UK football mailbag: Are the Wildcats guaranteed a bowl trip this season?
So, Kentucky played Alabama and it went even more poorly than most anticipated. Let’s talk about it.
Welcome to our mailbag addressing your questions about the game behind us, the game in front of us, and anything else related to (and maybe even a couple things unrelated to) UK football that come to mind each week. As the season rolls along, please direct your questions to me on Twitter (@JoshMooreHL) or email them to jmoore@herald-leader.com.
Let’s go!
(Note: Some questions edited for clarity).
“What’s left for Kentucky to play for this season?”
Confession: Nobody directed this question toward me, but it’s something worth wondering about with two games left on the regular-season schedule and the program at one of its lower points in recent memory.
The fastest answer is “pride,” and it’s the answer Mark Stoops keeps giving, albeit unintentionally. Stoops’ commitment to playing games out instead of letting Kentucky’s reduced roster force the postponement — and at this point, possible cancellation — of contests perhaps doesn’t gain the program much in the short term but further paints it as one that won’t back down in the midst of adversity, and gives UK something of an off-field identity in a season where it’s mostly lacked one on it. The personal tragedies through which the team has suffered undoubtedly play a role in standing by that choice as well; an opportunity to even debate playing was not afforded to linebacker Chris Oats this year, nor is it any longer something the late John Schlarman can weigh. With those men in mind, marching on despite some setbacks doesn’t seem like all that difficult a decision.
Now for the more complicated answer: a bowl game.
Kentucky continues to be included in bowl projections from media pundits, which about as good an indicator as any of the general perception of the Wildcats. ESPN, Sporting News, Saturday Down South and College Football News all have Kentucky as a bowl team in 2020, albeit with the destinations varying. ESPN’s two prognosticators are split — one has the Wildcats taking on West Virginia in the Liberty Bowl while the other sees them against Wisconsin in the Music City Bowl — while Sporting News and CFN both have them in the Liberty Bowl (against playing Oklahoma State and West Virginia, respectively). Saturday Down South has a Music City Bowl matchup with Purdue as its projection.
Following the College Football Playoff selections, at least one New Year’s Six bowl will inherit the Southeastern Conference champion or the league’s next-best team in the final playoff rankings. The Citrus Bowl will receive the next-best SEC team after that. That gives the league three guaranteed selections before it has to fill six with which it is affiliated, all of them based more on matchup potential than merit, although the Outback Bowl tends to be the leader in the clubhouse ahead of the five other bowls: Gator, Las Vegas Liberty, Music City, and Texas. The remaining two, Birmingham and Gasparilla, select their own teams following the SEC’s placement. (Note: the status of the Las Vegas Bowl is still to be determined.)
For Kentucky, continuing to play sends a “We Shall Persevere!” message not only to the nation, but to the league office. With it unlikely to finish no better than 4-6, the program will find itself fighting with a bunch of also-rans with similar records, but with the caveat that it has been a good soldier and played its schedule without complaint or any stoppages. Whether that counts for anything remains to be seen, but it’s something that could separate it if, say, four teams with identical records end up vying for one last bowl spot.
The SEC, as of Tuesday, does not have an objective process in place for such a scenario.
“During COVID I hesitate to say anything is written in stone, but at this time the selection process is the same as past years,” SEC Associate Commissioner Herb Vince wrote in an email to the Herald-Leader. “ ... As in the past, if there are additional teams that are bowl eligible and there are openings in other games, those teams could play in open bowl game slots.”
The potential for extra practices and an additional opportunity for a win over another Power Five opponent. That’s a tangible reason to keep on keeping on.
I do think Kentucky will be able to make some noise in the transfer market, though I don’t believe there will be as much movement between high-major FBS programs as some might think just because those players actually have to have a place to go, and scholarship crunch can quickly become a thing (as UK figured out recently).
My hunch is, at least short term, any potential transfers into the program would be guys with whom UK’s coaching staff formed relationships on the recruiting trail during their original recruitment. Take a guy like Wan’Dale Robinson, for example. If he were to decide this offseason that the Nebraska experiment isn’t going so nicely, UK is probably one of the first schools he’d look at, considering he was at one time committed to the Wildcats.
It’s not Alabama, but news broke Tuesday that Georgia Tech linebacker Justice Dingle is in the transfer portal. He’s a former four-star prospect from Bowling Green whose brother Jordan committed to Kentucky this month, and who fills a position of great need for the Wildcats. I’m just saying.
A few things to chew on here. Let’s start from the bottom.
1. The Citrus Bowl, in which Kentucky played on Jan. 1, 2019, is not an irrelevant bowl game unless you’re a person who believes all bowl games except for those in the College Football Playoff are irrelevant. In that case, I’ll agree.
2. Kentucky for much of its history has been a doormat in the SEC and is now consistently middling. It’s not an overnight sensation, but it’s made legitimate progress, but if you’re expecting Kentucky to magically fill its roster with nothing but four- and five-star recruits when the bulk of those guys originate from states where the nation’s best schools happen to be, then you’re going to be disappointed for a long time.
For Kentucky to have a chance of getting in the ballpark of the Alabamas and Georgias when it comes to recruiting, it has to win at a big level over several years. Then it has to keep doing that to stay there with ‘em. Until the state of Kentucky starts churning out 30 to 40 SEC-caliber players a year, that’s unlikely to happen with the sort of frequency that anyone would like to see.
So, that makes talent development all the more vital to the program’s growth, and it’s fair to wonder why the quarterbacks Kentucky has recruited, outside of junior-college transfers, have failed to contribute a great deal under Stoops’ staff. Drew Barker was the fifth-ranked quarterback nationally but did not live up to that billing in part due to injury. It bears mentioning, also, that few quarterbacks in that recruiting class amounted to much in terms of becoming college standouts; the best player in the class, it turns out, was a three-star prospect named Patrick Mahomes. Beau Allen was among the top quarterback targets in his class, and how his career pans out remains to be seen.
I don’t know that Kentucky isn’t getting good quarterback prospects. Whether it has maximized high school recruits at the position is certainly up for debate, though.
Next game
Kentucky at No. 6 Florida
When: Noon Saturday
TV: ESPN
Records: Kentucky 3-5; Florida 6-1
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Series: Florida leads 52-18.
Last meeting: Florida won 29-21 on Sept. 14, 2019, in Lexington.
