When you listen to Kentucky head coach Mark Stoops talk nowadays, he's getting one point across loud and clear in all his messaging: UK has it rough in the SEC.
On multiple occasions in his most recent press conference Stoops pointed to the fact that Kentucky will have played four teams that are currently in the top-10. That counts Louisville, coming up this weekend.
Of course, that doesn't explain the loss to South Carolina, and Stoops caught himself and noted the loss to the Gamecocks, a 4-6 team before Saturday, doesn't fall into that category. Neither did the loss to Tennessee (the Vols have now won three straight games in Lexington).
The good news is the sport is moving to a 12-team playoff model starting next season. That provides a lot of hope for college football programs, fans, and coaches all over the country. An expanded playoff probably doesn't bring national championships into the realm of the realistic for most teams, but for a program like Kentucky, it offers a more achievable "next step" compared to the impossible task of unseating Georgia in the East.
But the reality is, if you think this year was tough, it's probably not going to get any easier any time soon.
The erasure of divisions from the Southeastern Conference will benefit the likes of Arkansas and Mississippi State out in the West. Some of the games they have been playing against Alabama, LSU, and Ole Miss will now be against South Carolina, Vanderbilt, and yes, Kentucky.
If the SEC eventually moves to a 9-game conference model it makes life even more difficult.
Next year's schedule is daunting.
Kentucky draws Auburn, Georgia, South Carolina, and Vanderbilt at home. The Wildcats have to travel to Florida, Ole Miss, Tennessee, and Texas.
How many of those games will Kentucky be favored in?
The more optimistic fans will point out there's still a path to good outcomes. Vanderbilt should be a win. South Carolina at home should be winnable at the very least. Auburn is still a work in progress under Hugh Freeze. Kentucky has won three in a row against Florida.
Win all of those games and you're 4-4 in the league. That's if you win all of those games. Based on how Kentucky's games against the best teams in the league have gone recently, it's hard to give them a great shot against Ole Miss, Tennessee, Texas, or Georgia in those respective settings.
At the very least it's safe to say that Kentucky probably needs to go 3-1 in those home conference games next season, and that's as a starting point for fans to consider it a good year. Throw in the fact that Jeff Brohm has turned Louisville around very quickly, at least for one year, and you see that UK's situation in the sport's landscape becomes more difficult beginning next season.
Over the course of this year it has become clear that there is still a talent gap between Kentucky and the top teams in the SEC. This has manifested itself in too many holding penalties at the line of scrimmage, too many lost one-on-ones in the secondary, too few instances of wide receivers beating corners to make plays on the ball.
Throw in the operational issues: Running the fewest plays in the country, too many penalties overall, and a tendency for things to spiral when they have gone bad, and Kentucky is trending down for the first time in a while. The last several weeks have felt more like Kentucky before 2018, when bad almost invariably turned to worse.
It's easy to forget that Kentucky is one of the hardest jobs in the SEC. The fact that we haven't talked about that so much in recent years is a testament to what Mark Stoops has done to bring Kentucky from the basement it resided in before his arrival.
Stoops has proved that a head coach can win and have "splash" 10-win seasons at Kentucky. Not one, but two.
But some coaches who are on the outside looking in might be wondering, still, how feasible it is to build Kentucky up much more beyond where they currently are, barring a fundamental change in the NIL situation.
When Mark Stoops told fans they needed to "pony up" - and to be fair, he's correct; you have to take that quote in context - he was correct. That's not an excuse for the program's persistent failure to be more competitive against the very best teams they play, but it's really not realistic to expect Kentucky to beat Georgia or Alabama anyway.
Kentucky's biggest games are and may always be against middle of the pack SEC teams. Win all of those games and you can dream about sneaking into the 12-team playoff. Win half of them and it's probably a Gator Bowl-type of season.
