Revisiting Vince Marrow’s previous shots at Louisville ahead of Governor’s Cup

The most intriguing figure in this week’s Governor’s Cup rivalry game will have little to do with the outcome for either team.

But he will almost certainly be in the middle of the action when the teams meet at midfield for postgame handshakes and hugs.

Then Vince Marrow might need a reminder of which locker room to walk toward.

Mark Stoops’ longtime top lieutenant switched sides in the rivalry last spring, leaving Kentucky after 12 seasons as the Wildcats’ tight ends coach and recruiting coordinator to become the executive director of football personnel and recruiting for Louisville coach Jeff Brohm. Marrow no longer serves in an on-field coaching role, instead focusing all his time on building the Cardinals’ roster.

Fans from both sides of the rivalry will surely use Marrow’s defection to raise the stakes this week, but Stoops insisted Monday that won’t be the case in Kentucky’s locker room.

“In this situation, it feels like so long ago that there’s a lot that’s transpired between now and then,” he said. “The game is important, the response is important. There’s a lot of things that are important. That personal touch on it, I don’t think there’s anything there.”

Marrow is apparently not buying that argument. He told the Courier-Journal in a recent interview he expected his former Kentucky players to use his departure as motivation no matter how measured they are in public comments.

Stoops said he and Marrow, childhood friends from Youngstown, Ohio, have only spoken briefly since Marrow’s departure, when their paths crossed off the field due to mutual friends. Assuming UK players follow Stoops’ lead in downplaying any Marrow-related motivation this week, there probably won’t be much bulletin board material shared on either side of the rivalry.

Marrow was never shy about making his feelings on the rivalry known when he was at Kentucky, though. As he prepares for his first Governor’s Cup rivalry while wearing red, here’s a look at Marrow’s previous comments about Louisville while at Kentucky.

Postgame bragging

Marrow’s last Governor’s Cup rivalry game at Kentucky ended with an embarrassing 41-14 loss to Louisville, but the year before he fired off his most infamous rivalry tweet after Kentucky beat Louisville 38-31 to salvage something from the end of a 2023 season that had featured losses in five of six games before the rivalry.

At 3:42 p.m., 14 minutes after the game ended as rumors swirled that Stoops was on the verge of leaving UK for Texas A&M, Marrow tweeted a message directed at media members who had picked against the Wildcats and suggested Stoops and his staff might have lost the locker room.

“We own this state no matter what,” Marrow posted. “Go Big Blue.”

That tweet received more than 5,000 likes and 800 retweets. It has been viewed more than 421,000 times as of Monday.

A year earlier, after a 26-13 win over Louisville that extended UK’s winning streak in the series to four games, Marrow tweeted, “The only thing (that) change was the weather. Go Blue Blue. Blue state.”

After Kentucky’s 2021 win, he simply replied to Kentucky Sports Radio host Matt Jones’ screenshot of ESPN’s matchup predictor that had shown Louisville as a 60.5% favorite with “lol.” Kentucky won that game 52-21.

Marrow did not reserve his rivalry comments for football, either.

When a video of then-Louisville basketball coach Chris Mack bragging about the Cardinals’ 2020 win leaked in February 2021, Marrow retweeted Jones’ post of the video with the caption, “I wish I can say more, but I’m going to be professional. Go Big Blue.”

Recruiting battles

Marrow’s biggest impact at Kentucky was in leading the Wildcats’ unprecedented recruiting success. Much of that work was done in his home state of Ohio, but he took over recruiting in Kentucky midway through his UK tenure, too.

That move proved particularly fruitful in recruiting the city of Louisville, with Kentucky dominating local prospects there for multiple cycles.

“I think we were pretty good in most of the state, pretty much 85% of the state, but Louisville was a different monster,” Marrow said in December 2018. “It was just a thing where I think Louisville had a strong hold on a lot of the kids there, a lot of the inner city kids.

“...Just a different message. The success we were having on defense. Three of the top linebackers we took out of there were top guys in the country. I think they saw the success of our linebacker crew. A lot of people don’t know we’ve been pretty good in the NFL in the last couple years with linebacker play.”

Marrow signed four-star linebackers Jared Casey (Ballard) and J.J. Weaver (Moore) from Louisville in the 2019 class, as well as three-star linebacker Shawn’Kel Knight-Goff (Doss) and three--star wide receiver Tae Tae Crumes (Butler). In the 2020 class, Kentucky signed four-star offensive lineman John Young (Christian Academy) and three-star wide receiver Izayah Cummings (Male) from Louisville even though Cummings’ father worked at U of L. (Cummings transferred to Louisville after four seasons at Kentucky and redshirted after playing four games; he’s finishing his college career this season at Appalachian State, where he suffered a season-ending injury last month.)

On signing day in December 2019, Marrow credited then-Louisville coach Scott Satterfield and his staff for not engaging in the same type of negative recruiting he had felt from previous Louisville regimes.

“I think the reason why we weren’t getting a lot of inner-city kids in Louisville was there was negative recruiting from that school down there and making kids afraid to come to school here,” Marrow said. “… I actually like this new staff. They had a great year. To go from what they did last year to win seven or eight games, I think that was pretty good. We’ll have to battle, because they offered guys already we ain’t even offered. We got to catch up with them. I understand their philosophy, I understand why they’re doing it.”

The irony of all the buzz Marrow created in his Louisville recruiting success is that it actually did very little to help Kentucky in the long run.

Among the group of Louisville high school stars UK signed in the 2019 and 2020 classes, only Weaver even finished his career at Kentucky. The others were mostly little-used backups before transferring to other programs in search of more snaps.

That drought continued when Kentucky signed five-star offensive lineman Kiyaunta Goodwin, the highest-ranked signee of the Stoops era, in the 2022 class. Goodwin attended high school in Southern Indiana but grew up in Louisville and still trained there. He lasted just one season at Kentucky with almost all his snaps coming on the field-goal unit before transferring to Florida. Goodwin left Florida before his first season there started and never played football again.

The only Louisville high school graduate on Kentucky’s roster this season is senior walk-on defensive back Jackson Schulz. Marrow’s last two UK signing classes featured no Louisville natives.

There are still plenty of current Wildcats who were recruited to Lexington by Marrow, though. In his last signing day news conference last December, Marrow vowed to help that group bounce back from a 4-8 2024 season.

“Just like I told some coaches I was recruiting (against) before, when we were 2-10 (in 2013), I know who you are,” Marrow said that day. “You can bet your you-know-what this ain’t over. So, you better enjoy now. … I don’t plan on being at home on Christmas the next couple years. This whole team won’t. So looking forward to what we about to do with this.”

Instead, Marrow will be trying to help Louisville keep those players home for bowl season for a second straight year.

This story was originally published November 25, 2025 at 6:30 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