With Toledo, Mark Stoops enters pivotal UK football season with a tricky opener
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Toledo enters as MAC favorite and a potential College Football Playoff sleeper.
- Kentucky seeks rebound after 4-8 season and major offseason roster overhaul.
- Loss to Toledo could intensify scrutiny on Stoops amid rising fan frustration.
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Preview: Toledo at Kentucky football
Click below to read more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s preview coverage ahead of Saturday’s Kentucky-Toledo game at Kroger Field.
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When Toledo visits Kroger Field on Saturday, Mark Stoops will be coaching his 13th season opener as Kentucky football head man. The well-regarded Rockets will provide, perhaps, the “trickiest” debut game Stoops has yet faced as top Cat.
When the Wildcats and Rockets square off, one of the teams will enter the game:
• As preseason favorite to win its conference;
• Rated 36th in the country by voters in the Associated Press Top 25 preseason poll;
• Being touted as a potential College Football Playoff entrant.
Alas, the other team in the contest is Kentucky of the Southeastern Conference.
Toledo will come to Lexington — and enter 2025 — riding a wave of positive national buzz.
Writing in The Sporting News, Billy Heyen proclaimed Coach Jason Candle’s Rockets a legitimate threat to crash the College Football Playoff as the Group of Five representative.
“There’s a real chance,” Heyen wrote, projecting Toledo could go unbeaten.
On the College GameDay podcast, ESPN’s Rece Davis proclaimed that “Kentucky is on upset alert when Toledo comes calling. Big time.”
Chosen by the Mid-American Conference coaches as the favorite to win league’s regular season and championship game titles, the Rockets tallied 13 points in the AP Preseason Top 25 — which is 13 more than UK accumulated.
Kentucky enters Saturday’s contest off a 4-8 slog in 2024 that markedly lowered Stoops’ approval rating in the Big Blue Nation. With a whopping 50 new players after an offseason of roster churn, UK is desperate to turn the page from last year’s negativity.
That context explains why the visiting Rockets are such a problematic opening foe for Kentucky.
Toledo is “a team that you have to beat. They are not going to beat themselves,” Stoops said Monday at Kroger Field during his first weekly news conference of 2025.
If the Rockets play to the level of their preseason hype, they are, on paper, the second most difficult opening opponent Kentucky has faced in the Stoops era.
Only in 2020, when UK opened on the road and lost 29-13 at Auburn in that “COVID season” that saw SEC teams only play against in-league foes, has Kentucky entered a year facing a more difficult challenge than Toledo should present.
Adding a layer of intrigue to Saturday’s drama is the presence of former Kentucky running back Chip Trayanum on the Toledo roster.
A season ago, after transferring to UK from Ohio State, Trayanum was projected to be the Wildcats’ primary ball carrier.
Alas, rather than becoming next in the line of standout Stoops era running backs that passes from Boom Williams to Benny Snell to Christopher Rodriguez to Ray Davis, Traynaum instead only played in three games due to injuries.
Trayanum finished his Wildcats career with only 19 carries for 101 yards. While rocking Kentucky blue, Trayanum did not add even one score to the 13 career rushing touchdowns he brought to Lexington.
“A tough, physical back,” Stoops says of the 5-foot-11, 227-pound Trayanum. “You know, it’s unfortunate that he really wasn’t very healthy here. But we know what he’s capable of when fully healthy, and I would expect in game one that he’ll be ready to go.”
It is Toledo now expecting big things from Trayanum.
“The buzz around (Trayanum) has been non-stop since he stepped foot on campus in January, wrote Kyle Rowland in the Toledo newspaper, The Blade. “He flashed in the spring, offering coaches and teammates a glimpse of what could be this season, and these pages have been filled with hype about his talents.”
Last season, Toledo went 8-5 overall but was 2-0 vs. power conference teams. The Rockets routed SEC foe Mississippi State 41-17 in Starkville last September, then outlasted ACC opponent Pittsburgh 46-44 in six overtimes in the GameAbove Sports Bowl in Detroit on the day after Christmas.
UK, on the other hand, went 1-8 last season against power four competition.
Given the difficulty of Kentucky’s October schedule — games at No. 5 Georgia and versus No. 1 Texas and No. 24 Tennessee — it is all but imperative for the Wildcats to start no worse than 3-1 in September to have viable postseason aspirations in November.
Beating Toledo is integral to those hopes.
As Kentucky coach, Stoops is 9-3 in season openers. He is 11-0 vs. MAC teams.
Where things get tricky for Stoops and the Wildcats with Toledo is that a loss to a MAC foe would unleash a torrent of pessimism around the UK program from a fan base whose expectations for the Cats have not been met in three consecutive seasons (Kentucky has gone a combined 18-20 in that time frame).
Yet, if the Rockets are as strong as expected, they are going to be a cut above your typical Mid-American Conference team.
“If we want to change the (negative) narrative (around Kentucky football), then we have to go play well, and our performance will dictate what’s said about us,” Stoops says.
This story was originally published August 25, 2025 at 6:06 PM.
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