A year ago, Liam Coen sat in the driver’s seat of his sports car in a parking lot in Los Angeles. He was taking a break from errands, so he put his phone in the center counsel, opened the Zoom link and spent 40 minutes chatting with me about the move he was set to make the next day.

Or rather, the return he was set to make.

Coen was doing some last-minute things ahead of his move back to Lexington, where he agreed to accept the same offensive coordinator position that he had at Kentucky in 2021 when he led the Cats to their best offense in 14 years. For one reason or another, it admittedly didn’t work out in his return to the Los Angeles Rams, where he was the offensive coordinator for Sean McVay. Coen was fired up to return to Lexington with his wife and year-old son.

“I definitely didn’t expect this to be happening a year ago when we decided to come (to L.A.),” Coen told me in January 2023. “But at the end of the day, we missed Lexington. We missed college football. The recruiting and all the stuff that NFL coaches don’t really want to get back involved with — trust me, it’s a little crazy right now anyways — I missed the relationships. I missed the impact we could potentially have on 18- to 22-year-old kids’ lives.”

Well, a year later, Coen is back — back to the NFL. This time, however, he’s not going back to LA. He’s reportedly set to become the Tampa Bay Bucs’ offensive coordinator.

As my friends at KSR pointed out, how fitting it was that the news of Coen leaving UK again came out on Groundhog Day. Even after Coen and Mark Stoops reportedly were “on the same page,” weeks of speculation surrounding a potential jump back to an NFL OC role ended in the worst way for Kentucky.

Say what you want about the Cats’ offense in 2023. It was frustratingly inconsistent. It didn’t fuel the bounce-back season that Kentucky hoped it would have. Shoot, it didn’t fuel the bounce-back season that Coen had in mind a year ago. He returned after feeling “guilty” while watching Rich Scangarello’s one-and-done UK offense flop in 2022.

But make no mistake. UK losing Coen, even though the 2023 raw numbers weren’t at 2021 levels, is a significant loss. When you consider what he replaced both times, it might be the most significant coordinator loss in the SEC this offseason.

UK offense
2020 Gran
2021 Coen
2022 Scangarello
2023 Coen
Points/game
21.8
32.3
20.4
29.1
Yards/play
5.2
6.4
5.2
6.2
20-yard plays/game
3.5
4.8
3.6
5.1
Points/game vs. final Top 25
9.8
16.5
13.3
25.8

I’d argue all 4 of those metrics are pretty significant indicators of why Coen was given a 3-year contract that started at $1.8 million. Whoever replaces him cannot be at Scangarello levels.

Hiring an offensive coordinator in February isn’t ideal. UK should know. It’s exactly what Stoops had to do 2 years ago when Coen returned to LA after the Rams won the Super Bowl. That search ended with Scangarello, who was also part of the McVay/Kyle Shanahan tree that Stoops set out to maintain.

It’s to be determined if Stoops will go the same route. The issue is the timing. Brock Vandagriff was brought on board to run the Coen offense. The former 5-star signal-caller was the quarterback-in-waiting for 3 years at Georgia. Hopes that he could bring back some of those 2021 Will Levis vibes in Coen’s offense are on hold for the time being.

It’s not that there is a lack of quality offensive minds available. But Kentucky has had to replace an OC in each of the past 4 offseasons. At a place with just 1 offense that finished in the top half of the SEC in scoring in the past 13 seasons — it was Coen’s 2021 unit — UK fans know all too well that the alternative hasn’t been great.

It helped that the UK defense had nothing but top-7 scoring defense finishes in the SEC from 2018-22. That streak ended in 2023. It didn’t matter that Kentucky’s offense improved by 9 points per game in Coen’s return. Plenty of meat was left on the bone in a season wherein UK stayed at 7 wins.

Granted, a 2-6 finish didn’t sting quite as badly because Kentucky closed the regular season by beating No. 9 Louisville in arguably in the Cards’ biggest home game in program history. That happened because Coen’s offense exploded in a way that it hadn’t all season. At least against quality foes. Facing a 10-point deficit, UK exploded for 23 points in the final 17 minutes. Turnovers squashed a 28-point offensive effort (it wasn’t 35 because 7 of those points came via a kick return score) against a top-30 Clemson defense in the TaxSlayer Bowl.

It took a bit, but we saw why Coen’s return to Lexington was a major victory for Stoops.

When I talked with Coen last year as he sat in his car ahead of that move back to the Bluegrass State, he spoke like someone eager to establish some roots. It was as if his third consecutive move was weighing on him. It didn’t sound like he was completely turned off by the NFL, but his itch to return to the college game was evident. Matthew Stafford, he pointed out, didn’t need his guidance like a developing college quarterback did.

There was a lingering, easy feeling that Coen had watching UK games on TV during that 2022 season. It’s something that was on his mind even as he sat in his sports car on that late January day on the eve of his return to Lexington.

“I put them in a tough spot with the timing of when I left,” Coen told SDS a year ago. “That trickled into a different system, different terminology … it was difficult to watch at times. You get frustrated watching it because you wish you could help. I felt guilty at times.”

Kentucky is in a tough spot once again because of the timing of Coen’s departure. Groundhog Day hasn’t been kind.