Happiest over UK football turnaround? Barnhart may trump Stoops

After a dispiriting 0-2 start that picked up from a horrid finish to 2015, the 2016 Kentucky Wildcats football team has won five of six games.

Kentucky (5-3, 4-2 SEC) has reached four conference wins for the first time since 2006. The Cats have won three straight league games for the first time since 1999.

Since the SEC split into divisions in 1992, the current Cats are the first team in UK history to win three games — South Carolina, Vanderbilt, Missouri — against East Division foes in the same season.

With two league games left — Saturday against Georgia, at Tennessee on Nov. 12 — Mark Stoops’ Cats have some chance of recording the first winning mark in SEC games for UK since Fran Curci’s 10-1 Wildcats went a perfect 6-0 in 1977.

It seems a billion years ago that Kentucky was blowing a 35-10 lead and falling to Southern Mississippi 44-35 in Commonwealth Stadium in the season opener and then not showing up at all in a 45-7 loss at Florida the next week.

In big-time college sports, it never ceases to amaze the extent to which winning makes problems go away.

When Kentucky was 0-2, I didn’t go anywhere when someone wasn’t asking me in their most conspiratorial tone of voice if I’d heard this crazy rumor or that crazy rumor about the UK football program.

Now, that Kentucky has won five of its last six, it’s been weeks since I’ve heard any rumors.

When UK’s defense was giving up 40-points-plus over the season’s first three weeks, my email box was filled with venom directed at Kentucky Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart. People were fuming over Barnhart having gotten the university into a position where it would cost $12 million to buy out Stoops’ contract after this season.

With the Wildcats on a three-game winning streak and — thanks to a remaining game with winless FCS foe Austin Peay (0-8) — all but certain to achieve bowl eligibility, Stoops’ buyout now is a deader issue than Panama Canal sovereignty.

It doesn’t matter at all that Kentucky’s five wins are over teams with combined records of 15-25, nor that UK’s four SEC wins are against foes who are 4-10 in the league.

Actually, it shouldn’t matter. The first step to upgrading UK football is to beat SEC teams that are vulnerable.

So who is the happiest person in Kentucky over UK football’s 2016 turn of fortune?

After reviewing the incentive clauses in Stoops’ contract, the UK head coach — whose base salary is $3.1 million this season — could soon have hundreds of thousands of reasons for feeling jolly about what his football team has done in 2016.

Should Kentucky get to seven wins or better, Stoops would get $250,000 for each victory beginning with the seventh.

If UK is invited to a bowl in which the university clears $2 million or more, Stoops will get a $125,000 bonus.

Should Kentucky win the SEC East — which would mean UK winning over Georgia (4-4, 2-4) and at Tennessee (5-3, 2-3) while Florida (6-1, 4-1) lost two of three from at Arkansas (5-3, 1-3), vs. South Carolina (4-4, 2-4) and at LSU (5-2, 3-1) — and then beat the SEC West champ in the league title game, Stoops would earn $200,000.

Yet Barnhart might have even more reason to be thrilled.

Had the losing continued, the debate over Stoops’ contract buyout was going to be divisive and focus scrutiny on Barnhart’s mixed record of major coaching hires at UK. In the worst case, Barnhart could have ended up in yet another football coaching search — a process he does not much seem to enjoy.

Now, all of that is gone.

Unlike a coaching buyout, no one will be angry if Kentucky ends up paying Stoops some Wall Street-level bonuses.

Because that means the Wildcats are winning.

And, in major college sports, winning cures all.

This story was originally published October 31, 2016 at 6:35 PM with the headline "Happiest over UK football turnaround? Barnhart may trump Stoops."