their second loss and their first in West Coast Conference play.

Gonzaga won the next five meetings, all by double digits, including a 90-57 blowout in front of nearly 19,000 at BYU’s Marriott Center.

The last two contests in the 2023 season were highly competitive. Julian Strawther hit a late 3-pointer as No. 8 Gonzaga escaped the Marriott Center with a 75-74 win. Strawther scored 26 points in the rematch as No. 16 GU erased a six-point deficit in the final 8:35 for an 88-81 victory at the McCarthey Athletic Center.

“What’s he’s done in basketball has just been almost unfathomable,” Pope said of Few. “I love him. He puts together incredible teams, an incredible product every single year. He has a really distinctive style. They know exactly who they are. You could almost take the names off the jerseys and you would know if you were watching a Gonzaga team by the way they play, schematically and their approach.”

In that sense, Pope saw several similarities between Gonzaga and Clemson, which handed the Wildcats their first loss of the season (70-66) on Tuesday.

“Brad Brownell (Clemson coach) and Fewy have got to be friends,” Pope said. “They have to be comparing notes. Gonzaga plays way faster but in terms of their post play, it’s really similar in terms of exploiting point to post, high-low post, side-ball screen, away from the ball ducks and getting cross-screen action to get post play.

“Before our game, Clemson had the sixth-highest percentage of post usage and Gonzaga was at No. 3.”

Pope was hired in April after John Calipari left for the head coaching job at Arkansas. Calipari and Few, also good friends, agreed in October 2022 on a six-game series and Few’s teams came out on top in the first two meetings.

Next year’s game will be in Nashville, Tennessee, the 2026-27 clash will be at Kentucky’s Rupp Arena before the series finale at the McCarthey Athletic Center in 2027-28.

Pope said Kentucky will arrive in Seattle earlier than a typical road trip, giving the team a couple of days together prior to the game.

“So it’s going to be an epic adventure,” he said.