This became much more likely after Scott Drew turned the job down in a pretty public way.
Don’t get me wrong, Pope is a good coach, but Kentucky absolutely had their sights set higher for someone with a bigger name and more postseason success.
But after publicly being turned down by Pats, Donovan, Drew and others, they needed to make a hire and couldn’t take any more damage to their status by having more big names not be interested. So they had to recalibrate, stop focusing on pizzazz and moonshots and get the safe option (who as mentioned, is also a very good coach, just not as exciting as they would have liked)