For Mark Stoops to lead UK football revival in 2025, he has to get 1 area fixed
Having presided over a competitive collapse last year in his 12th season as Kentucky football coach, the task for Mark Stoops in his 13th year as top Cat is to lead a Wildcats revival.
What had been a UK record eight-year bowl streak ended in 2024 after a 4-8 slog, 1-7 in Southeastern Conference play. Kentucky football coaching history does not offer abundant optimism over the ultimate fate of head men whose teams have “slipped back” after achieving some modicum of success.
However, there have recently been coaches in college football jobs not dissimilar to UK who have gotten their programs back on track following the type of season Kentucky endured in 2024.
Iowa State’s Matt Campbell went 3-9 in his first season as ISU coach in 2016. The former Toledo head man then ripped off five straight winning seasons with the Cyclones before Iowa State sagged to 4-8 in 2022. In 2023, however, ISU bounced back to go 7-6. Last season, Iowa State went 11-3 and beat Miami 42-41 in the Pop Tarts Bowl.
At North Carolina State, Dave Doeren started his coaching tenure with a 3-9 mark in 2013. The Wolfpack proceeded to post five consecutive winning seasons before slumping to 4-8 in 2019. Since that competitive dip, N.C. State has gone 40-23 in the five subsequent seasons and been bowl-eligible every year.
For Stoops to have any hope of traveling a similar path at Kentucky in 2025 — and doing so against a schedule that will include six teams listed in ESPN.com’s “Way Too Early Top 25” — the coach has to fix an aspect of play that has undermined UK for three consecutive seasons.
To put it starkly, Kentucky has to eliminate the undisciplined, often sloppy, brand of football that has become a staple of the Wildcats in recent years.
If you want to fully grasp how UK went 1-8 last season in games against other power conference opponents, consider:
▪ In those nine contests, Kentucky committed multiple turnovers in seven of them. UK threw a whopping 12 interceptions combined over its final five games versus power conference foes.
In the dispiriting 31-6 loss to South Carolina in last season’s second game, the Wildcats turned the ball over four times with two lost fumbles and two thrown picks.
During the 41-14 loss to Louisville in the 2024 regular-season finale that returned the Governor’s Cup trophy to the Cardinals for the first time since 2017, UK gave up the ball five times with two lost fumbles and three interceptions.
▪ Three times last year against power conference opposition, Kentucky was flagged for double-digit penalties.
UK committed 11 penalties in the loss to South Carolina.
In what was going to be a limited-possession game against a ball-control Vanderbilt offense, Kentucky committed the unpardonable football sin of being flagged 12 times for a robust 105 yards. That played a role in Vandy’s 20-13 win over UK.
With the Wildcats putting up an unexpectedly competitive battle at No. 7 Tennessee, the Kentucky effort was undermined by the 10 penalties for which the Cats were called in what became a 28-18 defeat.
▪ In its nine games last season versus power conference foes, Kentucky surrendered more than three sacks in six. UK quarterbacks were sacked five times or more in three of those contests.
It is not a coincidence that, in the two best games Kentucky played last season versus power conference teams — the 13-12 loss to No. 1 Georgia and the 20-17 road upset of No. 6 Mississippi — the Wildcats did not turn the ball over in either.
In those two games, UK committed only seven combined penalties for a combined total of 53 yards.
If you think that Stoops’ good Kentucky teams did not indulge in nearly so much self-sabotage as have the recent editions, you are correct.
In 2021, the Cats finished 10-3 and beat Iowa in the Citrus Bowl (only to subsequently have the NCAA vacate all 10 wins due to alleged rules violations in the Wildcats’ program).
That year, UK was called for fewer than five penalties in eight of 10 games the Wildcats played versus major conference teams.
Only once did those 2021 Cats allow quarterback Will Levis to be sacked more than three times in a game versus a major conference opponent — and the six sacks Iowa recorded in the Citrus Bowl came against a make-shift UK offensive front.
The 10-win Wildcats of 2021 committed one turnover or fewer in seven of the 10 games they played versus power conference opponents.
Whether Stoops can get UK back to playing hard-nosed, disciplined football in 2025 will depend heavily on whether a revamped offensive line that has been heavily augmented with transfer portal additions can give presumptive starting quarterback Zach Calzada the time to function that last year’s Kentucky QBs did not get.
What we do know is that, for a team with the limited margin of error Kentucky tends to have in the SEC, playing clean football is the holy grail.
