For the second straight game, Kentucky got off to a terrible start against a physical team and dug themselves into a hole. After trailing Clemson by seven at halftime on Tuesday, the Cats made one more play but narrowly fell short, prompting Tigers fans to storm the field. Tonight, they rallied from a 16-point halftime deficit against No. 7 Gonzaga and not only forced overtime, but also pulled off the 90-89 upset, prompting chants of “Go Big Blue” to ring out throughout Climate Pledge Arena until The staff turned up the music and forced BBN to leave the building.

I think the fans would prefer this team not The starts are so slow, but man, the comebacks are definitely exciting. Given the late start time, some of the most disgruntled fans probably even went to bed when the Cats trailed by 16 at halftime. As Mark Pope said after the game, they missed one hell of a show.

“I think the guys just said, ‘Man, we feel like BBN is a little bit bored, so we just want to make it super, super exciting,’ and they do it,” Pope quipped. “Late night game. The people who went to sleep at halftime will be so sad.”

After Kentucky’s loss to Clemson, Pope said he was actually encouraged by how hard his team fought in the second half. The same goes for tonight and more. The Cats didn’t look like they belonged on the same level as Gonzaga in the first half, allowing the Bulldogs to score almost at will and come up empty on offense. The three-point shots still weren’t falling in the second half, but Kentucky was able to get back into the game by driving to the basket, which was a big focus of Pope’s halftime talk.

“It was interesting,” he told Tom Leach. “We talked about it at halftime. It takes some courage to go downhill and make plays and kind of get into the gut of the game and play with both feet. It actually takes courage and our guys did a lot better.”

Otega Oweh was one of those guys, scoring nine points in the second half and overtime after scoring just four points in the first half. After the game, he gave Goose Givens a glimpse of the halftime locker room.

“Just coming together as a group and just saying we didn’t come all the way here just to beat each other up and embarrass each other. We had to show some pride and we definitely had to show that in the second half and I think we all did that.”

“We just had to stay balanced,” Oweh added. “The whole world watches games like this. So not a lot of people are going to believe, but as long as the people in the circle have belief and just want to go out and win and just play hard, right now just forget about the score, just go out and do the things that we do and just play hard. And if you look up, you’ll see we either won or struggled.”

The Cats put up a fight against Clemson. They fought against Gonzaga and won.

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