Perhaps it should not have come as a surprise that Mark Stoops felt confident enough to engage in a public sparring match with John Calipari this month about whether Kentucky is a “basketball school.”

After all, Stoops is the same coach who at his introductory news conference in 2012 predicted a Kentucky program coming off a 2-10 season that had never won the SEC East could not only one day reach the SEC championship game but also win it. Now entering his 10th season on the job, Stoops is the longest-tenured coach in UK football history. His next win will tie Paul “Bear” Bryant for most among UK coaches.

With two 10-win seasons in the last four years, Stoops has led Kentucky to unprecedented success in the post-Bryant era, but the football program still falls well short of the eight national titles and 51 SEC championships of the men’s basketball program.

For almost the entire history of the UK athletics department, calling the university a basketball school would be considered too obvious to comment on, but Stoops has done more to alter that perception than any football coach in the last 70 years.

The same pride that pushed him to respond to Calipari has proven essential in the success of his rebuilding project.

“I can promise you this football team didn’t wake up on third base,” Stoops said. “… We did a lot of work.”

The 2022 season looks like Stoops’ best chance yet to prove Kentucky’s football program is worthy of more national recognition.

Quarterback Will Levis is widely projected as a possible first-round NFL Draft pick. Running back Chris Rodriguez could break Benny Snell’s rushing yards record if he is available for close to the full season. Four super seniors return to anchor a defense littered with former four-star recruits stepping into starting roles.

Reporters picked Kentucky to finish second in the SEC East in July. The Wildcats are ranked in the preseason Associated Press Top 25 for just the fifth time.

The rebuilding job Stoops has already pulled off has safely secured his spot as a program legend. But given the trajectory of Stoops’ first nine seasons in Lexington, it would be risky to bet against him pushing the program to even greater heights.

“He started recruiting and getting players who have the same view as him,” super senior linebacker DeAndre Square said. “I feel like when you have that as a player-and-coach relationship your program has to change.”

‘An underdog kind of guy’

While Stoops took issue with Calipari calling Kentucky a basketball school, even he agrees the football program he inherited had done little to earn national respect.

This summer, Stoops described the status of the program leading into the 2013 season as “6 feet below 14” in the SEC pecking order.

Kentucky was 4-20 in SEC games in Joker Phillips’ three seasons as coach. The 2012 Wildcats beat only one FBS team. They were outscored by SEC East teams by a combined 147 points.

Kentucky’s football facilities were among the worst in the conference. How quickly the program had collapsed after reaching five consecutive mid-tier bowls from 2006 to 2011 had made even the most optimistic of fans question whether UK could ever field a consistent winner in football.

Still, Stoops saw enough potential to approach UK Director of Athletics Mitch Barnhart about the job after Phillips was fired.

The Youngstown native felt he could call on his Ohio roots to recruit at a level Kentucky was not accustomed to. The younger brother of two FBS head coaches, Stoops knew what it took to build a winner.

“I think he’s kind of an underdog kind of guy,” former Kentucky coach Rich Brooks said of Stoops. “He’s tough. He’s stubborn. He has a commitment to be good. He doesn’t vary from that commitment even though there is some noise that maybe can be bothersome at times.”

Stoops’ brother Bob had returned Oklahoma to national prominence, leading the Sooners to a national championship in his second year on the job.

The example brother Mike set at Arizona might have held even more relevance, though.

With Mark serving as his defensive coordinator, Mike took over an Arizona program with little historical success to speak of in 2004. Three seasons later, Arizona posted a 6-6 record. A stretch of three straight bowl berths followed from 2008 to 2010.

“I think there’s a lot of similarities to when we went to Arizona,” Mike Stoops said. “(Our family) won at Kansas State, we won at Iowa when no one thought (we could). That’s been kind of our M.O. really since we’ve been in this business. We’ve had to work hard, do things a certain way, have an edge to you that gives you an opportunity to win.”

