Is Mark Stoops actually on the ‘hot seat’ amid sagging results for UK football?

It turns out there might have been no true winner in the great John Calipari-Mark Stoops feud of 2022.

Calipari, then Kentucky’s Hall of Fame basketball coach, appeared to misread his cache of public support after multiple seasons of sagging results when he went public with a plea for a new practice facility by calling UK a “basketball school.” Stoops, coming off his second 10-win season as UK’s football coach, wasted no time in clapping back at that comment on Twitter and appeared to earn the support of athletics director Mitch Barnhart in a fiery news conference that followed.

Less than two years later following another shocking NCAA Tournament upset, Calipari faced a growing number of calls for his job before jumping ship for a fresh start at Arkansas. While Stoops had failed to build on the momentum of his 2021 Citrus Bowl victory, he appeared to have emerged victorious from the feud.

But now, Stoops finds himself in an eerily similar situation to the one Calipari faced at the end of his Kentucky tenure.

Stoops might have never matched the level of Calipari’s early success at Kentucky on a national scale, but he inarguably had led the Wildcats to the program’s best run of sustained success in more than 40 years. And like Calipari, the massive amount of goodwill Stoops built with that run of success has largely eroded with three straight seasons that failed to meet expectations capped by a disastrous 4-8 2024 campaign.

Now Stoops finds himself on most of the “coaching hot seat” lists published in advance of the 2025 season, his 13th at UK.

But in the same way that Calipari was in no real danger of being fired after the 2024 NCAA Tournament loss to Oakland, Stoops’ status as Kentucky’s all-time winningest coach combined with what would be almost a $38-million buyout to fire him on Dec. 1 make it exceedingly unlikely his job is actually at risk this year.

“We’ve been in this spot before,” UK athletics director Mitch Barnhart said as the football Wildcats opened preseason camp this month. “We’ve been in this spot where we’re coming off tough moments where we didn’t get what we wanted to do, and Mark is really, really good at fighting through adversity.

“I’ve been so pleased with how hard our staff has worked, the way our players have worked, the roster we have in place.”

There is evidence to support Barnhart’s optimism.

Stoops is the same coach who led Kentucky from back-to-back 2-10 seasons in 2012 (the last of Joker Phillips’ tenure) and 2013 (Stoops’ first season at UK) to a run of eight straight bowl games. When many fans were calling for a change after a miserable start to the 2016 season, Stoops and his team rallied to reach the program’s first bowl game in six years. After the SEC’s move to a 10-game, conference-only schedule during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 resulted in a 5-6 season for Kentucky, Stoops fired his offensive coordinator, hired future NFL head coach Liam Coen as his replacement and led the Wildcats to their second 10-win season in four years in 2021.

But the downturn in form since the 2021 season (which was later vacated due to NCAA probation) has coincided with the ability of college athletes to transfer without sitting out a season and earn endorsement money from their name, image and likeness. Stoops has downplayed talk of a dysfunctional locker room resulting from those changes, but multiple players have publicly described culture problems behind the scenes during the 2024 collapse.

During those three years, Stoops was not shy about going public with his unhappiness about the amount of financial support the program was receiving either.

After a 2023 loss to Georgia, he said fans who were unhappy about the program’s inability to beat the SEC elites needed to “pony up” with more donations in order to match those programs’ resources. In an interview with The Cats’ Pause before the 2024 season, Stoops said he felt “completely alone” with no help in his efforts to raise NIL funds to build a roster.

When Stoops appeared on the verge of being hired by Texas A&M, it appeared he might be acknowledging he needed to move to a program with more historic resources to succeed in the modern era of college football.

Instead, the deal fell apart at the last minute as a vocal portion of Aggies fans blasted the reported hire on social media. Stoops remained at Kentucky and posted the worst season since his first year in the program.

“I think this past two, three years have been different, as you know,” Stoops said. “Everybody has talked about that, every coach that coaches college sports. It’s different. Everybody, we all have our own obstacles, and it is what it is. I think I just got to a point where I have to embrace that situation.

“I really believe we’re coming out on the other side of that as a whole, and I think that’s exciting. I think we went through some real difficult times.”

Stoops sees the approval of the NCAA’s House legal settlement as a positive step.

With schools now cleared to distribute up to $20.5 million directly to athletes, Stoops hopes programs like Kentucky will be operating at something close to a level playing field with the traditional SEC powerhouses. The burden of fundraising to fill out an NIL budget has largely been removed from Stoops’ plate and transformed into the athletic department’s search for additional revenue to account for the new revenue sharing expense.

