Kentucky-Alabama turned into ‘a little bit of a chess match.’ The Tide won game one.

Kentucky fans left disappointed — for the first time all season — but the back and forth between two of the most innovative brains in college basketball was a fun watch for anyone who didn’t care about who came out on top in the end.

By the time that buzzer sounded, No. 4 Alabama had beaten No. 8 Kentucky 102-97 on Saturday afternoon in Rupp Arena, handing the Wildcats their first loss in the building since Mark Pope took over the program.

The angst was visible on the UK side of things afterward. But the entertainment value was undeniable. And the Cats will get another shot at the Crimson Tide in a few weeks.

Still two months removed from the NCAA Tournament — and with plenty of potential improvements to be made in the meantime, when losses hurt but leave the losing side time to make that progress — this edition of UK-Bama lived up to the billing.

Two of the best squads in the sport put on a show worthy of the final weekend of the season.

After his team handed Kentucky its first home loss in the Pope era, Nate Oats held court for more than 20 minutes in the Rupp media room. Amid his analysis, Oats perfectly summed up the day.

Somewhere along the way toward their impressive victory, the Crimson Tide came up with a play to fit the opponent and the occasion. When it worked, they kept going to it, putting the ball in the hands of their 4 man — either Grant Nelson or Mouhamed Dioubate — on the elbow that matched that player’s strong hand, getting the UK defender they felt would be a mismatch involved, and going to work.

Oats said the play was “invented on the fly” Saturday in Rupp.

“They’re trying to get their matchups, and we’re just moving the guys around to where we needed them to get,” he said of the action that started in out-of-bounds situations. “I think they switched it, added on the inbounder. We quick-switched the inbounder, put them in the action. So, you know, Coach Pope knows what he’s doing. He also knew what he’s dealing with, and we had a little bit of a chess match going out there.”

By the time Saturday’s game ended, check and mate had gone to the Crimson Tide.

But there will be a return match Feb. 22 in Tuscaloosa, and the result there could be different.

Two very good basketball teams were on the court Saturday in Rupp. Bama was just a little bit better.

“They were pretty diligent,” Pope said of Bama’s players finding UK’s defensive breaking points. “They went at the guys that you would expect, and then they adjusted as the game went on. I thought they were pretty smart about how they went about it.”

Kentucky did plenty of adjusting, too, something that has earned Pope plenty of praise over his first 18 games as coach of the Wildcats.

During one stretch early in the second half — after UK jumped out to a 7-2 lead that got Rupp rocking — Alabama scored on nine consecutive possessions, going 8-for-8 from the floor and hitting all four 3-point attempts during that run.

Kentucky then flashed a wacky zone, and the Tide finally missed a 3 on a possession that went deep into the shot clock. That started a defensive run in which UK allowed just one make over Bama’s next 10 attempts — the outlier a Cliff Omoruyi putback dunk to follow a missed 3-pointer — and saw the Cats retake the lead.

And so it went all day long. Runs here and there. One coach making an adjustment to get his team back on track. The other then adjusting to that adjustment to retake the momentum.

Afterward, Oats — the 50-year-old former math teacher who took the SEC by storm with his analytical approach to offense and guided Bama to its first Final Four in program history last year — had nothing but praise for his counterpart.

“He’s done an unbelievable job,” Oats said of Pope. “They’re playing a great style of basketball.”

Kentucky’s coach — a 52-year-old former medical school student who has transformed the Cats into one of the most watchable teams in the sport — delivered perhaps his most succinct opening statement of the season, wearing his emotion on his sleeve with four fitting words at the end.

“Losing is the worst,” said Pope, who went 25-1 in Rupp Arena as a UK player and started this season with 11 straight wins in the building.

Pope was also full of praise for Oats earlier this week and complimentary of the Crimson Tide after Saturday’s loss. His Wildcats had a shot in the end. Brandon Garrison’s dunk with a little more than five minutes left tied the score at 81, but Bama went on a 9-0 run from there, effectively putting the game out of reach.

The Cats were obviously down afterward. Otega Oweh, who led UK with 21 points, wasn’t aware that Bama’s flurry at the end amounted to a 9-0 run, too into the flow of the game to notice the exact math while it was happening.

“Well that’s just not acceptable,” he said. “We’re trying to get back into the game.”

On this day, both teams were good. Bama was better at the end, and Oats’ team was able to do just enough to slow the Cats down in some key areas.

Kentucky — a team that wants to shoot 35 3-pointers a game — made 40.7% of its long-range shots but didn’t shoot nearly as many as it would have liked. The Cats nailed four straight 3s during a first-half flurry that featured eight consecutive possessions with a score, and by the time Lamont Butler hit one in the opening minute of the second half, they were 6-for-12 from deep. But that number of attempts was low, and no Wildcat took another one for more than five minutes.

UK attempted five 3-pointers — and made two — in the final two minutes. Other than that, the Bama defense mostly did what it wanted on the perimeter.

Oats explained in great detail that the plan was for his bigs to play up more. He wanted to push the Cats farther out. He wanted his guards to blow up ball screens. His players disrupted UK’s handoffs and made things generally uncomfortable enough to run the Cats off the line.

Kentucky ended up shooting several shots from outside the paint and inside the arc, missing most of them. Alabama, who takes a similar 3s-or-easy-2s approach to offense, took just one such shot, according to the official chart.

Pope went into just as much detail about how Bama limited UK’s 3-point looks. He said his guys could have done more cutting away from the ball to create better shots. Instead, there was more standing around than he would have liked.

The final tally from deep: Alabama was 13-for-34 (38.2%) and Kentucky was 11-for-27 (40.7%). In a game that was decided by five points, Bama won by six at the perimeter. Pope lamented the Tide’s outside shooting percentage — they were 32.0% from deep coming in — and the fact that UK gave up 15 offensive rebounds and yielded 34 free-throw attempts.

“When you do those things, it makes it a really tough package to get a win, right?” he said. “That’s like the trifecta right now.”

Bama also outscored Kentucky 29-16 at the line — with 14 more attempts — a subject of consternation in the Rupp crowd but not one that Pope attributed to the loss.

For sure, some of the areas that Kentucky struggled with Saturday can be fixed — and will need to be for this group to come close to its ceiling by March — but in a battle of two good teams, somebody had to lose. This time, it was the Cats, who were 5-0 against teams ranked in the AP top 15 before Bama came to town.

Pope was down about the loss, but he made it clear he’d quickly move on to the next one.

“The most important thing for us is we can’t waste any energy or any time on non-constructive things,” he said. “It’s a race to see how fast we can get better, and that’s not easy.”

And when asked about that lack of cutting to get more shots for teammates and if that was indicative of players trying to do too much on their own — something Pope has criticized his Cats for after losses in the past — the UK coach jumped to his team’s defense with a fiery response.

This time, he said, that wasn’t the case. His guys just came out on the wrong end of the score.

“I got beautiful guys, man. My guys are fighting for each other. … There’s zero part of my guys that are in this for themselves at all. That doesn’t exist at all. These guys are fighting for each other.”

Alabama just showed Kentucky basketball what it’s lacking. It’s on UK to find an answer.

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