Exactly one week after the Kentucky football faithful spent their night waiting out the weather for the Wildcats’ season opener, Coach Stoops’s crew returned the favor with one of the worst losses in program history.
The Cats, following a decisive win in week one, were favored by most to come out on top again against conference rival South Carolina (SC). The Gamecocks have been Southeastern Conference (SEC) bottomfeeders for the better part of a decade now, aside from occasional spikes of improvement now and again.
This is the same SC team that nearly dropped their first home game against Old Dominion, who are ranked last in one of the most listless conferences in college football. That team just marched into Kroger Field and drove Kentucky into the dirt.
50,000 fans (a number that slowly bled away as the game went on) watched in utter dismay as the Gamecocks dismantled the Cats, preventing Kentucky from scoring a single touchdown and eventually claiming a 31-6 win.
For South Carolina, that’s a solid in-conference win on the road. For Kentucky, it’s an apocalyptic loss. Naturally, people are pointing fingers every which way in search of a scapegoat. Who’s to blame?
The answer is clearer now than it’s ever been: Mark Stoops.
Since their historic 10-3 season in 2018 (negating the discounted 2021 season), the Cats have only finished with more than seven wins one time. In SEC play specifically, they’ve gone a combined 13-21 since then. It’s not just that the team isn’t improving; they’re actively deteriorating.
As fans have watched the team walk backward, they’ve called for a change just about everywhere but the head coach. We’ve seen a total of five offensive coordinators come and go in Stoops’ 12-year tenure, all run out of town due to the consistent scoring struggles that have defined the program over the years. With another new hire this year yielding the same tired results, maybe it’s time to stop blaming those guys and look to the top.
The offensive coordinator position has become a reflection of Stoops’ age-old playbook. What won games in 2018 doesn’t win games now. Good coaches evolve, and the rest get left behind. It’s hard enough to see your team’s coach fall off the horse, but him refusing to get on it in the first place is downright unbelievable. Stoops doesn’t even own a saddle.
He’s grounded himself in a game-gone-by. This refusal to change has not only been illustrated on the field, but also in the process of recruiting players to rep the blue and white.
The most drastic example here comes as a result of the name, image and likeness (NIL) rule in NCAA Football. Passed by the league in 2021, it meant officially allowing college athletes to be paid for the commercial use of their names. Effectively, teams could now pay-up for players. This added a new dimension to the process, and just three years later, it’s become arguably the most important part of it. Out of frustration in having to adapt to a new era, Stoops turned the blame outward. That always ends well, right?
“I don’t know how long I can take dealing with what I’ve dealt with. I’ve never felt this kind of stress and pressure,” Stoops said in an interview with 247Sports. “I get no help. None.”
After last year’s team lost 51-13 to the top-ranked Georgia Bulldogs, Stoops tried to take the fans to task. “You’re climbing the ladder in the SEC. You think it’s easy? I sat here and watched a bunch of people try to do it. It’s not easy at a lot of different schools.”
“I encourage anybody that’s disgruntled to pony up some more,” he said in reference to the school’s NIL fund. After the recent loss to South Carolina, Stoops was met with a chorus of “pony up” chants from fans as he left the field.
If it wasn’t bad enough already, the coach was asked about Kentucky’s extremely difficult schedule still left to play in the first half of this season. “That’s a joy,” he said flatly.
Kentucky doesn’t shy away from competition, let alone dread it. The school’s athletic tradition is known for a lot of things that Stoops may have at one point embodied, but it’s painfully obvious now that those days are behind us.
This scenario feels eerily similar to the John Calipari fallout earlier this year, and if the aforementioned schedule turns out as tough as it seems, history may soon repeat itself. If so, maybe we can all finally accept that it’d be for the better.