When the head coach is making $9 million a year it's only natural for fans to bristle at talk about ceilings or scarcity. Throw in the fact that Kentucky's staff is very well compensated overall - top-10 in the nation - and it has the look of a program that compensates the coaches very well, with not much left over for the NIL pot. Of course, these are two different sources of funding; one from the school, one technically not. But that's the reality.
It's only natural to talk about decline when those 10 win seasons feel like a distant memory. They weren't that long ago, and Stoops' most ardent defenders could easily point out that they had two 7-win years in between their 10-win seasons, so it's not crazy at all to suggest he's not done with those double-digit years.
And if Kentucky loses to Louisville the concern has to be what kind of momentum the program has going into the portal season and the early signing period. Will they have enough juice to build the kind of roster that can make next season better?
What is Kentucky's "identity" going into the new SEC?
For several years Kentucky's identity was clear and it gave the Wildcats a major advantage against other middle of the pack SEC programs. They ran the football with physical backs, they blocked as well as teams other than Bama and UGA, and they played sound defense, eliminating big plays. That formula created the run of 7-straight bowl games Kentucky is currently enjoying.
But the Big Blue Wall's brand has been knocked down more than a peg. The line is improved but it's not what it was. There are promising players in the pipeline and a couple of older players could return for another year, but Drake Jackson and Landon Young aren't walking through that door, tomorrow at least.
The defense hasn't been at its peak for a while now. Granted, the defense has been better than the offense overall for these past couple of seasons. But against the better teams Kentucky has faced, there have been more chinks in the armor. They're giving up more big plays, they're providing less resistance to the best teams, and one can wonder about the overall talent level compared to the 2018 and 2021 teams, especially when you get deeper into the depth chart.
A fair "identity" analysis for Kentucky at the moment would probably find that the Wildcats play good defense against middle of the pack SEC teams and worse, but there's not a whole lot else for UK to hang its hat on moving forward. That has to change.
Key to that identity: Players like Jackson and Young. Players like Fortner and Kinnard. In other words, Kentucky's success was largely built on local offensive linemen from Kentucky and Ohio. The program has not demonstrated the ability to consistently go recruit elite offensive linemen from the South, so they simply must develop more local linemen. This is not an overnight fix. The portal allows you to make quicker improvements, but two things need to be happening at the same time. Immediate improvements, longer-term depth building.
Over time, the immediate fixes will always be more important. That's where the great mass of energy, attention, and resources will be devoted in a sport where fan bases simply do not have patience. And that shift of attention to the portal makes it much more difficult to build, establish, and maintain that blue collar "no shortcuts" approach that Stoops succeeded with so much in building this program.
What happened the last two years?
The last two years represent regression and the record bears that out. But what happened?
The obvious answer is that 10 win seasons for Kentucky football are really hard to come by, and seven wins is more in line what what somebody should reasonably expect based on the talent we've seen on the field this fall.
But that's not the only issue.
There have been offensive coordinator changes every year since 2020. There have been three offensive line coaches since 2020. High school quarterbacks have not been developed. Wide receivers have not gotten better. Younger offensive linemen haven't even seen enough snaps in backup or mop-up duty to gain experience to build for the future.
Kentucky has not recruited and/or developed enough of a pass rush. Nobody expected another Josh Allen on the heels of the man himself, but the drop-off in pass rush has been severe enough that it has really affected the pass defense.
Since moving on from Eddie Gran, Stoops' top concern was figuring out how to unlock the offense more to take the program to the next level. Nobody can say he has been asleep at the wheel for this. It has been a real emphasis. But in how slow they play (which is not totally a function of wanting to shorten the game) and the mistakes they make - we're going on two years of talking about shooting themselves in the foot - it's clear that things are off.
Maybe the biggest issue is the issue that has always been considered Kentucky's biggest challenge: A lack of local talent.
