A hat tip to Mark Stoops for achieving something rare in UK football history
On Monday at his weekly news conference at Kroger Field, Mark Stoops did something he had never done before:
The Kentucky Wildcats head man appeared before assembled local media members to preview the pending UK game as a coach with an overall winning record.
Kentucky’s tense, 35-28 victory over Missouri on Saturday night in what was deemed as a pivotal SEC showdown for both teams left Stoops with a mark of 51-50.
For a coach who started his coaching tenure at UK by going 12-26, clawing back above .500 is no small achievement.
Jokingly, I asked Stoops if he feels smarter now that he is a coach with a winning record.
“There are a lot of things I could say here,” Stoops said, laughing. “But, I really don’t (feel smarter), I really don’t.” Turning serious, Stoops added, “I just continue to do what I know the best I can.”
As Wan’Dale Robinson, Christopher Rodriguez, Will Levis and Co. prepare to lead host Kentucky (2-0, 1-0 SEC) into battle against FCS foe Chattanooga (1-1, 0-0 Southern Conference) Saturday at noon, it feels like an appropriate time to take stock of what Stoops has achieved in what has traditionally been a career-derailing job.
Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of UK football history knows that no head man has left Kentucky with a winning record since Blanton Collier (41-36-3) in 1961.
According to Corey Price, the “numbers guy” in the UK Athletics Communications Department, the last Kentucky coach with a winning record at least 50 games into his Wildcats tenure was Fran Curci — who stood 45-44-2 after suffering a 19-10 loss to Alabama on Sept. 19, 1981.
Curci went on to finish his UK career at 47-51-2, one of the nine straight Kentucky head men prior to Stoops who departed Lexington with losing records as top Cat.
That Stoops has inched above .500 so deep into his UK tenure is made more impressive by the hole he was in when he started.
The season before Stoops was hired, Kentucky went 2-10, 0-8 in the SEC, in 2012. Once Stoops accepted the task of rebuilding at UK, he lost 26 of the first 38 games he coached.
Yet from there, beginning in the third game of his fourth season, Stoops and UK have subsequently gone 39-24.
Price, the UK sports statistician, says Kentucky’s .619 winning percentage starting with that third game of 2016 until now is the best run for the Wildcats football program over a 63-game stretch since the Cats went 37-22-4 from Oct. 21, 1951, through Oct. 19, 1957, under Bear Bryant (through 1953) and then Collier.
History says a coach should not be able to dig out of a 12-26 start to build an overall winning record at Kentucky.
Asked if he takes satisfaction in defying UK-football-coaching gravity, Stoops demurred.
“You know me, (my approach is) day-to-day. It’s week-to-week. That’s how I look at it,” Stoops said. “I like my job. I like what I do. I like our team. I like where our program is right now. But it’s truly one day at a time. You know and I know how quickly this can be flipped.”
In the bigger picture, the run of relative success that has turned Stoops into a winning coach is also lifting the Kentucky program itself back toward the plus side of the ledger.
From the second game of the 1903 season through the ninth game of 2012, no UK football team ever took the field representing a program with an overall losing record.
Alas, after 109 years, UK football lost the status of an all-time winner in 2012 when the Wildcats fell 33-10 at Missouri in Joker Phillips’ final season as UK head coach.
That lowered Kentucky’s all-time record to 579-580-44.
For a time, that hole only grew deeper.
By the second game of 2016, when Stoops and the Cats were smoked at Florida 45-7, Kentucky stood at 16 games under .500 overall.
Now, if UK beats Chattanooga on Saturday — and it will be dire and shocking if the Cats fail to tame the Mocs — UK’s all-time record as a program will return to .500 at 632-632-44.
Having entered 2021 three games under .500 all-time, Kentucky must go at least 9-4 (based off a 13-game season) to finish this year with an all-time winning mark.
Assuming Stoops stays at UK through at least the 2022 season, he seems certain to make more Kentucky coaching history — both positive and negative.
At 51-50, Stoops needs 10 more wins as UK coach to pass Bryant (60-23-5 from 1946-1953) as Kentucky’s all-time wins leader. Conversely, three more defeats will push Stoops past Bill Curry (26-52 from 1990-1996) as UK’s loss leader.
Stoops says neither the UK coaching history he has made nor the marks which could be still to come are what motivate him.
“This is not about me,” Stoops says. “It’s about our program, our kids, our staff. There’s a lot of things that go into it. I’m just the guy who is holding down the seat right now.”
