Let’s discuss what the proper expectations for UK football should be
Over the past week, on Twitter and in my email box, I have found myself in the middle of a debate among factions of Kentucky football fans over what is the proper level of expectations for the UK program.
One camp thinks that even the past five years of the Mark Stoops coaching era — in which UK has gone 36-26, 20-22 in SEC games — “has just been so mediocre,” as one e-mailer put it last week.
According to this school of thought, the vast gap in the historic levels of success between the UK football and men’s basketball programs comes down to expectations and what level of performance the Kentucky fan base “is willing to accept.”
Conversely, another fan faction from which I hear thinks 8-5 seasons are as well as UK can realistically hope to do. As a Kentucky backer in my Twitter feed put it, “eight-win seasons are friggin’ glorious.”
Respectfully, I think both of these schools of thought about what should be expected from Kentucky football miss the mark.
The crowd that belittles Kentucky football winning seasons as celebrations of mediocrity are out of touch with the history of the program they support.
By decade, UK had two winning football seasons in the 1960s; three in the 1970s; three in the 1980s; one — one — in the 1990s; five in the 2000s; and four in the 2010s.
That track record is what you judge Kentucky’s current standing against.
UK has now won at least four SEC games in four of the past five years. That is something the Wildcats program has never before done in its history.
If you want to say UK’s four league victories in 2020 came over the four worst teams in the SEC — Mississippi State, Tennessee, Vanderbilt and South Carolina — I won’t argue.
But there have been many, many years in the past when Kentucky would have been among the four worst teams in the league.
That UK has spent the past five years genuinely in the middle of the SEC is not something to be lamented.
It is a sign of progress.
So is the fact that Kentucky will enter the 2021 season having beaten South Carolina six out of seven; Vanderbilt six out of seven; Missouri five out of six; Louisville three out of four; Mississippi State three out of five; and Tennessee two out of four.
Those who think UK football can become UK basketball merely with the ratcheting up of fan expectations ignore that college sports programs have different histories and those differences yield divergent recruiting realities.
Acknowledging that is not “accepting mediocrity.”
It’s living in the real world.
Yet the school of Kentucky football fandom willing to be satisfied with no aspiration higher than winning seasons is not being ambitious enough for the UK program.
It is true that the 9-3 regular season, 10-3 overall, put together by Josh Allen, Benny Snell, Lynn Bowden and Co. for Stoops in 2018 is still the only time UK has won more than seven games in a regular season since 1984.
But rather than accepting that as a once-in-a-generation, unicorn-type of season, the goal for Kentucky football should be to continue to improve so that the paradigm for what is possible shifts toward more such years.
At UK, you want to reach a point where the bad years are 6-6 or 5-7 and not 2-10. Then, in the good years, you go 9-3 or even 10-2, not 7-5, and hope to contend for the SEC East title — as Kentucky did in 2018 when it lost a November showdown with Georgia that decided the division crown.
In a division where Florida and Georgia enjoy massive advantages due to robust, in-state recruiting bases, it is always going to be an upset when anyone other than one of those two wins the East.
But those years do happen.
If South Carolina (2010) and Missouri (2013 and 2014) can win the SEC East, then Kentucky has every reason to aspire to the same.
For football at UK, the margin of error is always going to be thin.
Fear that the program was “slipping back” is, I think, one reason why fans felt so uneasy this fall as a veteran Kentucky team went 4-6 against an all-league slate in a season when many of us predicted better.
We will see if Stoops and the new offensive brain trust he will hire can defy the historical realities of coaching at UK.
As for the Kentucky football fan debate, one faction needs to remember that going 7-5 is a whole lot better than going 2-10.
The opposite faction needs to recall that UK was just one win short of playing in the SEC Championship Game two years ago.
Earning another chance to play for the right to go to Atlanta — not just aspiring to go 7-5 — should be the goal moving forward at Kentucky.
This story was originally published December 10, 2020 at 5:35 PM.
