Let’s be clear: For Kentucky football in 2021, going 7-5 is not ‘success’
When sports wagering outlet DraftKings issued its “win totals” this week for all NCAA FBS teams for the coming season, it initially set the over/under on Kentucky Wildcats football victories in 2021 at 6.5.
Subsequently, that appears to have been moved up to seven for Mark Stoops and troops.
Listening to a Louisville sports talk radio show Wednesday afternoon, a discussion of UK football between a local host and a national college football writer quickly turned to whether the 2021 Cats can get to seven wins.
As the run-up to the 2021 Kentucky football season picks up steam, let’s be clear on something: Going 7-5 will not constitute “success” for Stoops and UK in the coming year.
To start with the obvious, the Kentucky 2021 schedule should set the Wildcats up for better than seven wins.
UK will play all of three teams that had winning records in the 2020 season. Two of them are SEC East titans Georgia (8-2) and Florida (8-4); the other is FCS foe Chattanooga, which went 3-2 while only playing five games.
Next, let’s move to recent trends: Against the teams one has to beat to succeed as a coach at Kentucky, Stoops will enter 2021 having:
Beaten South Carolina six out of the last seven;
Beaten Vanderbilt six out of the last seven;
Beaten Missouri five out of the last six;
Beaten Louisville three out of the last four;
Beaten Mississippi State three out of the last five;
And beaten Tennessee two out of the last four.
Three of those teams, South Carolina, Tennessee and Vanderbilt, will be breaking in new head coaches in 2021.
Two others, Louisville and Mississippi State, are coming off of 4-7 seasons.
For UK, both U of L and MSU are road games in the impending season.
Playing in Starkville — last Kentucky win: 2008 — has been challenging for the Cats.
Playing in The Ville — UK overall record in Cardinal Stadium 6-5, including two victories in a row — has historically been more hospitable for the Wildcats.
If UK can avenge last season’s disappointing loss at Missouri by beating the Tigers at Kroger Field in this season’s second game — the pivotal contest on the 2021 Kentucky schedule, for my money — the Cats should be positioned to make some noise.
With Kentucky having won at least four SEC games in four of the past five seasons and having won three straight bowl games, the task for Stoops and the UK football program is finding the way to take the proverbial “next step.”
Kentucky football has had quite a run this spring. UK had six players chosen in the 2021 NFL Draft, giving the Cats 13 NFL Draft picks combined in the past three drafts. Kentucky’s 2022 recruiting class is currently ranked No. 9 in the country by Rivals and No. 11 in the 24/7 Composite.
This fall, Stoops and Co. need to produce a similar magnitude of success on the field.
At UK, the tangible sign of program growth is winning at least eight games in a regular season. For almost the past four decades, seven-win regular seasons have formed a frustrating constraint on the ambitions of the Kentucky football program.
When Stoops coached Kentucky to its 9-3 march through the 2018 regular season, it marked the first time Kentucky had won more than seven games in a regular season since Jerry Claiborne’s 1984 Cats finished 8-3.
To reinforce the other metrics that suggest UK football is changing for the better, Stoops needs to produce another season similar to 2018.
In fairness, bad luck likely prevented Stoops and crew from backing up 2018’s success with two more “crash through the seven-win ceiling” seasons in 2019 and 2020.
In 2019, Kentucky starting quarterback Terry Wilson was knocked out for the season with a knee injury in the second half of the second game.
To its credit, UK scrambled and found a way to salvage a winning (7-5, of course) regular season by eventually shifting star flanker Lynn Bowden to quarterback and transforming into a lethal read-option attack.
With a healthy Wilson, however, it seems likely Kentucky would have won at least eight, maybe nine, regular-season games in 2019.
Last year, the coronavirus pandemic led the SEC to cancel all non-league games and instead adopt a 10-game, all-conference schedule.
Kentucky went 4-4 against the league teams it was originally slated to play and 0-2 against the new additions to its schedule.
Had the normal schedule been played, UK would have had a more than viable shot to finish 8-4, rather than 4-6.
Those opportunities these past two seasons to push past the seven-win threshold that circumstances helped foil for Kentucky now serve to create more impetus for the 2021 Cats to again crash through that barrier.
For Stoops and Kentucky football in 2021, the baseline in defining success is stark: Plus-seven wins is where it is at.