The success was not immediate for Stoops at Kentucky.

Stoops’ first UK team went 2-10 overall and winless in SEC play. Early recruiting returns were strong but two games into his fourth season as coach, Stoops was just 12-26 as a Wildcat.

Kentucky had just opened the 2016 season with an embarrassing home loss to Southern Miss and a 45-7 blowout defeat at Florida. Week three featured a closer-than-expected win over New Mexico State, leading for calls from a vocal portion of the fan base for Barnhart to make a coaching change.

The New Mexico State win might have represented another point of concern in the moment but it also featured the emergence of Snell as a powerful freshman running back. Junior-college transfer Stephen Johnson took over the reins at quarterback that afternoon.

Behind that duo Kentucky rallied for the first bowl berth of the Stoops era and helped forge an identity for a program searching for one with a physical run game.

“The line of scrimmage has to win games for you,” Mike Stoops said. “I think that’s Georgia’s DNA, that’s Alabama’s DNA. That’s what Coach Mark wants his DNA to be.”

‘You have to adapt and overcome’

Asked what kind of personality is needed for a coach to succeed in a rebuilding project like Kentucky, Brooks has an easy answer.

“You gotta be stubborn,” he said.

To Brooks, who also faced criticism from fans early in his UK tenure, that stubbornness manifests not only in confidence that the goal can be reached but also an ability to drown out those who loudly cast doubt on your vision.

But stubbornness only gets a coach so far. A willingness to adapt when circumstances warrant is essential, too.

Stoops has met that challenge multiple times.

Like his brothers had done at Oklahoma and Arizona, Stoops, a defensive coach at heart, hired an “Air Raid” offensive coordinator when he was hired at Kentucky. While the offense coordinator Neal Brown ran in Lexington for two seasons before being hired as Troy’s head coach only partially resembled the traditional “Air Raid” because of personnel limitations inherited from the previous staff, Stoops doubled down on the decision by hiring Hal Mumme-disciple Shannon Dawson as Brown’s replacement.

It did not take long to realize Stoops and Dawson were not a good philosophical match. Stoops reacted quickly by firing Dawson after one season and replacing him with Cincinnati offensive coordinator Eddie Gran.

Gran was expected to run his own version of a pass-heavy spread offense, but after a back injury sidelined starting quarterback Drew Barker early in the 2016 season, Gran switched to a run-heavy approach built around Snell and fellow running back Boom Williams. Over the next four seasons that emphasis would only grow, especially when injuries forced wide receiver Lynn Bowden to move to quarterback in 2019.

“Gimmicks don’t work in the long run,” Brooks said. “You have to have a system. You have to believe in the system.”

When a 10-game SEC schedule necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 exposed the weaknesses of Kentucky’s run-heavy attack, Stoops adapted again.

This time he hired Los Angeles Rams assistant coach Liam Coen to bring Sean McVay’s offense to college football. The promise to field a competent passing attack again helped Kentucky land Levis and wide receiver Wan’Dale Robinson as transfers.

Kentucky responded with another 10-win season in 2021, then signed its highest-ranked recruiting class yet. When Coen returned to the Rams, Stoops replaced him with San Francisco 49ers quarterbacks coach Rich Scangarello from the same coaching tree.

“I think all of us, you’re going to be accused of being hardheaded at times,” Stoops said. “You have to stay to your core beliefs is the only advice I can give anybody. … To me it’s just being authentic, staying true to who I am, my core beliefs, what I know is right, but then also adjusting and adapting when you have to.

“For the longevity, you have to. You have to adapt and overcome any situation.”

‘We’re not done’

The facility investments that sparked Calipari’s basketball school comment also played an essential role in Stoops’ Kentucky success.

Calipari was arguing that his program had been too long ignored while football and non-revenue sports were prioritized. Considering, even at UK, football generates more revenue than men’s basketball, spending on football facility upgrades seems a logical decision.

But that spending had not always been common at Kentucky.

