‘An SEC contender.’ Terry Bowden sings Kentucky’s praises ahead of season opener.
Terry Bowden isn’t selling snake oil.
He knows that the Louisiana Monroe Warhawks are a 31-point underdog at Kentucky this weekend, and believes that they should be.
“If we play our best and Kentucky plays their best, they’re gonna win the football game,” Bowden said in an interview with the Herald-Leader this week. “ ... We go in wanting to win and planning to win, but I don’t blow smoke up our players and say, ‘Guys, man, we got these guys, if we just play our best we’re gonna win this game.’
“I don’t think they paid us a million and a half dollars for that to be the case.”
Two decades ago at Auburn, Bowden was on the buyer’s end of so-called “guarantee” games, in which a program of larger stature pays a smaller school to show up and take a drubbing. Being on the other side of it isn’t foreign to the 65-year-old head coach; he coached in several while guiding Akron from 2012 to 2018, including a 2015 season opener that saw the Zips fall 41-3 at Oklahoma in Baker Mayfield’s debut at quarterback.
Akron from there finished 8-5, its best record under Bowden, and defeated Utah State in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, the program’s only bowl victory. So if the Warhawks take a licking in Lexington, he knows it won’t be the end of the world; how they respond afterward against their Sun Belt Conference counterparts will be much more telling.
Bowden handed out thumpings aplenty while coaching Auburn, including two to Kentucky — 41-14 in 1994 (win No. 16 in a 20-game win streak, the school’s longest) and 41-21 in 1995. The latter was Bowden’s last visit to Lexington as a head coach.
Kentucky’s fortunes have changed in the 26 years since that encounter (the Cats finished 4-7 that season). They’re vying for a school-record sixth straight bowl appearance and are expected to contend for the second spot in the Eastern Division among a cluster of teams not named Georgia. Coaches were fired at the end of last season not because they weren’t doing a good job, but because they weren’t doing a good enough job to inspire confidence in the program’s hopes for continued growth.
“It’s amazing what Mark has done at Kentucky,” Bowden said. “ ... He comes from a football family just like I do. Football has been his life, and if anybody can do it at Kentucky, you just had to feel it would be Mark Stoops.”
Rebuilding
Bowden, fresh off a graduate assistantship at Clemson, now has his own reclamation project, situated about 6 1/2 hours from Auburn. The Warhawks went 0-10 last season, and never led in a single game. Since 1994 — its first year as an FBS-level program — ULM has finished .500 or better just five times, and has played in only one bowl game; the Warhawks fell to Ohio, 45-14, in the 2012 Independence Bowl to finish 8-5.
Aiding him is Rich Rodriguez, whose spread offense gave way to a meteoric rise (and BCS championship door-knocking) at West Virginia before stints at Michigan and Arizona each ended miserably, for different reasons. Rodriguez will call the offense with his son, Rhett, holding the reins. He’s a graduate transfer who played in 11 games for Arizona from 2017-2020.
Rhett is the only starter that Bowden has named publicly leading up to the game. The Warhawks, who added and lost a bevy of players in the transfer portal, and who didn’t reveal an official roster until this week, do return four of their top five receivers from a year ago.
Keeping things close to the vest throughout fall camp was intentional gamesmanship, Bowden confessed.
“What advantages do we have, if any, in this game? None,” Bowden said. “It’s an away game. It’s against an SEC contender with what’s expected to be a great team. All I’ve got is a roster of guys where I don’t know who’s gonna start. And if I got some bad ones at certain positions, I sure don’t want Kentucky to know which ones are the worst. Then all they gotta do is watch the video and say, ‘Who’s the worst of those guys?’
“I’d at least like to keep that a surprise for a couple of series.”
One thing on which ULM can hang its hat? In that inaugural FBS season, when it was then known as Northeast Louisiana, it went 3-8 as an independent; its lone victory over an FBS program came at Kentucky, 21-14. UK, an 18-point favorite going into that first meeting between the schools, has since won four straight in the series (Stoops was behind the most recent, 48-14, in 2014).
“That outcome, with this program’s heartbreak heritage and its present-day mutilation of a perfectly good sport, was the predictable part,” Chuck Culpepper wrote in the Herald-Leader on Nov. 13, 1994, the day after that game was played. “The mystery is where any player or fan gets the idea, and gets it week after week, of expecting Kentucky to win on any given day.”
The expectations have changed at Kentucky, of course. Bowden knows it, and is in good spirits while anticipating an avalanche.
“I’ve been on both sides of this,” Bowden said. “I am completely excited about the chance to play, and I hope they fumble the opening kickoff and we get a quick seven.”
He added with a laugh, “Then we’ll only be underdogs by 21 points, not 28.”
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Saturday
Louisiana Monroe at Kentucky
When: Noon
TV: SEC Network
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Records: Louisiana Monroe 0-0, Kentucky 0-0
Series: Kentucky leads 4-1.
Last meeting: Kentucky won 48-14 on Oct. 11, 2014, in Lexington.
This story was originally published September 2, 2021 at 6:30 AM.
