It feels like Mark Stoops is pushing up against Kentucky football’s hard reality
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Game day: No. 8 Alabama 49, Kentucky 21
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader’s and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s Kentucky-Alabama football game at Kroger Field.
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Let’s start with two stipulations:
1. What Mark Stoops has done with the Kentucky football program since 2016 — 60-39 record; eight-straight seasons of bowl-eligibility; two 10-win seasons with two winning SEC records — is the best sustained stretch for the UK football program in my lifetime.
2.) As bad as Kentucky (6-4, 3-4 SEC) looked in falling 49-21 to No. 8 Alabama (9-1, 7-0 SEC) on Saturday at Kroger Field, the mood around the Wildcats’ 2023 campaign will be entirely different if UK finishes its regular season with back-to-back road wins at South Carolina and archrival Louisville.
Yet as I watched a dejected-seeming Stoops in his postgame news conference after the UK head man’s record against top 10 teams had fallen to 1-18, I couldn’t help but wonder if the Kentucky coach is finally crashing into the historically difficult ceiling on coaching football at UK.
On Saturday, given another chance to show it could compete against one of the Southeastern Conference’s iconic football brands, Kentucky had instead run only four offensive plays from scrimmage by the time it was behind 21-0.
“We didn’t get off to a very good start — and it didn’t get much better after that start,” Stoops said.
Stoops is now 0-15 as Kentucky head man against the current SEC kingpins — 0-11 against Georgia and 0-4 vs. Alabama.
Under Stoops, Kentucky has never played Nick Saban and Bama to closer than a 28-point losing margin. UK’s last seven losses to Kirby Smart and Georgia have all come by double digits.
It is a credit to the Stoops-era ascension in UK football fortunes that the fact that the Wildcats cannot beat the SEC’s best is now an issue. For most of UK football’s middling (or worse) past, not being able to beat the Southeastern Conference elite was accepted as a given.
However, after Stoops directed Kentucky to 10-3 seasons in both 2018 and 2021, Kentucky football backers let themselves dream of seeing the Wildcats threaten the league’s elite.
This fall, when given the chance to show that level of program growth while competing on the field against Georgia and Alabama, Kentucky has instead appeared not ready for prime time in each game.
In the first quarter of Saturday’s game, a fumble by Kentucky wideout Barion Brown set up the 1-yard Alabama touchdown drive that put UK behind 21-0.
Even after that, the Wildcats had chances. Down 28-7 in the second quarter, Kentucky three times moved the ball into Alabama territory.
Those three drives yielded no points.
“It kills you,” Stoops said of that futility in Crimson Tide territory.
The Kentucky defense spent a good bit of its afternoon surrendering long Alabama passing plays in down-and-distance scenarios that should have been favorable to UK.
The Cats gave up a 40-yard touchdown pass from Jalen Milroe to Kobe Prentice on a third-and-12 play.
UK surrendered a 26-yard TD throw from Milroe to Roydell Williams on a second-and-16.
After scoring on its first drive of the second half to pull within 28-14, Kentucky allowed a 30-yard pass from Milroe to Prentice on a third-and-17 from the Wildcats 45-yard line. That was the key play in the Crimson Tide touchdown drive that seemed to break UK’s back.
“I wouldn’t say we were lacking fight,” Kentucky safety Jordan Lovett said. “But we were lacking execution. Against a team like Alabama, you can’t do that.”
We are 10 games into the second straight season in which I think Stoops believed he had a team capable of making noise in the SEC.
Last season, Kentucky lost two games because of untimely penalties. An offensive infraction took what would have probably been a game-winning touchdown (at Mississippi) off the board. A defensive penalty nullified what would have been a game-clinching interception (Vanderbilt.). UK tried to give away a third win by snapping the ball over the punter’s head late in a one-score game (Missouri), but the Wildcats were bailed out by a gutty play from their punter.
This year, penalties and turnovers have been a featured part of UK’s self-sabotage. But let’s be blunt: Against the best SEC teams, UK has not played competitively on either side of the ball.
For UK backers, Kentucky’s failure to contend for what would have been its first-ever SEC East crown in either 2022 or 2023 carries acute frustration.
With Oklahoma and Texas arriving in the league in 2024 and the division-based scheduling format going away, the path to football success for the Wildcats program moving forward only looks more challenging than the already-difficult status quo.
It certainly feels like the Kentucky head coach shares in that angst.
Other than the postgame news conference that followed Kentucky’s 33-14 win over Florida in the season’s fifth game, Stoops has seemed unhappy with his team’s play after all nine other UK games this year.
“This schedule is not easy,” Stoops said. “The SEC is not easy. But, it’s like I tell our players, there isn’t a soul going to feel sorry for you. Got to buckle it up and get back to work.”
This story was originally published November 11, 2023 at 7:03 PM.