If you look at the commitment lists for other SEC programs, it's clear, year after year, how much of an advantage they have with more local talent to draw from. Kentucky simply doesn't get much from Kentucky. If the state had produced players like Damien Harris or Jedrick Wills during Kentucky's stretch with two 10-win seasons it would have been a lot easier to avoid the past couple of years. But it didn't. And you never know when those players will come along. And then you still have to beat them out when Alabama comes along.
And more recently you've seen the Big Ten's top programs target Ohio much more, to the point where it's a lot harder to land the quantity of the best players from there that we used to see.
So at the end of the day, either the recruiting situation changes, or Kentucky just has to improve its overall recruiting.
Stoops still has to figure out offense
At the end of the day, offense has never come easy for Mark Stoops. Back in 2021, in Liam Coen's first year, the Wildcats averaged 200 yards rushing and 200 yards passing. It was the most balanced offense Kentucky has had in quite some time. It wasn't one of the nation's best offenses, but we saw Will Levis, Chris Rodriguez, Wan'Dale Robinson, and a pretty strong offensive line prove that offense isn't impossible for Stoops.
But that year was the outlier.
They haven't developed high school quarterbacks. There's been far too much turnover in terms of offensive line and wide receiver coaches. Those positions have not developed to the level needed to win more in the SEC, and the number of penalties and drops make that clear.
They still go very slow. Not just slow, but slower than just about everyone. This many years in, how realistic is it to expect that to change?
The good news is Coen has shown that you can have a successful offense with Stoops. He's done it. But the personnel is not the same and there are new challenges.
What needs to happen this offseason?
Probably only Mark Stoops has a clear idea of the staffing changes that will be made in the offseason. He will probably have two things in mind as he thinks about the composition of his staff: Recruiting chops, and how the unit has performed.
There are some staff members who have recruited very hard and enjoyed some success. There are others who have not demonstrated the ability to bring top flight talent into the program. At the end of the day, talent accumulation is the No. 1 most important thing for any college football staffer. After all, it's the Jimmy's & Joes more than the X's and O's, we hear so often.
Kentucky will have to recruit another quarterback from the transfer portal. Will it be as easy this season?
On the one hand, Will Levis is in the NFL. Kentucky took this Penn State backup and he was a second round draft pick. Whatever happened in 2022 with Rich Scangarello as OC, that's still a success story.
But Leary's year could be cause for consternation for some.
Kentucky may well need portal help at quarterback, running back, wide receiver, and the offensive line this year. Wide receivers should be the easiest to find. Think about guys like Javon Baker, Taj Harris, and others. There has been no shortage of talented pass-catching prospects who have been linked to UK in the portal in recent years.
Getting a couple of wide receivers from the portal early will make the job more attractive to prospective quarterbacks.
Selling Ray Davis' wildly successful one-year stint in Lexington is something else that should help them in the portal. Kentucky took an efficiency back and made him one of the top playmakers in the country, at least for much of the year.
If Kentucky can get those portal pieces in place on offense, they should be able to find a quarterback from the portal. Coen has proven he can attract a quarterback, and regardless of Leary disappointing this season, we can't sleep on that.
On defense, keeping Deone Walker has to be the top priority. We saw against South Carolina the impact that Walker can make. You have to plan on building around him for next year, and then riding the wave of recruiting momentum with defensive linemen that will result from him being taken high in the draft. The defensive line should be solid next year, so if you keep Walker for a third year in the NIL era you can then sell that as an example of NIL and NFL success to future defensive recruits.
Then, you really just need to upgrade as many positions in the portal as you can. The good news is every year in the portal offer you the opportunity to upgrade your roster at every spot on the field. Evaluation successes and just getting all the right ingredients together can go a long way. The bad news is, NIL is a factor here, and Kentucky will not be "eating first" with a lot of portal guys, especially as it has to continue to devote more money to keeping its best players in the program.
It's clear that this is something of a fork in the road for Kentucky football given the last two years, the current stretch, and the SEC next year.
Whatever somebody thinks about Stoops after these last few weeks, unless he leaves for another job this season he's going to be the man who has a chance to try and fix things.
