UK football gets no respect? In one vital area, the national media embraces the Cats.
Quick hitters from the first Saturday in ... what?
21. Kentucky football. Some UK backers saw disrespect in the fact that the Wildcats’ season opener at Auburn on Sept. 26 drew the noon television slot on the SEC Network rather than more high-profile TV windows later in the day on CBS or ESPN.
20. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. There is one area, however, where the Kentucky football program has been reaping an unusual level of national acclaim this summer: That is in rankings of all FBS head coaches by national media members.
19. Mark Stoops. Working at a historically pigskin-challenged school, the UK head coach having gone 32-20, 16-16 in the SEC, combined over the past four seasons seems to have caught the fancy of college football writers.
18. The Sporting News. Stoops was ranked the 27th-best coach in the Football Bowl Subdivision by writer Bill Bender.
17. 24/7 Sports. The Kentucky head man was rated the No. 25 coach in the country by writer Joal Ryan.
16. CBS Sports. Stoops stood at No. 22 on the list of top FBS head coaches compiled by writer Tom Fornelli.
15. Saturday Down South. Writer Connor O’Gara listed UK’s Stoops as the 15th-best coach in the FBS entering the 2020 season — ahead of TCU’s Gary Patterson (No. 20), Tom Herman of Texas (No. 18) and Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh (No. 17), among other coaching luminaries.
14. Building a program. Of UK, O’Gara writes “Stoops’ program might not have a ceiling to be a yearly top-15 team, but if you think Kentucky is falling off the face of the Earth anytime soon, you haven’t been paying attention.”
13. Key to Kentucky’s 2020 season? According to College Football News, Kentucky is 13-2 over the past two seasons when it limits opponents to an average of less than 5 yards a carry on the ground.
12. Jager Burton. The Frederick Douglass High School offensive guard verbally committed to play college football for UK on Sunday. As a result, the Wildcats hold class of 2021 pledges from the No. 1 (Burton), No. 3 (Frederick Douglass wideout Dekel Crowdus), No. 4 (North Hardin safety Jordan Lovett), No. 7 (Somerset quarterback Kaiya Sheron) and No. 8 (North Hardin running back La’Vell Wright) prospects in the state, as ranked on the 24/7 Sports Composite.
11. The “Big Dog” effect. After Kentucky failed to sign a single in-state player in its 2018 recruiting class, Mark Stoops gave recruiting ace Vince Marrow enhanced responsibility for wooing in-state prospects. In the three recruiting classes since, UK has signed or holds commitments from a combined 15 homegrown players.
10. Tyrrell Pigrome. Western Kentucky Coach Tyson Helton has announced the graduate transfer from Maryland will start at quarterback for the Hilltoppers when WKU plays at Louisville on Sept. 12 at 8 p.m. in the first game of 2020 for both teams.
9. Dangerous in openers. In the first game of 2017, Pigrome threw for two touchdowns, ran for one and — before leaving the game with a torn ACL — sparked Maryland to a 51-41 road upset of No. 23 Texas.
8. Best nickname in college football? The Western Kentucky QB, a 5-foot-10, 210-pound product of Birmingham, is known as “Piggy T.”
7. Officially “true blue.” UK announced last week that its business relationship with WKYT-TV — a partnership that reached back to the early 1970s — is over for now. The university instead named WLEX-TV as its new local TV partner.
6. WLEX alumni. The heightened status for Channel 18 in its Kentucky Wildcats sports coverage brought excited reactions from some well-known, former WLEX sports anchors.
5. Alan Cutler. “I wish (becoming the official UK station) happened when I was there,” says Cutler, who retired in 2018 after a lengthy career with WLEX. “(I am) esctatic for Channel 18.”
4. Tom Hammond. The longtime NBC Sports announcer began his career as an anchor and reporter at WLEX late in Adolph Rupp’s coaching tenure — back before Channel 27 wrested the status as the primary UK station in the Lexington market away from Channel 18.
3. Memorable debut. “Literally, my first assignment for Channel 18, I did the play-by-play with (ex-UK student manager) Humsey Yessin as my color analyst of a UK basketball game in (Memorial) Coliseum against Kansas,” Hammond recalls. “Not a bad way to start a job, is it?”
2. Homecoming for Tubby. The Eastern Kentucky men’s basketball program announced on Twitter on Wednesday that ex-Kentucky men’s basketball coach Tubby Smith is slated to bring his High Point Panthers to Richmond this season to face A.W. Hamilton’s Colonels on Dec. 22.
1. Makayla Epps. Condolences to the former Kentucky Wildcats women’s basketball star on the unexpected death of her mother, Angela Mattingly, this week.
