In the year Mark Stoops lost the BBN, he’s also done a good coaching job
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Mark Stoops steadies Kentucky, stops collapse and preserves team cohesion.
- Kentucky improved defense and offense, winning three straight to reach 5-5.
- A road upset — at Vanderbilt or Louisville — would clinch bowl eligibility.
In the preseason, it seemed self-evident that, for the Kentucky football to have a successful season in 2025, the Wildcats had to beat either Mississippi or South Carolina in September.
UK did neither.
As part of a brutal October schedule, the Wildcats outplayed a lavishly-hyped Texas roster in most facets of the game and had a narrative-altering upset within their grasp — only be done in by poor execution in short-yardage offense and horrid punt coverage.
By the time Kentucky — coming off a mistake-filled 4-8 slog of a season in 2024 that had been proceeded by back-to-back disappointing 7-6 campaigns — started the 2025 season 2-5, large factions of the Big Blue Nation concluded, not without reason, that UK football needed a head coach other than Mark Stoops.
Yet in a college football season in which storied programs that began this year with national championship aspirations have imploded underneath adversity, Stoops and UK football have done the opposite.
They have refused to buckle.
Kentucky (5-5, 2-5 SEC) won its third straight game Saturday, ruining the bid of FCS foe Tennessee Tech (10-1, 7-0 OVC/Big South Football Association) for an undefeated regular season with a 42-10 rout before an announced crowd of 53,686 at Kroger Field.
The UK win snapped a 15-game winning streak for coach Bobby Wilder’s Golden Eagles.
“Very good win for us,” Stoops said afterward. “... I love this team’s attitude and effort.”
In what only four weeks ago seemed a second straight lost Kentucky football season, the Wildcats have now given themselves two chances — at No. 13 Vanderbilt next Saturday and at No. 19 Louisville on Nov. 29 — to earn the sixth victory that would make them bowl-eligible.
Regardless of how you feel about Stoops and his future with the Wildcats, you should concede that 1.) his team has improved as this season has progressed; 2.) the head coach has held his troops together in an environment in which it would have been easy to fold.
“You’re always at a place for a reason,” UK offensive coordinator Bush Hamdan said of Stoops. “I just think in a lot of ways, seeing (Stoops’) consistency over the course of the last six weeks, seeing his tenacity, everything he’s about, he’s blue collar, he’s a players coach in a lot of ways. I think that will be with me for the rest of my career.”
Following up its 10-3 road win at Auburn two weeks back and its 38-7 home pasting of Florida last week, UK against Tennessee Tech looked like what an SEC team should look like against even a very good Football Championship Subdivision foe: superior in all areas.
The Wildcats hung 42 points and 468 yards of offense on a Tennessee Tech team that entered the game sixth in the FCS in total defense, allowing only 279.1 yards a game.
In spite of being down four defensive starters from last week due to injuries, Kentucky held the highest-scoring offense in the FCS — Tech came to Lexington averaging 45.2 points a game — to 10 points and 264 yards.
For Stoops, the most harrowing part of what could have been a tricky game came on UK’s second offensive series. That was when Cutter Boley, UK’s rapidly-developing redshirt freshman quarterback, scrambled from the Tennessee Tech 30-yard line within sight of the Golden Eagles end zone.
Encountering Tech defensive back Jameson Wharton at the 3-yard line, Boley, rather than taking “the quarterback preservation route” and stepping out of bounds, lowed his shoulder pads and bulled his way into the end zone for a touchdown.
“I was a little bit dumbfounded,” Stoops said of Boley’s choosing violence over preservation. “I said ‘Did he score?’ So that was fun. ... But you do not want to see that. We’ve got to teach him how to protect himself a little bit.”
When he wasn’t running over defensive backs, the 6-foot-5, 220-pound Boley went 18 of 21 passing for 236 yards and a touchdown.
In 2016, when Stoops directed Kentucky to what would be the first of eight straight bowl trips, UK started the season 2-3, then turned things around by going 5-2 down the stretch.
Three years later, when UK ran out of healthy quarterbacks and had to play wideout Lynn Bowden as a read-option QB, the Cats started 2-3, then went 5-2 down the stretch.
Against the odds, Kentucky has given itself a chance to make this year into a similar turnaround story.
Over the next two weeks, we’ll find out if Kentucky has improved enough to beat good teams on the road. The Cats will likely have to upset either Vandy or U of L for UK backers to feel positively toward the 2025 season when it’s over.
Yet even if you continue to think it would be best for Kentucky football and Stoops to part ways, you should also be able to acknowledge this:
In this season of Kentucky football discontent, Mark Stoops has kept his team together and fighting — and deserves credit for that.
This story was originally published November 15, 2025 at 7:20 PM.
