In South Carolina, Kentucky’s Mark Stoops prepares again to face his pivotal foe
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Mark Stoops' early wins vs. South Carolina marked the rise of Kentucky football.
- Recent UK losses to the Gamecocks signaled decline and raised program concerns.
- Kentucky must beat South Carolina to keep bowl hopes alive and reverse momentum.
When Kentucky football comes off its open week to play at South Carolina on Sept. 27, the Wildcats will be facing what has been the pivotal opponent of the Mark Stoops coaching era.
It was success against the Gamecocks early in the Stoops coaching tenure that was the initial indicator that the UK program was on the rise.
From 2000 through 2013, Kentucky went a horrid 1-13 vs. South Carolina. However, in 2014 and again in 2015, Stoops and the troops stunned Steve Spurrier-coached Gamecocks teams.
After losing in back-to-back seasons to UK, the “Head Ball Coach” only coached four more games after the 2015 defeat to the Wildcats. Spurrier then quit as South Carolina coach with six contests remaining in that season.
Those early Stoops victories over “Steve Superior” launched UK to seven wins in eight meetings vs. South Carolina from 2014 through 2021. That success against the Gamecocks helped propel the Wildcats program on an upward arc that eventually produced two 10-win seasons (2018 and 2021) and eight-straight trips to bowl games (2016 through 2023).
Conversely, disappointing Kentucky losses to South Carolina in 2022 and 2023 did more than allow Shane Beamer and Co. to flip the series back in the Gamecocks’ favor. For UK, those defeats were an early warning sign that the Stoops-era rise in the Wildcats’ football fortunes was beginning to lose steam.
Last season, Kentucky’s sloppy overall play and its porous pass protection in what became a 31-6 home loss to South Carolina in Week 2 foreshadowed the 4-8 slog that became UK’s 2024 campaign.
This year, how UK fares vs. the Gamecocks in Columbia will tell us much about the viability of Stoops’ attempt to reverse Kentucky’s football fortunes via a massive one-year roster rebuild that saw the Cats add (at least) 50 new scholarship players.
Given the difficulty of UK’s October schedule — games at No. 5 Georgia and vs. No. 8 Texas and No. 15 Tennessee — the Wildcats (2-1, 0-1 SEC) very much need to get to three wins in September to have realistic hopes of reaching the six victories required for bowl eligibility in 2025.
Having let a winnable home game vs. now-No. 13 Mississippi slip away with a 30-23 loss in Week 2, Kentucky now has to win at South Carolina to get to three September wins.
In retrospect, the single biggest move by Beamer that allowed the Gamecocks to turn the tables on the Wildcats was hiring Clayton White away from Western Kentucky to run the South Carolina defense.
In the four games UK has played against a White-coordinated Gamecocks defense, the Wildcats have never scored more than 16 points and have turned the ball over a combined 12 times.
UK’s total yardage against White’s defenses has declined in every meeting — from 332 yards in 2021 to 299 in 2022 to 293 in 2023 and to 183 last season.
Last year’s performance by White’s defense vs. Kentucky was a work of art. South Carolina held the Cats to 44 passing yards, recorded 11 tackles for loss, sacked the quarterback five times and intercepted two passes, one that became a pick six.
Assuming that former Lexington Christian Academy star Cutter Boley will be making his first college road start at quarterback when the Wildcats invade Williams-Brice Stadium, it will be asking a lot of the redshirt freshman to reverse what has been a trend of futility for Wildcats offenses vs. White-coordinated South Carolina defenses.
Adding another interesting twist to this season’s renewal of Kentucky-South Carolina is how the game “sets up” on each team’s schedule.
While Kentucky is off Sept. 20, South Carolina will play a night time road game (7 p.m. EDT kickoff) at No. 23 Missouri.
In theory, that scenario should favor UK the following week — except that, under Stoops, the Cats are 6-10 in regular-season games that immediately follow an open Saturday and have lost five of their seven most recent such contests.
Meeting with reporters Wednesday, Stoops said the fact that the first of two Kentucky off weeks this season (the other leads into an open date on Saturday, Oct. 11) fell so early on the schedule led to his taking a different practice approach.
Because the Kentucky players are relatively fresh, Stoops said “I really want to push them this week. This week, we are working hard.” The UK head coach added that the Wildcats are “doing a little more good on good (scrimmaging) this week than we normally would.”
Whether Kentucky’s more hard-nosed approach to an early-season off week will make a difference in how the Wildcats perform coming out of an open date is, obviously, to be determined.
What we do know is that the history of the Mark Stoops coaching era says that how Kentucky fares against South Carolina will tell us much both about the kind of season UK will ultimately have and the overall direction in which the UK program is headed.
