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Kentucky football fights for respect in SEC — and on own campus
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The Kentucky Wildcats took out the Alabama Crimson Tide, and they did it rather easily in front of an adoring but spoiled audience that appreciated the win but also fully expected it.
Unless you just landed from another planet, you know those winning Wildcat words are reserved for wintertime, never the fall in Lexington.
The Wildcats did in fact carve up the Crimson Tide, on Tuesday night on national TV at fabled Rupp Arena, where legends play and basketball dreams are made.
Kentucky football rarely lands into any such wonderful dream.
Those Wildcats usually are swimming against the tide, not beating the Tide.
Take a quick trip to the sports menu at visitlex.com, a guide to Lexington’s attractions, and you see where UK football ranks in the pecking order. After scrolling through paragraphs about “Big Blue” basketball and Rupp and even old Memorial Coliseum that preceded Rupp, followed by more paragraphs on another Lexington institution, horse racing, you finally get to “Gridiron Cats.” Even The Red Mile Harness Track comes before Kentucky football.
And once you do get down there, finally, you can read about how “football may sometimes play second fiddle to basketball at the University of Kentucky,” which is of course being kind. But the Lexington site is trying to attract fans to refurbished Commonwealth Stadium, not tell them why they should stay away.
And while their basketball brothers have been busy piling up eight national titles, the most all-time victories and the highest winning percentage in Division I history, with few exceptions it’s been the cruel, polar opposite for football ever since, well, Bear Bryant left.
For the gridiron Wildcats, it’s been about survival.
Better, but long way to go
Flash back to last fall, on a night when Mark Stoops’ football team was hopelessly chasing around Mississippi State star quarterback Dak Prescott during a 42-16 loss in Starkville. John Clay, a columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader, wrote of the Wildcats that late October night: “Yes, Stoops has done a better job recruiting. Yes, Kentucky is a better football team this year than last. But this Saturday night in Mississippi showed that the Cats have a long way to go.”
Stoops’ guys fought hard that night and all season but lugged the same 5-7 record back home as they had the season before, when the Wildcats managed to break a 17-game SEC losing streak against fellow longtime SEC doormat Vanderbilt. In 2013, Stoops’ first year, Kentucky went 2-10, the same record as it had the year before he got to Lexington.
Stoops signed the highest-ranked recruiting class in program history just nine months into his tenure, but it hasn’t translated into a dramatic turnaround on the field, not yet at least. Wildcats fans, spoiled by basketball riches, are waiting for the football fortunes to turn for the better in the fall.
They’ve been living that double life of sorts for decades. University of Kansas fans can surely relate. So can Indiana fans, though they’ll get no sympathy from their border counterparts. Fall frustrations preceding winter wonderment, year after year, as predictable as the months on the calendar.
Kentucky has been to just 15 bowl games and not since 2010, when it lost the BBVA Compass Bowl to Pittsburgh to finish 6-7.
So even the Wildcats’ flirtations with football success have been marginal — and fleeting. Another bowl drought is well under way, and that supposed strong recruiting class Stoops brought in upon his arrival is running out of time. The 2016 class was ranked 12th in the SEC by 247Sports, ahead of only Missouri and Vanderbilt.
Perhaps Kentucky football’s lot in life, in the SEC and on its own campus, is symbolized by a 29-game losing streak to SEC East foe Florida. The Wildcats have been close to ending this embarrassing streak on a few occasions, like in last fall’s highly respectable 14-9 loss in Lexington. But the streak has lived on.
At least the university is showing interest. Commonwealth Stadium just underwent a $110 million renovation. The seating capacity was reduced to 61,000 but everything else was upgraded, and after the completion of the project before last season it was being called “The New Commonwealth Stadium.”
New stadium. Next are newer, better results.
In his year-end column depicting the “dark clouds” and “silver linings” of 2015, Clay wrote in his final “dark cloud”: “You have to wonder what the second consecutive feeble finish will do to season-ticket sales for next season. Build it and they will come only lasts so long — even less these days.”
Battling one decision, decades of history
A note in the visit Lexington site teaches a sneaky little history lesson about Wildcats football. It explains how during a brief stretch of brilliance UK football was like … UK basketball? It lasted from 1946-53 under Bryant, who led the Wildcats to their first bowl appearance in 1947 and their first of two lonely SEC titles in 1950.
That 1950 team capped its magical season by toppling undefeated and top-ranked Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl, snapping the Sooners’ 31-game winning streak. Bryant led the Wildcats to four bowl games during his tenure but left for Texas A&M (and then headed to Alabama) after just eight seasons.
Just imagine, Kentucky had Bryant and Adolph Rupp in its grasp at the same time. Rupp built his legend in Lexington, winning three national titles in basketball during Bryant’s short time there; Bryant made his at another SEC school, the one that owns the Wildcats and most everyone else on fall Saturdays.
After its final bowl appearance of the Bryant era in 1951, it would be another quarter-century before Kentucky returned to a bowl. It hasn’t been a dreamy road. Today, the Wildcats exist in the shadows of those SEC football skyscrapers, not to mention John Calipari’s Rolls Royce of a program next door.
Kentucky football’s all-time record is 592-606-44. Not awful. But also not 2,199-680, the astonishing all-time mark of the basketball program after beating Alabama.
Grantland asked last fall in its State of the Bluegrass, “When Will Kentucky Football Finally Turn It Around?”
The answer is maybe this is just how it was all meant to play out.
“Bryant left Kentucky after losing a battle of wills with Adolph Rupp as to whether basketball or football should be the dominant sport,” explains Britannica.com.
So one sport continued dominating. And another began that decades-long fight for onfield survival. Kentucky fans know all too well that this isn’t some dream. It’s just their own weird reality.
Cory Nightingale, a sports copy editor at the Miami Herald, lives for Saturdays. He especially enjoys the pageantry, tradition and history of SEC football.
