‘Godfidence’ Paid Off for Cats Against Tennessee

Jaxson Robinson celebrated as UK was closing out the win over Tennessee. (Vicky Graff Photo)

Kentucky coach Mark Pope had an interesting answer after Tuesday’s win at Tennessee about where the victory ranked for him in terms of the resiliency of his team.

Pope went into detail about the pregame prayer by assistant coach Alvin Brooks III.

“He prayed that we could have confidence, but even more importantly, that we could have ‘Godfidence.’ I’d never heard ‘Godfidence’ before, but I love it because that’s just — there’s a little bit of this team for me, and we’re a pretty faithful team,” said Pope. “There’s a little bit of us that is … we’re kind of in some ways performing for an audience of one the best we can.

“And we’re trying to take all the other noise and just kind of set it aside a little bit. And so when you see a game like this where for us, this ‘Godfidence’ was a real factor in this. It ranks pretty high. It’s pretty special.”

Pope wasn’t worried about point guard Lamont Butler out with an injury or the likelihood that starting forward Andrew Carr would be limited — and played only 90 seconds. He was eager for the matchup with No. 8 Tennessee even though UK had lost its previous two games.

“I told the guys before the game, like I said, ‘There’s no place I would’ve rather been tonight.’ And it was easy to double down on that after the game. So we’re really blessed,” the Kentucky coach said. “This is a team that we believed from the outs, from the first few months, we believed that we would have resilience.

“That’s what we thought we were like. We will have resilience cause these guys are loving each other enough that we’re a really good team. It is also challenging, right? But we do feel like we can withstand punches.

“Like we can withstand rough stretches and we can get better from ’em. And we were really fortunate tonight and really blessed, and it was a good night for us.”