Yo, national media: Ask Mark Stoops this week if there is no pressure coaching at UK?
You will recall back in mid-September when some in the national college football media were extolling the virtues of being the head football coach at Kentucky.
The gist of those proclamations was that Mark Stoops was paid like a Southeastern Conference football coach, had a program with SEC-level amenities — but without SEC-level pressure.
The Athletic’s Andy Staples even maintained that Stoops has the best job in college football when evaluated on the ratio of compensation/job security versus fan pressure/expectation.
Fact is, expectations for football success at Kentucky are, based on program history, different than what exists at LSU or Florida.
But the idea that there is not pressure to win at UK is wrong-headed. One need only look in on Stoops and his program this week to understand that.
With Kentucky having started the season 6-0, expectations were raised on what will qualify as success in 2021 for UK.
Now, 6-2 after an understandable defeat at No. 1 Georgia and a surprisingly bad showing at Mississippi State, UK will close out its season against four teams that do not presently have winning records. — Tennessee (4-4), Vanderbilt (2-7), New Mexico State (1-7) and Louisville (4-4).
You will note that two of the remaining games are against the two opponents many Wildcats backers most yearn to beat.
The other two are against teams who have struggled to such an extent in 2021 that there’s no credit available in beating them but losing to either would be catastrophic.
Kentucky has not won 10 games in a football regular season since 1977. Yet Stoops is now in a position that anything less than a 10-2 mark for 2021 is going to feel like a letdown to his team’s fan base.
To a large extent, the outcome of the remaining games with Tennessee (Saturday at 7 p.m. at Kroger Field) and Louisville (Nov. 27 at Cardinal Stadium) are going to determine how the UK season is viewed.
We saw firsthand in 2018 how the failure to win a late-season rivalry game can remove some shine from an otherwise stellar season.
That year, Kentucky was 7-2 when it traveled to Knoxville to face a 4-5 Tennessee.
The Wildcats were one week removed from having lost to Georgia in the game that determined the SEC East champion. As a result, UK turned up at Neyland Stadium with no petrol in the emotional tank and took a 24-7 defeat to an eminently mediocre UT team that finished 5-7.
To the long-running frustration of the Big Blue Nation, beating Tennessee at football has been a persistent Kentucky problem.
If you are reading this, you likely lived through the Wildcats’ embarrassing 26-game losing skid to the Volunteers from 1985-2010.
Even farther back, the greatest UK football coach of all, one Paul “Bear” Bryant, failed to win in his first seven meetings (five losses, two ties) vs. UT.
The futility ate at Bryant to such an extent, he started sending 11 scouts — one to chart each Tennessee player on the field — to analyze the Vols.
Only on his eighth try, in what turned out to be his final game as Kentucky coach in 1953, did Bryant at last vanquish his Tennessee demons.
All that history is why losing to UT in 2018 when UK clearly had the better team galled Wildcats fans.
Even though Kentucky went on to finish 10-3 with a stirring win over No. 12 Penn State in the Citrus Bowl, a lot of UK backers had a hard time moving past the disappointment in Knoxville.
Avoiding a similar dynamic in 2021 is at stake for Stoops and troops when new Tennessee head man Josh Heupel brings his first Volunteers team to Kroger Field.
Beyond rivalry implications and fan-base contentment, there is one other significant factor at stake for Kentucky in its remaining meetings with both Tennessee and Louisville.
That is recruiting impact.
To the chagrin of U of L supporters, UK ace recruiter Vince Marrow has been the dominant force in recent years in wooing top prospects from Jefferson County.
Kentucky does not want to give Scott Satterfield’s U of L coaching staff a chance to flip the recruiting momentum in our state’s largest city with an on-the-field breakthrough.
Meanwhile, Stoops has astutely directed UK recruiters to make a big push into Tennessee, especially the rapidly growing Nashville metropolitan area.
Kentucky has already secured class of 2022 commitments from highly regarded twin brothers Destin and Keaten Wade (Spring Hill, Tenn.) and is in ardent pursuit of lavishly hyped wide receiver Barion Brown (Nashville).
A head-to-head win over the Volunteers on Saturday night could put even more wind behind Kentucky’s recruiting efforts in Tennessee. It would negate the ability of UT recruiters to use the one-sided past history of the head-to-head between the schools against UK.
So while the standard Stoops is held to at Kentucky may not be what Nick Saban faces at Alabama, the suggestion there is not pressure on a football coach to win at UK is misguided.
This week shows that.
Saturday
Tennessee at No. 18 Kentucky
When: 7 p.m.
TV: ESPN2
Records: Tennessee 4-4 (2-3 SEC), Kentucky 6-2 (4-2)
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Series: Tennessee leads 81-26-9
Last meeting: Kentucky won 34-7 on Oct. 17, 2020, in Knoxville.
This story was originally published November 4, 2021 at 3:08 PM.
