Mark Pope will not call it “sending a message,” but everyone saw what happened. Brandon Garrison turned it over and slowed down as a UNNC player went up for a dunk. Pope called a timeout, told him to go sit down and he never came back in a single second during the next 28 minutes.
What mattered more to Pope was what came next.
“I don’t know about messaging, but I do know that BG after practice, at the end of practice, we had a conditioning session. He won every sprint,” Pope said in his pre-Indiana press conference. “It was awesome.”…