The rankings don’t favor Kentucky football’s first wave of transfers, but does it matter?
After a 4-8 season in which a headline-grabbing transfer class failed to live up to expectations, Mark Stoops at least is unlikely to need to worry about his next group of incoming transfers being overhyped.
But for a coach who at least three times before the winter transfer portal period opened urged fans not to panic about the state of Kentucky football’s 2025 roster, what appears to be a tweak in the program’s transfer strategy has only added to the pressure on him and his staff to prove they can produce better results.
“We’ve done good things in the past, and we know how to do it,” Stoops said the week before the portal opened when he met with reporters to discuss his high school signing class. “I feel like we have a good plan to move forward here. There will be a lot of moving pieces in the next two, three, four weeks, and we will get it fixed.”
Stoops closed that media session by offering his second plea for fans not to panic in just more than a week, foreshadowing the announcement that star wide receiver Dane Key planned to transfer that came just a few hours later. Since the end of the regular season, Kentucky has lost 20 scholarship players to the transfer portal and two players with eligibility remaining to the NFL draft. Those departures join the nine starters and two key backups who exhausted their eligibility this season. More are likely to come before the portal window closes on Dec. 28 and the NFL draft early entry deadline passes on Jan. 6.
Most of the outgoing transfers have come from a group of backups blocked on the depth chart who will likely end up at smaller schools with a clearer path to snaps, but four starters have already entered the portal as well.
Wide receiver Barion Brown signed with LSU. Tight end Jordan Dingle signed with South Carolina. Nose guard Keeshawn Silver signed with Southern California. Key is expected to pick between Georgia and Nebraska in the coming days.
While recruiting coordinator Vince Marrow predicted on high school signing day that fans would be “amazed” at how many transfers would want to play for Kentucky when the portal opened, only the most hardcore of college football fans would have heard of more than a couple of the 14 transfers to commit to UK even a few weeks ago. Only one of the commitments was ranked among the top 50 players available in the portal by 247Sports, and that honor went to former Bowling Green offensive tackle Alex Wollschlaeger, who checked in at No. 49.
It is difficult to pigeon hole the transfer class to any one theme.
Offensive linemen Wollschlaeger (Bowling Green), Evan Wibberley (Western Kentucky) and Wallace Unamba (New Mexico), linebacker Landyn Watson (Marshall), defensive lineman Jaden Williams (Wyoming) and edge rusher Kameron Olds (Kent State) are players who have proven production at the Group of Five conference level. Edge rusher Sam Greene (Southern California), running back Dante Dowdell (Nebraska), tight end Henry Boyer (Illinois) and cornerback Kevis Thomas (Maryland) have varying levels of Power Five conference experience with multiple years of eligibility remaining. Offensive guard Joshua Braun (Arkansas) and wide receivers J.J. Hester (Oklahoma) and Kendrick Law (Alabama) are multi-year SEC contributors looking for a spark in their final season of college football.
And then there is quarterback Zach Calzada (Incarnate Word), who is in a category all his own.
Calzada brings the most name recognition to the class thanks to his previous stint at Texas A&M, but the game he led the Aggies to an upset of No. 1 Alabama will have been four years ago by the time he plays for UK. He has left two SEC schools already (Texas A&M and Auburn) and will be playing his seventh college season in 2025.
But thanks to a stellar two-year run at FCS Incarnate Word, the same program that produced current Miami star quarterback Cam Ward, there is legitimate reason to hope Calzada can provide an upgrade at quarterback for the Wildcats if he holds off redshirt freshman Cutter Boley for the starting job, as expected.
While there might not be one theme that unites all the transfers Kentucky has landed thus far, there does appear to be at least one significant change from years past.
Whereas a year ago, six of the 12 transfers signed by Kentucky (Jamon Dumas-Johnson, Jalen Farmer, Gerald Mincey, Chip Trayanum, DJ Waller and Gavin Wimsatt) were players UK pursued and lost out of high school, the new group of transfers is light on connections to Stoops and his staff.
The exception to that trend is the wide receivers, a position Kentucky faced challenges recruiting due to a lack of a proven quarterback and 2024’s offensive struggles. Hester started his career at Missouri while offensive coordinator Bush Hamdan and new wide receivers coach L’Damian Washington were on staff there. Law and Washington are both from Shreveport, Louisiana.
By avoiding falling back on previous connections in its transfer pursuits, Stoops and company appear to be making a bet that the tweaks to UK’s transfer portal recruiting operation he has alluded to in recent months but not specified will translate to better evaluation than a year ago. But the strategy also seems to run contrary to the philosophy Marrow promoted on signing day.
“You got to know who these guys are that you bring into your culture,” he said. “That’s what you got to do. … You got to do your homework.”
Marrow pointed to the top two transfers of the Stoops era (wide receiver Wan’Dale Robinson and quarterback Will Levis) as proof pursuing transfers the staff recruited in high school could work. Robinson famously committed to UK before being named Mr. Football at Western Hills but flipped to Nebraska before signing day in high school. Levis was briefly recruited to FCS Maine by Liam Coen, who led his recruitment to UK as a transfer from Penn State.
But even by going heavy on players the staff was familiar with in the portal, Kentucky apparently did not avoid the culture problems Marrow alluded to.
“We didn’t do a good enough job in any area,” Stoops said after the season-ending loss to Louisville. “There’s just no way around it. We failed in that area. We didn’t have the discipline that we needed. We didn’t play as good as we needed to. Every level needs to improve, and accountability needs to happen.”
Of course, just because Kentucky coaches did not recruit many of the current transfer commitments in high school does not mean they could not spend extra time doing background research to evaluate a prospect’s fit in the culture Stoops wants to build now. The quick turnaround of portal recruiting just means the pressure on those evaluations is increased.
Perhaps the most important takeaway from Kentucky’s transfer portal work so far is that while Kentucky needs 15-20 transfers to fill glaring holes in the roster, the type of transfer UK has landed might do more to raise the floor of the 2025 roster than the ceiling.
Stoops has pointed to South Carolina, which went from five wins in 2023 to nine in 2024 thanks in part to transfer portal work as reason to hope for a quick turnaround for Kentucky, but the Gamecocks relied heavily on multiple impact freshmen and returning players. The key to Kentucky returning to relevance in 2025 might have more to do with the progress of returning Wildcats like Jamarion Wilcox, Cutter Boley, Hardley Gilmore, Willie Rodriguez, Alex Afari and Tehryon Nichols than expecting star performances from the transfers.
“I didn’t think or ever say that the portal was perfect or the end-all be-all,” Stoops said after the Louisville game. “… It’s not end-all be-all. You have to have a strong nucleus of some good players and then supplement it. But it is everywhere. It is every program.”
This story was originally published December 23, 2024 at 7:00 AM.