‘We need to go win one.’ Why Kentucky is so driven to beat Penn State.

Somewhere in Kentucky’s football facility collecting dust is a runner-up trophy from last year’s Music City Bowl.

Just knowing that it’s under the same roof irritates Mark Stoops.

“There’s no runner-up trophies going in our trophy case,” Kentucky’s coach said recently when reminded that UK is 0-2 in bowl games under him, with a Citrus Bowl against Penn State on the calendar for Tuesday.

“So unbeknownst to me, they gave us (a runner-up trophy) a year ago and I think it’s in Dan Berezowitz’s office. It’ll stay there. We need to go win one.”

For his part, UK’s chief of staff said outside a recent Citrus Bowl practice that the trophy — a half-sized version of the winning trophy presented to Northwestern a season ago — is not in his office, but it’s in the building.

Stoops and his players, including more than a dozen playing their final games in a UK uniform, are ready to bring home more than a pint-sized replica.

“It’s a much better feeling when you exit that field taking that trophy,” Stoops said. “I know it’s bothered me. You’re in these bowl games and you put that amount of work in and you exit that field and one team is accepting a trophy in celebration and the other team’s going in the locker room.”

Kentucky’s coach isn’t the only one perturbed that the program hasn’t won a bowl game in the Stoops era. Right guard Bunchy Stallings also expressed annoyance at that stat.

Getting a win has been the Cats’ biggest focus, the senior said.

“It doesn’t feel good when you work this hard throughout the whole season and get a big accomplishment of making a bowl game and you go down there and lose it,” said Stallings, an All-America lineman this season. “That’s not what we’re here for. That’s not what we want to do.”

▪ Of note from Berezowitz this week: UK plans to expand its trophy case in the front lobby of the practice facility to make space for replicas of linebacker Josh Allen’s many defensive player of the year trophies he received in December.

And if UK were to win the Citrus Bowl, that trophy would be a nice centerpiece, too.

Some outside UK perspective

It was almost like James Franklin was in Kentucky’s living room recruiting the Cats.

At the joint head coach’s news conference to preview the Citrus Bowl, the Penn State coach was just a few sentences in before he exclaimed: “I’m a huge Coach Stoops fan,” with UK’s coach sitting right next to him on Monday morning.

Franklin has a little history with UK, going 3-0 versus the Cats when he was the head coach at Vanderbilt before taking over the Nittany Lions’ program.

So the Penn State head coach has some perspective on rebuilding in the Southeastern Conference and what Stoops has been able to do getting the Cats to a 9-3 record and a New Year’s Day bowl for the first time in 20 years.

“(Stoops) needed time to come in and get his philosophy in place and his program in place, and for all of us, that takes time — that takes a number of years,” Franklin said.

“And that’s what you see right now. You see a football program that has taken on his identity. They’re tough. They’re hard nosed. They play really hard. They play together. They’ve got really good schemes and offense, defense and special teams, and they’ve done a good job of going out and finding talent.”

‘They have been brutal’

While Franklin opened the Citrus Bowl news conference Monday morning with a fondness for Kentucky and Stoops, he ended it by asking the Cats’ head coach to do him a solid.

Without context for a non-regular opponent and its fans, the Penn State coach tweeted out the word “Kentucky” 24 times recently. It led to many interesting responses from not only UK players, but also from Cats fans.

“There was a lot of kind of, I think, misinterpretation of what that’s about,” Franklin said. “That’s strictly a message to our team and our fan base that we’re locked and loaded and completely focused on our next opponent.”

He then turned to Stoops and said: “If you could ask the Big Blue Nation to kind of leave me alone on Twitter because they have been brutal.”

Stoops smiled when asked for assistance, but didn’t play along.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “We need to be hostile and ready to go.”

Cats as underdogs

It’s a tale as old as time: Kentucky is the underdog versus the Nittany Lions in the Citrus Bowl, according to Las Vegas oddsmakers and various television talking head predictions.

“People have always slept on Kentucky football,” quarterback Terry Wilson said. “Going into every game, they have us as underdogs.”

It’s a challenge Kentucky has come to embrace, linebacker Kash Daniel said, noting that UK is aware of the success and history of Penn State’s program.

But of the UK doubters?

“I don’t care,” Daniel said. “I know that this team doesn’t care. We’ve been doubted the entire year, so it’s nothing new to us. It’s OK, cool.”

People can say UK is the underdog, Wilson said, but “we don’t play like it.

“We’re going to come out there and play ball. We’ve caught a lot of teams off guard. We were ready. We were hungry. We were just ready to show everybody we can play football.”

This story was originally published December 31, 2018 at 4:52 PM.