‘Life happens.’ UK’s Mark Stoops addresses transfers, proposed NCAA rule change.
The University of Kentucky has 111 players on its spring practice roster. That’s a lot.
It is the most UK has had in the spring under Mark Stoops. That number includes walk-ons, 68 scholarship players returning from last season and 11 scholarship players who enrolled in January.
Division I football teams can have a maximum of 85 scholarship players on their roster. With at least 10 more freshman signees expected to enroll this fall, transfers are likely forthcoming from among the 68 returnees on scholarship.
Roster management is an never-ending responsibility for all coaches, but potentially having too many players is a new “problem” for Kentucky entering the 2020 season. Stoops said it presents a good opportunity for the program to be at full-strength, numbers-wise, but knows it will be hard to suss out.
“There’s a lot of things that we all go through, as programs, as head coaches, that we have to do what’s best for our programs,” Stoops said. “For us, we’ll be one of the few schools that will be at 85 scholarships next year. We should be right at it. We’ll see how things go.”
No transfer situation — incoming or outgoing — is exactly like another. UK in less than a year’s time welcomed four transfers — quarterbacks Joey Gatewood and Sawyer Smith, defensive back Kelvin Joseph and linebacker Xavier Peters — but all at different junctions of the calendar and for varying reasons. The same is true of multiple players who left the program over the same period of time — quarterbacks Gunnar Hoak and Walker Wood, linebacker Shawn’Kel Knight-Goff and defensive back Stanley Garner.
Just because a player comes to Kentucky from another program or seeks a home elsewhere doesn’t mean they were a headache for whomever was guiding them previously.
“Life happens,” Stoops said. “Guys are going to go through issues and we understand that completely. All situations are different and (with) every individual that conversation’s different. … There’s very good reasons with families and things that come up, and you’d be very wrong not to support those things.”
Stoops mentioned Courtney Love — who transferred from Nebraska and played his last two years of football for Stoops at UK — as one of the best possible cases for a transfer. Love last year was hired as UK’s director of player development, a role in which he still serves.
“He’s in a position right now that I probably would never hire somebody that young in, but he was prepared for it,” Stoops said. “He was a transfer and I felt like that worked out good.”
An NCAA proposal set to be voted on in April would allow first-time transfers, beginning with the 2020-21 school year, to be immediately eligible without having to sit out a season in baseball, football, hockey and men’s and women’s basketball (other sports already allow immediate eligibility). It seeks to address concerns over the influx and rewarding of transfer waivers, for which players who have transferred previously would still need to apply if moving to another Division I school.
Stoops preferred to stay neutral on the subject of the new proposal but acknowledged the complexity of the issue.
“Where the conflict comes in is sometimes it’s our job to hold people accountable, hold their feet to the fire and help them grow up,” Stoops said. “And, y’kow, unless all of you are perfect and got all the answers, that’s difficult. I know it is with my own children and I know it’s difficult with 111 guys. But I think that’s where the arguments on both sides come in.
“It’s all different. … There’s good reasons for some of our players to leave.”
