The road trip that wasn’t: What UK fans lost with football game’s move to Lexington
READ MORE
UK vs. Eastern Michigan preview
Check below all week for coverage of the University of Kentucky football team leading up to its game against Eastern Michigan on Saturday.
Expand All
In a town of 22,000 strong, Greg Steiner has found home.
Steiner, an associate athletic director at Eastern Michigan University, has lived in Ypsilanti, Mich., for two decades.
“I came here to go to school at Eastern 20 years ago and loved it so much that I never left,” Steiner wrote in an email to the Herald-Leader.
Kentucky football fans lost an opportunity to fall in love with Ypsilanti; UK was originally scheduled to play Eastern Michigan there this weekend but last year agreed to a buyout of that game. For $800,000, the Eagles are making their first trip to Lexington since 2017 (they’re coming back next year, too) on Saturday.
EMU lost, 24-20, in the first-ever meeting between the programs two years ago but had a Hail Mary opportunity at the end. Film from that game has been dissected by Kentucky’s coaches this week and should be a strong motivator for players who were around then, especially members of the offensive line, which gave up five sacks and 10 tackles for loss against the Eagles then.
A home game against a Southeastern Conference opponent would have quickly packed The Factory — EMU’s nickname for Rynearson Stadium, its 30,200-seat stadium highlighted by concrete-colored turf — but it made more sense to trade it for a fat check.
“Previously we were going to be paying (UK) money to come up here and in turn it’ll be a payday for us,” Steiner told 247Sports last year. “Certainly if you look at it from a financial point of view, we could not have made the $800,000 in 2019 off of a home game here at our stadium. It made financial sense and a good opportunity for us knowing our team competed exceptionally well last season in Lexington.”
Some other fast facts on EMU’s city of origin ...
▪ The Domino’s Pizza chain began there. Today two Domino’s Pizza stores operate in Ypsilanti but the original location is now home to Got Burger!, a gourmet burger restaurant.
▪ “Ypsilanti has an impressive number of museums,” Steiner wrote. He wasn’t lying: It is home to the Michigan Firehouse Museum, and Yankee Air Museum, as well as the Ypsilanti Automobile Heritage Museum, which displays cars built near the area into the 1960s. It is part of the MotorCities National Heritage Area, a federal designation encompassing parts of 16 southern Michigan counties that featured prominently in the automobile industry.
▪ Ypsilanti — oft-shortened to “Ypsi” by locals, Steiner said — is only 6 miles east of Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan. Despite proximity, EMU and Michigan have played only 10 times, and the last meeting was in 2011. The Wolverines are unbeaten in the series and have won each game by double digits (the closest game was in 2007, a 33-22 decision; Michigan earlier that year lost, 34-32, to Appalachian State, then an FCS program).
▪ It would have been a tough ticket due to stadium size, but locals who might have made the trip would not have had to drive too far: it’s about five hours to Ypsilanti from Lexington, making it a shorter drive than all but one of the Wildcats’ road games (at Vanderbilt) this season.
It worked out to where playing the game in Lexington made the most sense for both parties. UK head coach Mark Stoops said this week that the Cats could have learned from an early road experience but that he wouldn’t complain about an additional home game. .
Kentucky vs. Michigan
Kentucky’s favorite opponent from the Great Lake State has been Central Michigan, against whom it is 7-0 all-time. The Wildcats most recently beat the Chippewas, 35-20, last season (that was their second-largest victory in the series, behind a 31-14 outcome the first time they played in 1983).
UK and Michigan State are 2-2 in four meetings, the last one a 7-6 Wildcats win in East Lansing in 1947 that gave them a two-game win streak against the Spartans. That was the last time Kentucky played a football game in the state.
Michigan defeated UK in Ann Arbor, 62-0, in the programs’ only meeting in 1908.
This story was originally published September 6, 2019 at 8:10 AM.