Many of the facility projects Brooks was pushing for in 2009 had still not been completed when Stoops was hired. The excitement about his arrival helped push through a massive stadium upgrade and construction of a new practice facility that cost more than $150 million combined.

“I honestly would not have anticipated (Stoops’ success), but I didn’t know they would get the facility upgrades,” Brooks said. “… He was doing a really good job with what he had, and then with the facility upgrades, Kentucky joined the arms race in football and it’s paid off because he’s continued to recruit a lot of talent. He’s done a better job of getting more talent at more positions than I was able to do.”

In February, UK’s Board of Trustees approved a $25 million project that includes the construction of a new indoor track facility that will allow the athletics department to remove the track in the Nutter Field House and renovate that building to better suit the football program’s needs for an indoor practice field.

Brooks agreed continued investment in the program is essential for Stoops to build on his success, but the changing landscape of college athletics adds new challenges for the program.

To date, the one-time free transfer rule has helped Kentucky more than it has hurt, allowing Stoops and company to attract veteran plug-in starters. However, the NCAA’s move to allow athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness complicates Kentucky’s recruiting efforts for both transfers and top-level high school talents.

Stoops went public with his plea for Kentucky boosters to step up their investment in player NIL deals this summer so his program could compete against the NIL collectives popping up at other programs. Whether the program boasts enough financial support to fund those deals as well as the donations needed for continued facility upgrades is an unanswered question.

Winning at Kentucky naturally leads to questions about whether other programs will try to lure Stoops from Lexington. Worries about the NIL situation only add to that concern.

Thus far, Stoops has resisted any temptation to leave, frequently citing the long-term commitment his brother Bob made to Oklahoma as the example he would like to follow. The decision to stay has been made easier by UK making Stoops one of the highest-paid coaches in college football and awarding him a contract that includes automatic extension clauses every time the program wins at least seven games.

Even during his public feud with Calipari, Stoops was clear that he has higher expectations than consistently reaching bowl games. Players and Kentucky coaches have established winning the SEC East as the team’s 2022 goal. Even if beating Georgia proves too much, a berth in one of the New Year’s Six bowls seems within reach.

The program that once built its identity around the mantra “Why not Kentucky?” is now asking loftier questions.

“You have to be able to be where your feet are and do what you can in the moment to gain more success and raise that bar higher,” senior offensive guard Kenneth Horsey said. “We’re not where we want to be yet. We’re not in Atlanta yet, so the job is not finished. We don’t have enough trophies on our wall.”

How Kentucky is able to adapt to the NIL/transfer portal era will go far in determining if Stoops can reach those goals at UK or needs to jump to a program with more historic success to do so.

Defeating Miami (Ohio) in the season opener would give Stoops his 60th win at Kentucky, matching Bryant’s record. Stoops (.527) is unlikely to catch Bryant’s UK career winning percentage (.710), but another strong season could move him ahead of Blanton Collier (.531) for best winning percentage in the post-Bryant era.

Future success is not guaranteed, especially with college sports at a point of historic upheaval, but Stoops has a chance to redefine the narrative again this fall. Do that, and the basketball school label will appear even less appropriate.

“We’re not done,” Barnhart said after awarding Stoops’ latest contract extension. “Our goals are lofty, but we aspire to be in Atlanta in the SEC championship. We aspire to get to the College Football Playoffs. We aspire to be a program that has those opportunities, so the only way you can do that is to be consistent in our growth.

“We’ve got a guy that has built a culture of toughness and discipline in our program.”

This story was originally published August 25, 2022 at 10:06 AM.

Jon Hale

Lexington Herald-Leader

(859) 414-6776

Jon Hale is the University of Kentucky football beat writer for the Lexington Herald-Leader. He joined the Herald-Leader in 2022 but has covered UK athletics for more than 10 years. Hale was named the 2021 Kentucky Sportswriter of the Year. Support my work with a digital subscription