Mitch Barnhart offers his assessment of UK football: ‘We’ve got to find a way to recover’
Kentucky football fans still frustrated by a disappointing 2024 season can take at least some solace in the knowledge that coach Mark Stoops and athletics director Mitch Barnhart share in that assessment.
But anyone who views last season’s 4-8 record as evidence the program has returned to its historic spot at the bottom of the SEC pecking order will not find an ally in Barnhart.
“Trust me, there’s no one on that staff that wanted anything less than wins and moving our program forward,” Barnhart said in a one-on-one interview with the Herald-Leader on Tuesday. “I’m confident that (Stoops) loves his place. He’s the all-time winningest coach here, and that’s saying something. There’s been a lot of people who tried hard here and couldn’t sustain it and couldn’t work at it.
“… A one-year blip is not what I would call ‘not sustaining it.’ Now, if we go two or three more, a couple more years, and we’re still not back where we want to be, sure, then you have to have a conversation about, what are we trying to get to here? And how do we do that? But he’s absolutely engaged with our guys. Staff is over there, working hard at it, and we’ve got a good group of guys coming in.”
The interview with the Herald-Leader marked Barnhart’s first in-depth public assessment of the football program since its eight-year bowl streak was snapped last fall.
The roster Stoops will field next week as spring practice opens will look little like the one that took the field for the 2024 regular-season finale against Louisville. UK lost 21 scholarship players to the transfer portal, two underclassmen to the NFL draft, 11 contributors to graduation and its starting quarterback to retirement. To fill those holes, Kentucky added 31 newcomers, including 20 transfers, to the spring roster.
Following that massive turnover, Barnhart has made a point to visit the football training facility multiple times this winter to get a firsthand view at the changes within Stoops’ program and has walked away impressed by the business-like attitude the team has taken to winter workouts.
“I think in the new world that we’re in, it changes so rapidly that you can stumble, but you can also recover,” Barnhart said. “And I think that’s sort of where we are as we stumbled and did not have the year we wanted to have.
“So now we’ve got to find a way to recover. And so I think the staff has done a really, really good job of going out and finding that balance between the experience that you try and gain out of the (transfer) portal and the ability to grow with some young people coming in.”
A year after Kentucky’s much-hyped 2024 transfer class mostly failed to meet expectations, Stoops and company will rely again on transfers to right the ship in 2025. Stoops has offered few specifics about any changes to the staff’s transfer evaluation process this offseason, but in a news conference last week he acknowledged a desire to build better depth rather than relying on one player to carry the load at a position. The transfer class is also heavy on players who have extensive track records of performance at smaller college programs who are looking to prove themselves in the SEC.
“We’re disappointed we broke that bowl streak, and we want to get back to that and sustain success and improvement and all of those things,” Stoops said. “But it gave us an opportunity to really concentrate, dive in and reboot this roster.”
Stoops repeatedly dismissed speculation that he might consider walking away from his $9 million annual salary as the team struggled last fall, but his own previous comments helped spark those rumors.
In an interview with The Cats’ Pause last spring, Stoops said the constant fundraising for the program’s name, image and likeness efforts made him feel “very isolated, very alone.”
“I’ll be honest: I don’t know how long I can take dealing with what I’ve dealt with,” he told The Cats’ Pause.
Those comments came just months after Stoops appeared on the verge of leaving UK for Texas A&M only to announce his return to Lexington after a vocal portion of Aggies fans took to social media to blast the reported hire. The combination led some fans to question whether Stoops felt Kentucky had reached its ceiling as a program.
To Barnhart, Stoops’ comments were less a sign of discontent at Kentucky than the natural frustration that comes with any person who is in a job for an extended period of time.
“We had great conversations,” Barnhart said. “They were candid. And there were some times it wasn’t easy.”
While Stoops has insisted he is energized by the prospect of rebuilding the roster, he has continued to be frank about the financial resources needed to fund a competitive team in the transfer portal/NIL era. Even last week, he pointed to better resources as being key to producing what he thinks will be a better transfer class than a year ago.
Barnhart pushed back on the suggestion that more resources necessarily lead to better results, though.
“Yeah, resources help, but you’re also changing the way you teach,” Barnhart said. “And so where Mark had spent a lot of time, I think teaching and growing young guys, all of the sudden, we didn’t need teaching growth. We needed growth (now), and we weren’t there. And so I think that they’ve made the adjustment to how and whom they’re coaching.
“… Now, we got this group of guys that have got some real experience, and we will coach them probably a little differently than we did the guys we were growing up.”
Football players are expected to receive the bulk of the $20.5 million in revenue schools will be able to distribute directly to athletes starting in July if a federal judge approves the NCAA’s House settlement in April, but that ruling will bring its own challenges for athletic departments searching for new revenues. NIL deals will remain available to players in addition to the revenue sharing funding.
At least two schools coming off disappointing seasons (Oklahoma State and Florida State) renegotiated contracts with their coaches in December so that the coach would give part of his salary back to the school for fundraising efforts. Despite Stoops’ being so vocal about the need to raise more NIL money, Kentucky is not considering a similar change to Stoops’ contract, Barnhart said.
“As an institution, we’re just approaching it a little differently,” Barnhart said. “Doesn’t mean Mark’s not committed to doing things to help our program. He’s fully committed to that. And I think coaches do that in a variety of ways. And some of them want to be very public about the way they do their work, and some of them want to just do it other ways and support. And Mark’s been supportive.”
Multiple times in his pre-spring practice news conference last week, Stoops blamed himself for the 2024 shortcomings. His desire to fix issues on and off the field appears to have resonated with his boss.
But both Barnhart and Stoops are aware the ultimate test will come against a daunting SEC schedule this fall.
“We have people that love this program at a high, high level,” Barnhart said. “I’d say 95% of our fan base really don’t know much about the legislation or the litigation that’s going on out there.
“They know one thing, that Kentucky means the world to them, and it’s really, really important to them when they turn the Cats on that we play well. So, that’s our responsibility to those folks.”
This story was originally published March 5, 2025 at 7:00 AM.