25 to watch in 2025: Is Mark Stoops’ job on the line if UK football cannot bounce back?
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25 to watch in 2025
The Lexington Herald-Leader is tracking 25 individuals we expect will be making news in 2025.
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Editor’s note: The Herald-Leader is profiling 25 individuals we predict will make news in 2025..
Who: Mark Stoops, University of Kentucky football coach.
Background: When Stoops signed his last contract extension on Nov. 11, 2022, it was almost impossible to poke holes in his Kentucky résumé. He held the most wins of any coach in UK history, had led the team to two 10-win seasons after the program failed to reach that threshold for more than 40 years and had just clinched a seventh consecutive bowl berth. But the next day Kentucky lost to Vanderbilt at home, snapping the Commodores’ 26-game SEC losing streak, and UK is just 12-17 since.
Why 2025 will be notable: In this space a year ago, we said 2024 would “go a long way to determining if Stoops has hit a ceiling at Kentucky.” The pressure was on him after he was seemingly left at the alter by Texas A&M amid reports he was leaving UK to coach the Aggies. Instead of proving the vocal portion of Texas A&M fans who took to social media to blast the potential hire wrong, Stoops and Kentucky went 4-8, the team’s worst record since Stoops’ first season on the job.
Even if the buyout to fire Stoops was not more than $44 million, there was no real risk that UK athletics director Mitch Barnhart would fire the program’s winningest coach after one losing season. But because Stoops has been vocal about the toll the constant fundraising required of a coach in the NIL and transfer portal eras had taken on him, there were persistent rumors throughout the fall that Stoops was considering walking away.
Instead, Stoops flatly dismissed that possibility and vowed to rebuild UK’s roster through the transfer portal. After losing 16 starters and a handful of key backups to graduation, the NFL draft or transfer, Stoops faces his biggest rebuilding job since inheriting a program coming off a 2-10 season in 2013. The 2025 schedule is daunting, but there will be legitimate questions about whether Stoops’ job is at risk in the event of another losing season.
What others say: “He’s going to adapt. You can’t go about building programs the way we have before, because clearly it’s not been working. I think there’s been a drop off and a dip in the product on the field starting really kind of last two, three years, starting in 2022. And that’s just something we have to learn to adapt to in the world of college football. How can we go about bringing in talented guys, but also guys that have bought into the culture of Kentucky being a blue collar program, being a nasty blue collar operation that Coach Stoops has built the success of this program on? Just finding a way to get back to that while also bringing in talented guys as well. So it’s a multi-faceted issue. It’s not an overnight fix, but I think this program is in great hands, and has been for 12 years.” — former UK center Eli Cox
What Stoops says about 2025: “We’ve got to go back to being who we are and be very tough and be very disciplined and very fundamental. And we were not always that this year. It wasn’t very good, I understand that and it’s very frustrating. I understand that, and I accept the responsibility of that. We’ve done good things in the past and we know how to do it. I feel like we have a good plan to move forward here.”
