As Mark Stoops enters a crucial season, the SEC hasn’t done him any favors
The University of Kentucky Board of Trustees Athletics Committee had just voted Thursday in favor of millions of dollars in upgrades to Kroger Field. Afterward, Mitch Barnhart spoke with members of the media about the challenge Mark Stoops faces in seeking to lead a bounce-back season for the Wildcats after last year’s 4-8 slog.
Between transfer portal additions and incoming high school recruits, Barnhart said UK football has 47 new players on its 2025 roster.
“They’re ready to have a really good summer and go into (the) fall and a really difficult football schedule we’ve got ahead of us,” the UK athletics director said. “The schedule doesn’t get any easier in this league. I’m not sure that anybody can go, ‘Hey, I got an easy (SEC) schedule. You know?’”
Well, there might not be any easy SEC football slates, but in the era of the 16-team mega-Southeastern Conference, one of the key variables that determines the success levels of teams is that there is a substantial variation in the strength of league schedules that the SEC teams must play.
As Stoops faces the task of getting UK football again moving in an upward arc after the Wildcats’ eight-year bowl streak was snapped last season, his challenge is heightened by facing, on paper, one of the most strenuous SEC slates that any team will confront in the coming season.
Consider:
▪ In 2024, there were three SEC teams — Texas, Georgia and Tennessee — that made the 12-team College Football Playoff.
For 2025, only three SEC teams will play all three of last season’s CFP entrants — Florida, Kentucky and Mississippi State.
Conversely, there are three SEC teams — LSU, Missouri and South Carolina — that will not have to play any of the Southeastern Conference’s playoff teams from 2024.
▪ There were eight SEC teams — the three playoff qualifiers, plus Alabama, LSU, Mississippi, Missouri and South Carolina — who won at least nine games in 2024.
In the coming season, Oklahoma has to play seven of those eight teams, Vanderbilt will face six and Kentucky is among five SEC teams that will face five of last year’s nine-win Southeastern Conference teams.
Conversely, Texas will only play one SEC team — Georgia — that won as many as nine games last year. Missouri and Tennessee will only face two such teams, while Auburn, LSU and Ole Miss will only play in three such games.
▪ Of the 16 SEC teams, 12 had winning overall records in 2024.
Poor Mississippi State, which went 2-10 overall and 0-8 in the SEC last season, will play all eight of its 2025 SEC games against teams that had winning marks in 2024.
Kentucky, LSU and Oklahoma will face seven league foes who had winning records last year.
Conversely, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas will all play only five games against SEC teams that had winning overall records last year.
(For UK, even the one SEC foe it gets to play in the coming season which had a losing league mark in 2024, Auburn (5-7, 2-6 SEC), is problematic. Since a 17-7 Kentucky win against the Tigers at Stoll Field in 1966, Auburn has had UK’s number. The Tigers have beaten the Wildcats in 19 of their past 20 meetings. That includes a 24-10 victory against Kentucky last season at Kroger Field, a game in which the Tigers ran for a whopping 324 yards on the Cats.)
Let’s stipulate that the strength of teams can fluctuate from season to season. Teams that were strong last season might not be as good this year, while teams that struggled in 2024 could thrive in 2025.
Still, with the Southeastern Conference running back the 2024 league schedules, with venues reversed, for each SEC team in 2025, last season’s results might have more of a predictive element than would exist in a typical year.
In terms of the differences in schedule strength, it seems self-evident that Kentucky’s chances of getting back above .500 in this coming season would be significantly enhanced if it got to play against, say, Missouri’s league schedule.
Meanwhile, Missouri’s odds of backing up last year’s 10-3 campaign with another double-digit victory season in 2025 would be lessened if the Tigers had to play against UK’s slate.
Suffice to say, the Southeastern Conference office didn’t do Stoops and Kentucky any favors when it decided to run back the 2024 league schedule in 2025. That’s true even though some of the reasons the SEC had for doing so, especially the preservation of secondary rivalry games, are positive.
For Stoops, the unhappy reality of Kentucky’s high-difficulty league schedule is that UK could put a substantially better team on the field in 2025 than it did a season ago yet that might not be reflected in the only place where it matters, the wins/losses column.
This story was originally published June 16, 2025 at 3:54 PM.
