Is there any reason to think Mark Stoops can get Kentucky football back on the rails?
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Game day: Louisville 41, Kentucky 14
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s Kentucky-Louisville football game at Kroger Field.
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After Kentucky suffered a blowout loss to its intrastate archrival to end a dismal 2024 season, Mark Stoops proclaimed himself ready to lead a Big Blue football resurrection.
“The misery index goes around,” Stoops said. “I’m more concerned and concentrated and excited about the rebuild.”
If it wasn’t already apparent that Kentucky football is in keen need of a makeover, Louisville traveled the 80 miles east on I-64 and put an exclamation point on UK’s misery.
Unleashing the kind of physical, disciplined effort that had characterized Kentucky’s play during the Wildcats’ now former five-game winning streak in the Governor’s Cup rivalry, the Cardinals throttled UK 41-14 before an announced (and chilly) crowd of 58,612 at Kroger Field.
In his second head coaching go in the commonwealth’s most-galvanizing rivalry, Jeff Brohm and his Cards (8-4, 5-3 ACC) delivered an emphatic statement. The Louisville offense ran for a whopping 358 yards. U of L’s defense forced five Kentucky turnovers.
As a result, the Governor’s Cup trophy — which had become almost as much a Lexington landmark as Keeneland — is moving west to the Derby city.
“Give Louisville credit,” Stoops said. “I knew going into it, they have a very good team that, I’m sure, was very motivated to come in and play well — and they did.”
What’s left for Kentucky (4-8, 1-7 SEC) is an offseason of hard questions. The biggest one is whether the 57-year-old Stoops — the winningest coach in UK history at 67-73 officially (but 77-73 in on-the-field results) — is the right coach to get the Kentucky football program back on the rails.
After Stoops led Kentucky to eight straight bowl games from 2016 through 2023 and to seven winning seasons in those eight years, it’s hard to overstate how deep a trough the UK program has fallen into:
▪ Kentucky is now 3-14 in its 17 most recent games vs. power conference foes.
▪ UK will enter 2025 having lost 11 of its 13 most recent SEC home games.
▪ In 2024, Kentucky played nine games against power conference competition. UK never scored more than 20 points in any of those games — and reached 20 points only twice.
“It wasn’t very good. I understand that,” Stoops said of the Kentucky season. “It was frustrating. I understand that. I accept the responsibility for that.”
The best teams of the Stoops era played a physical, disciplined brand of football that allowed the Wildcats to close out tough games and kept UK from beating itself.
Even as UK went 7-6 in both 2022 and 2023, there were concerning signs of slippage in that tough-minded ethos. This year, sloppy play came to define the Wildcats’ year — as was evidenced by UK’s five turnovers vs. U of L.
After the Louisville debacle, Kentucky players suggested the UK season had been undermined by a lack of internal discipline.
“You can find discipline in so many things,” safety Ty Bryant said. “When it comes to the weight room, coming in on time. Coming to meetings on time. And wearing the proper stuff. I feel like we kind of got a little lackadaisical as the season went along about that stuff.”
Asked how Kentucky could return to a winning culture, UK wide receiver Ja’Mori Maclin said “probably a lot more leadership, man. Holding guys accountable. A lot more discipline. That’s what’s going to help (UK) take the next step.”
In his postgame news conference, I asked Stoops his view on what explains Kentucky’s undisciplined play in recent seasons.
“We failed in that area,” Stoops said. “We didn’t have the discipline that we needed.”
This will not be what many understandably frustrated Cats fans want to hear, but if Stoops wants to try to right the Kentucky football ship in 2025, he deserves that chance.
That is partially because his overall body of work as UK coach should merit that chance. It is also because it would cost the University of Kentucky north of $40 million to buy Stoops out of his contract plus almost $11 million more to buy out his assistants.
In an era when revenue sharing with college athletes is imminent, spending over $50 million on coaching buyouts is not an efficient use of a university’s athletics funding.
Once a coach loses momentum as Stoops has done, reversing that is a massive challenge. Still, there is evidence it can be done.
South Carolina coach Shane Beamer went 5-7 in 2023 yet led the Gamecocks to a 9-3 mark this year.
Vanderbilt head man Clark Lea was 2-10 in 2023 but improved by four wins in 2024.
Matt Campbell at Iowa State and Dave Doeren at North Carolina State are head men in coaching jobs at schools that are non-traditional football powers who have had success, seen their programs slip back but then presided over bounce-backs.
A similar coaching recovery is now the daunting but not impossible task facing Mark Stoops at Kentucky.
“We’ve done some good things in the past. We know how to do it,” Stoops said. “I feel like we have a good plan to move forward here. There will be a lot of moving pieces in the next two, three, four weeks and we’ll get it fixed.”
