Jayden Quaintance makes ‘great progress’ on knee recovery — but fails driver’s test

I’ve got good news and bad news for you, Big Blue Nation. The bad news is that while Jayden Quaintance passed Mark Pope‘s Brady Bunch Driving Challenge at Kroger Field before he returned home for a quick break ahead of the fall semester, the 18-year-old ended up failing his actual driver’s test.

Miserably.

“There were all kinds of paperwork issues, but he finally took the test. He was doing great until he backed straight over a cone and they failed him. … He backed dead straight, right over this cone,” Pope said on Eye on College Basketball with Matt Norlander. “I’m like, ‘How’d you know?’ He’s like, ‘It was just like this loud (noise) and the car jumped up and down. We have some work to do on him.”

The good news is that everything else is going extremely well with Quaintance — especially when it comes to his recovery following surgery to repair a torn ACL back in March.

Pope isn’t sure exactly when he’s going to be able to suit up for the Wildcats in 2025-26, but the Arizona State transfer will play, and there’s a chance it happens in the early part of the non-conference schedule.

“Listen, it’s really important that he gets a full recovery, so it’s gonna be a little while,” Pope told Norlander. “… I have every expectation that he will play this season. I don’t think he’s gonna play all the games this season, but we’ll see. He’s made great progress, and he’s kind of crossing off the benchmarks as he goes.”

Summer was about dipping his toes into the water with testing and measuring, learning how to transition from walking to jogging to running. Now back on campus for rehab, the ramp-up process will get serious in the coming weeks.

That will decide just how ambitious the Wildcats can be in his return-to-play timeline.

“He’s in a really important three-week space for him right now. It’s the first time we get to hit strength training head-on,” Pope said. “He’s still not doing anything live-ish or even close to it, but we’re really going strength heavy, heavy, heavy over the next three weeks. We’ll see how these three weeks go.”

Should things go as planned, could we see Quaintance open the season on the floor with his teammates? Unlikely, but Pope isn’t ready to rule out late November — a massive positive for availability pessimists in Lexington.

“Maybe-ish,” he continued. “This one’s hard.”

We’ll take that ballpark.

When he does make his highly anticipated debut as a Wildcat, Pope is giddy thinking of the possibilities, especially on the defensive end of the floor. Quaintance is a projected top-five pick, after all.

“As a 16-year-old, playing last year in the Big 12 — which was a good conference — he was one of the leading shot blockers in the country,” he said. “… This guy is a physical specimen like you’ve never seen before.”

Whether he’s ready to play in November, December, or the start of SEC play in January, BBN just wants to see the prized portal addition destroying the competition in February, March and early April.

Quaintance certainly has the talent.