“I want to get back to the coaching,” Stoops said. “That makes me very happy.”

Throughout the offseason, Stoops has repeated the same mantra: He plans to learn from the mistakes of 2024 without dwelling on them. The departure of longtime recruiting ace and childhood friend Vince Marrow for archrival Louisville in June added to the perception that the program was stuck in a tailspin, but Stoops has gone out of his way to avoid promising drastic changes or quick fixes in hopes of building some positive buzz.

At SEC Media Days in July, he took issue with the suggestion he has intentionally avoided the spotlight throughout the offseason, noting he had not cut any of the normal media obligations from his schedule. He used the phrase “business as usual” multiple times during his appearance in Atlanta to describe the vibe around the program.

“I kind of see the same Coach Stoops,” safety Jordan Lovett said that day. “Same guy that’s gonna take care of business.”

That message appears to be a direct response to the #MotivatedMarkStoops memes that have littered social media throughout the offseason, in which fans have poked fun at the Wildcats’ coach by suggesting 2025 will be different because now Stoops is motivated to win in a way he was not previously. Asked about the memes at SEC Media Days, Stoops said he would describe himself as “grateful” instead.

“I’ll play along and let the media have their fun, take their shots,” he said. “That’s cool with me. I’m ready to just move forward.”

Regardless of Stoops’ public comments, there appear to have been significant changes in the program in the wake of the 2024 collapse.

After years of giving in to ever-escalating player demands to keep a batch of promising young playmakers on the roster and away from powerhouse programs, Kentucky parted ways with a host of starters in the transfer portal, including much-hyped wide receivers Dane Key and Barion Brown. With former EKU and Murray State head coach Dean Hood, now UK’s director of player development, leading the way, Stoops has placed an added emphasis on team building as he works to form a cohesive unit on a roster where more than half the scholarship players will be playing for Kentucky for the first time.

The profile of the type of transfer Kentucky added has changed, with the bulk of the incoming veterans transferring up from smaller programs. Those players must prove their previous college production can translate to the SEC, but after almost the entire 2024 transfer class failed to live up to expectations a strategy change was needed.

“You’ve got to go do it on the field, and our league is unforgiving,” Barnhart said. “It is an unforgiving place to play football, but we’ve got to find a way to get better. You know me well enough to know I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘it’s this number of wins, it’s this number of things’ (to be a success). I’m not doing that. I’ve never done that. I’m not going to start doing that now.

“We’ve been a place that’s embraced our coaches. We’ve got a longevity with our coaches, and we’ve never overreacted to things. Maybe that’s something that people don’t particularly like about me. I’m not particularly caring at this point.”

Of course, even if Stoops was on the proverbial hot seat, it would do Barnhart no good to say so publicly before the season has even started.

Perhaps there is a scenario where the 2025 season is such a disaster that he has no choice but to make a coaching change, given the importance of football success in returning the athletic department to financial stability. But this is an athletic department that needed internal loans worth up to $141 million from the university to cover a projected two-year budget shortfall and kickstart a round of facility improvements designed to increase revenue. Nothing about Barnhart’s track record suggests he would be willing to pay almost $38 million, which would be due in a lump sum payment within 60 days, to fire the program’s winningest coach, especially considering the program’s current financial trouble.

Stoops’ frequent public lamentations about the drain he has felt in the NIL era have led to persistent rumors that he might consider walking away himself or searching for a fresh start in the same way Calipari did at Arkansas. At 58 years old, Stoops is now older than his brother Bob was when he shocked the college football world by retiring as Oklahoma coach.

But Stoops has repeatedly shot down that speculation.

Whether he is called motivated, grateful or something else, Stoops has another chance to cement his Kentucky legacy with a bounce-back season this fall. Do that, and the calls for a coaching change will seem a distant memory.

“Really diving into the challenge that lies ahead of us and embracing that and having fun with it,” Stoops said. “This shit’s hard. You might as well go enjoy it, dive into it. There’s a lot of people that can’t do it and didn’t do it for 12 years, didn’t do it for 13 years — not at Kentucky. You look at the history of what we’ve done, there’s a lot of great ones that didn’t make it very long.

“I’m proud of the run that we had. I want to use last year for us to learn from and to grow from and to get better and to get back to who we want to be. That’s something that our program deserves. That’s something our fan base deserves. The great people in Kentucky, the administration. We’re all in, and we’re excited about this next season.”

This story was originally published August 21, 2025 at 10:00 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