Mitch Barnhart, Will Stein promise UK is equipped to build competitive roster
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Rich Brooks warns Kentucky needs stronger NIL investment to sustain success
- AD Mitch Barnhart defends UK budget, pledges legal, strategic roster funding
- Will Stein will prioritize relationships, recruiting structure over pay-first pitches
Former Kentucky football coach Rich Brooks does not know new UK coach Will Stein well.
The two have crossed paths in Oregon, where Brooks was coach for 18 years and Stein has spent the past three seasons at offensive coordinator. Brooks has been impressed with the work Stein has done in Eugene.
So when the Herald-Leader reached Brooks by phone Monday — just a few hours after news broke that Stein was the likely pick to replace Mark Stoops at Kentucky — Brooks did not have a lot of insight to offer on the Wildcats’ new coach.
He did have a piece of advice for the administration, though.
“Unless Kentucky steps up and gets in the ball game, it’s a tough job,” Brooks said. “If they do, they have a real good chance.”
Brooks was referring to Kentucky’s investment in name, image and likeness funds. He attributed a lack of NIL resources compared to other SEC powers as the primary reason Mark Stoops was unable to sustain the unprecedented success he achieved at Kentucky with a stretch of eight straight bowls that included two 10-win seasons.
Brooks later tweeted a similar sentiment when he publicly congratulated Stein on his new job.
Two days after Brooks spoke to the Herald-Leader, UK athletic director Mitch Barnhart had clearly grown frustrated by the continued chatter about Kentucky’s NIL and revenue sharing budget.
“We’re confident in what we’re doing,” a fiery Barnhart said after Stein’s introductory news conference when asked by the Herald-Leader about the football program’s revenue sharing budget. “People have asked that question 19 different ways, from all the stuff that’s been going on, and it’s exhausting. Enough. Enough about, ‘Have we got enough?’ We’ve got enough. We’re working at it just like everyone else is working at it. We’re no different.”
Hiring a new coach usually brings a wave of excitement that can translate into additional monetary support from boosters.
When Mark Stoops was hired in 2012, that momentum helped Kentucky push through a $126 million renovation to Commonwealth Stadium (later renamed Kroger Field) and the construction of a new $45-million training facility. Those are the type of facility improvements that Brooks had unsuccessfully pushed for as UK’s coach from 2003 to 2009.
“It was kind of a normal playing field, if you would, in those days (after the renovations),” Brooks said. “Until the NIL came in.”
Stoops was not shy about going public with calls for more financial support after the NCAA’s move to let players profit off their name, image and likeness morphed into the creation of NIL collectives that were essentially pay-for-play recruiting apparatuses. After a loss to Georgia in 2023, Stoops famously said on his weekly radio show that disgruntled fans should “pony up” and donate more money for roster construction.
But following the NCAA’s House settlement, which paved the way for schools to directly pay athletes, Stoops praised Kentucky’s financial situation.
A week before he was fired, though, Stoops acknowledged he did not have the same resources that powerhouse programs did to throw money at highly ranked high school recruits who were not certain to help immediately in college.
Add in Kentucky’s refusal to disclose how it is splitting the $20.5 million it is allowed to distribute to athletes between football, men’s basketball and other non-revenue sports, and the questions about the football program’s roster budget were certain to be among the early topics for Stein as coach.
“I feel like we’re right there to be successful right away,” Stein said Wednesday. “Let me say this. I worked at a place (at Oregon) that everybody thinks Phil Knight, Nike, these people have the most money in the world. There’s money there, don’t get me wrong, but we beat (others for) recruits because we win the relationships. That’s where it starts.”
Gauging the roster budget moving forward is more difficult because college sports remain in a transition year for the House settlement.
The Herald-Leader reported in October the 2024-25 men’s basketball roster cost around $22 million, but most of that money was paid before the house settlement went into effect July 1 and theoretically limited the amount of outside NIL money athletes will earn moving forward. The 2025 football roster was also funded before the house settlement went into effect.
Stein’s first UK football roster will have to be funded entirely under the new set of guidelines, but it appears not every school is playing by those rules.
“If the first conversation is about money, probably not the place for you,” Stein said of his recruiting pitch. “Not because a lack of it. We have plenty of that here. I talked to about 10,000 people at the basketball game (Tuesday), all willing and supportive of the program. I know we have that. But that can’t be the first thing you talk about. I want guys that love football, that want to compete every single day, be the best version of themselves and win.”
Barnhart was on the NCAA committee tasked with implementing the components a federal judge approved in the House settlement. One key provision was the creation of a clearinghouse to approve NIL deals, ensuring they met what an algorithm determined was fair market value and were for legitimate business purposes rather than pay-for-play.
In October, Barnhart told the board of governors of Champions Blue, the LLC created to house UK’s athletics department, that the largest NIL deal for a UK athlete approved by the clearinghouse to that point was worth $50,000. He said UK’s average NIL deal (around $3,000) was on par with the national average, after accounting for one $1.8 million deal elsewhere that had skewed the numbers upward.
Those numbers suggest the seven-figure deals guaranteed top transfers in previous offseasons are unlikely to be approved by the clearing house, but some schools clearly don’t seem to care.
The Advocate reported LSU has pledged $25-30 million for Lane Kiffin’s first roster in the form of revenue sharing and NIL funds. That’s an increase from the reported $18 million LSU’s 2025 roster cost under the previous rules.
Yahoo Sports reported Tuesday that multiple schools elected not to sign an agreement that would have prevented them from suing the College Sports Commission created by the House settlement from enforcing its rules in the future.
Kentucky does not appear to be planning to push the boundaries of the settlement, though.
“This notion that we don’t have enough is ridiculous,” Barnhart said. “We’ve got enough. We’ve got to resource it the right way. We’ve got to assess talent the right way. We’ve got to acquire it the right way, and we’ve got to make sure we’re within the boundaries of the rules. We’re not going to break the rules. That’s flat out. We’re not doing that. We will do it the right way.”
Stein is set to hire former Oregon director of recruiting strategy Pat Biondo as his chief of staff at Kentucky. Barnhart pushed back on the idea that Kentucky was creating a new position for Biondo, but he will be tasked with managing the roster budget, essentially replacing the role Eddie Gran filled for Stoops in recent years.
Biondo is expected to implement some of the same roster-building apparatuses used at Oregon and has previous recruiting experience at Texas A&M from a time when the Aggies were considered to be among the biggest NIL spenders in the country.
In his first day on the job, Stein already made some changes to the roster building process, Barnhart said. He and Biondo will work with JMI Sports, which has taken control of the NIL collectives that previously funded UK’s roster.
But don’t expect more public details about the specific budget numbers. Barnhart could have silenced the questions by sharing them Thursday but instead offered his passionate response defending Kentucky’s resources without providing specifics.
“The structure, it all comes down to the same thing,” Barnhart said. “It comes down to talent evaluation, talent acquisition and putting the things in place that legally allow you to compete. All this notion that the coaches aren’t controlling their rosters and they’re not making decisions, it’s ridiculous. At the end of the day, the coach is going to put in that program who he wants to put in that program to make plays, period, or he’s not going to be the coach very long.
“If he’s allowing someone to sit down the hallway and make those decisions for him, he will not be the coach very long. So it has to be integrated. It has to work together. It will work together for us.”