Mark Stoops doesn’t want to just exist at Kentucky, but has the window closed?
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Mark Stoops was the final SEC coach to take the stage this past week during the league’s annual media conference in Dallas. Fifteen coaches had come and gone, and with them, much of the credentialed media from earlier in the week had departed the Lone Star State. On Day 1, the ballroom was crammed full. By the time Stoops walked onto the set of The Paul Finebaum Show, the room had well emptied out.
It felt a little too on the nose.
Kentucky is coming off consecutive 7-win seasons. But the program has made 8 straight bowl games, something only 9 other FBS schools can say. Stoops has been at Kentucky since the 2013 season, and he has 2 of the 4 10-win seasons in program history. But he also has 8 seasons that have featured at least 6 losses. He led the program to a Citrus Bowl victory in 2018 and 2021 but hasn’t yet broken through.
And now that Texas and Oklahoma have joined the league, the job has gotten tougher and Kentucky has slipped back into the background.
At ESPN Bet, Kentucky’s win total is set at 6.5. The -110 price for a bet on the under carries an implied probability of 52%. ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI) expects a 6-6 record and gives the Wildcats a 0.2% chance to win the SEC. In the preseason media poll, Kentucky was picked to finish 11th.
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There’s little in the way of expectations for these ‘Cats.
That begs an interesting question: Has the window closed on Stoops’ Kentucky?
“We want more, but the consistency that you have to have in this league, it’s difficult,” Stoops said.
There are only a handful of coaches in the history of the league who have been at a single school for 12 years or more. “I like being a part of that group,” Stoops said. And Stoops is Kentucky’s all-time leader in career wins, which lends him some leeway to have ups and downs throughout his tenure.
In recent years, there hasn’t been much continuity on the offensive side of the football, and that has impacted what they’ve been able to do.
Since Terry Wilson quarterbacked a 10-win team in 2018, Kentucky has had a different quarterback lead the team in pass attempts in all but 1 year. Will Levis proved to be a shrewd transfer portal pickup. Devin Leary wasn’t quite the same last season.
Stoops joked that with Media Days arriving, it meant he needed to talk about the Wildcats’ new offensive coordinator. Bush Hamdan took the job this offseason, replacing Liam Coen. Hamdan’s arrival this offseason made it 4 seasons in a row with a different offensive coordinator running things in Lexington.
During the 2018 season, Kentucky ranked 72nd in offensive efficiency and 85th in scoring. The following year, they ranked 39th and 76th, respectively. During the COVID campaign in 2020, the offensive efficiency plummeted to 95th in the country and they dropped outside the top 100 in scoring. Levis took over, and Kentucky averaged 6.4 yards a play (21st) and 32.3 points a game (35th) in 2021. Then Coen left and things crashed in 2022.
Now, the Wildcats are entrusting Hamdan and Georgia transfer Brock Vandagriff to stabilize things.
“With Brock, the first thing is we have a lot of pro elements to our system, and you know coming from Georgia he was coached extremely well,” Stoops said. “What you saw with him is you saw the operation. You saw him go through the reads, you saw him process things, you saw the way he handled himself. The talent was there, that was obvious. He only needed an opportunity, so I thought it was a very good fit.
“I like what I’ve seen so far.”
Vandagriff was a 5-star recruit in the 2021 class, but he threw 21 passes in 3 years with the Georgia program. To see him seek out a new opportunity this offseason wasn’t much of a surprise, and Kentucky pounced on a player 247Sports rated as the fifth-best quarterback available. Hamdan will have him for multiple seasons to hopefully provide some continuity.
On the other side, Kentucky returns 9 starters, including a mountain of a man in the middle of the defensive line who can wreck anything and everything — Deone Walker. The Wildcats have an All-SEC talent at corner and a former Butkus Award finalist at linebacker. Stoops, very plainly, said he likes the group.
But that was sort of the theme from the Kentucky coach throughout the day. There weren’t many sweeping declarations about who they were going to be or what they were going to do, only statements that Stoops wasn’t content for the Wildcats to just continue to live in the middle of the pack.
“I’m not exactly content with just being average, being OK, and going to (bowl) games. It’s 2 years in a row we come here, I sit here, and I get a little bit pissed because it’s, ‘What if?’ You’ve got to find a way to make those plays to go back to winning 8, 9, 10 games, playing on New Year’s Day, being in that picture,” Stoops told Finebaum. “It’s not nothing. I mean, we’re doing something.
“But we want more. I’m not interested in just existing at Kentucky.”
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The Wildcats open the season against Southern Miss before playing consecutive early-September conference games against South Carolina and Georgia. They close the month with a trip to Ole Miss. With road trips to Tennessee and Texas in November, October clashes with Florida (on the road) and Auburn become crucial games for Stoops’ group.
A losing season in conference play would be Kentucky’s fifth in the last 6 seasons. Offseason interest from Texas A&M shows Stoops is still in demand as a program builder, but recruiting can get tough in a hurry if others sense stagnation in Lexington.
The expanded playoff offers a lifeline, but Kentucky needs 9-3 (or better) seasons to be in those conversations in November. Is that still attainable?
“You hear it all the time from every coach and it’s true for us, we can only control what’s right in front of us,” Stoops said. “That approach won’t change.”
Stoops has built something sustainable at Kentucky. He doesn’t become the longest-tenured coach in the toughest conference in the country without doing so. But his task — and his objective — now is to push the envelope. Kentucky took 13 transfers this year — big names among them — to push the program forward.
“You either exist, you exit — you leave and say goodbye — or you find a way to explore your options to get better,” Stoops told Finebaum. “I feel like we needed to take advantage of that and find a way to close the gap to get to that next level that I’ve been hunting.”
Derek Peterson does a bit of everything, not unlike Taysom Hill. He has covered Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Pac-12, and now delivers CFB-wide content.
