Rowland: Mark Stoops is Kentucky's best football coach since Bear Bryant

It's usually not a good idea to make snap judgments or draw big conclusions after a major outcome, positive or negative, but it just so happens that Saturday's win against Louisville comes at a perfect time to ask this question:

Is Mark Stoops the best football coach Kentucky has had since Bear Bryant?

I believe the answer is yes.

Mark Stoops now has a 35-39 record in six seasons at Kentucky with the bowl game remaining either late this year or early in 2019. Since a 2-10 season in 2013, one year removed from the Joker Phillips tenure, Stoops' Wildcats are 33-29.

Over the past three seasons Kentucky has a 13-11 record in SEC play. Putting aside the fact that it was virtually unheard of for Kentucky to finish .500 in SEC play in back to back seasons, as the Cats were from 2016-17, this year's Kentucky team was the first to be above .500 in SEC play since 1977.

Stoops has won five straight games against South Carolina. Not long ago the Gamecocks owned a very long streak against Kentucky. He has won three straight against Vanderbilt and four straight against Missouri. Drew Lock has never beaten Kentucky, and it's interesting to note that Mizzou has suddenly become something of a juggernaut each of the last two years after losing to the Wildcats.

Stoops has won two of three against Mississippi State and also two of three against Louisville.

And he is the coach who broke the Florida streak. Not only that, but his teams at Kentucky have consistently played the Gators tougher and more competitively than those of any other UK coach during the same time period. Some of that is on Florida during a down stretch, but the talent and speed has still been there to reckon with.

With the win against Louisville on Saturday, Stoops now has a higher winning percentage at Kentucky than Fran Curci, Jerry Claiborne and Rich Brooks. Since Bear Bryant, only Blanton Collier (1954-1961) has had a higher winning percentage at Kentucky (53-percent versus Stoops' 47.2-percent), but the fact is that Collier inherited the program that enjoyed outstanding success under Bear Bryant. Collier's three best seasons at Kentucky were his first three years at the school. While the bottom didn't fall out under his watch, his successors saw an immediate dip in success and he did not leave the program on the same plane that he found it on.

Contrast that with Stoops, who inherited a mess of a program left behind when Joker Phillips left Kentucky. Fans will remember their Wildcats losing a home game to Vanderbilt, 40-0, in one of the least-attended games in Kentucky football history.

There is a case to be made that Rich Brooks is still the bar that Stoops has to reach. To that point, Brooks also inherited an awful situation, and maybe one that was worse because of the lingering effects of probation, which saddled the Wildcats with scholarship restrictions. Some will also point out that the SEC may have been stronger when Brooks was Kentucky's coach, but if we dig a little deeper that question is a lot more complex. While Florida and Tennessee were better than they have been recently, and South Carolina was trending up (though not yet at the peak Steve Spurrier brought it to), Vanderbilt was down, Mississippi State was down and Georgia was not as good as they are now.

While we don't have recruiting rankings from the time period before 2002, the dawn of the Rivals.com era of modern internet rankings and evaluations, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Stoops has elevated the program's recruiting to new heights.

That has been a source of great pleasure for fans who enjoy following the excitement of football and recruiting year round, leading up to National Signing Day, but it has sometimes been a massive gorilla on Stoops' back because fans have expected the results to follow the recruiting rankings.

It's true that Brooks' best teams overperformed their collective recruiting rankings more than Stoops' team have, at least until 2018 (when that has not been the case and the Cats have overperformed their recruiting rankings). But part of the consideration here, in determining UK's best coach since the Bear, has to be a coach's work not only on Saturdays, but in recruiting, roster management, attrition overseen, academic performance and other factors. So if you're inclined to say Stoops should have won as he has, you have to credit him with raising the bar in terms of recruiting expectations.

Furthermore, whether Stoops leaves Kentucky in one year, five years or ten years, it may be that his greatest legacy is shattering the perceived low ceiling for the program's recruiting potential. Stoops may never ink another Top 20 class at Kentucky (though he very well may), but the days of Kentucky signing classes ranked in the 50's and 60's seem like a distant memory. Stoops has proven that what was the norm (those class rankings) was the outlier, and not his own improved recruiting results. There was simply no excuse for a program in the SEC to recruit at that level.

But that wasn't entirely the fault of Stoops' predecessors, to whom I am comparing him here. No doubt, Stoops has benefited from the full and uncompromised commitment of an athletic department that has stood by him faithfully and has not only embarked upon massive facility renovations, but has upped their commitment to assistant coach salaries and recruiting budgets.

But there's a counterpoint there, too. Stoops probably deserves quite a bit of credit for those investments because of the enthusiasm that he created right after his hiring with the power of his family name, his immediate recruiting wins and his plans for a new and exciting brand of football (which, ironically, has not been the path of success and was abandoned before his greatest successes).

The real comparison here is between Stoops and Brooks, whose records are nearly identical. It's not a comparison that we have to make, but it's fun to talk about and there's nothing to say we shouldn't as people who follow the program closely.

In my mind, Stoops' overall win trajectory - which has remained constant or improved every single year since 2013 - is one of the deciding factors in his favor. That he has rewritten expectations for recruiting, a change likely to endure into the tenures of his successors (and high expectations are quite often a very good thing in sports, and really a necessary ingredient of greatness), is another big point in his favor.

But the biggest, most decisive factor that leads me to pick Stoops and Kentucky's best, most successful coach since Bear Bryant, is the way in which he has built the program.

He abandoned the Air Raid to which he was committed to establishing under Neal Brown and Shannon Dawson (with their own versions of it) and has built a program in the slowest, least sexy of ways. Stoops has created a "line of scrimmage" program in a "line of scrimmage" league, and if quality line play can be born and sustained, that's tough to quantify.

While Rich Brooks gets enormous credit for changing UK's culture at the time, for being persistent against horrible odds, and for creating a wonderful culture made up of great personalities and people (see names like Woodson, Tamme, Woodyard and others), overachieving with a skilled class of players who surprised and exceeded their recruiting rankings is a less sustainable path to success than the way Stoops has done it.

No doubt, replacing Josh Allen, several very experienced defensive backs, C.J. Conrad and probably Benny Snell will be an unenviable task. But Terry Wilson finished the season with a passer rating of 152.7 over his last five games. That would have ranked fourth in the SEC behind only Tua Tagavailoa, Jake Fromm and Jordan Ta'amu if prorated for the entire season. Is that cherry picking stats? Maybe, but we'll get into that in another opinion/analysis piece soon. I don't think so. Furthermore, some of Kentucky's highest-graded offensive players will return, as will some of the program's most improved defensive players. UK will also benefit from the return of Landon Young and Josh Paschal (who has played sparingly of late), as well as what could be an even more favorable schedule in 2019.

All that is to say what Stoops has built is very old-fashioned, it has been a patient process, and it appears to be sustainable. There are no guarantees for the future, but he has not only produced more and more wins over tie, he has also done so in a way that should lead fans to believe there isn't a cliff. That's fairly new territory for the Cats.

Those who grew up watching Kentucky during the Air Raid era that produced Tim Couch, Dusty Bonner, Jared Lorenzen and later, in a different system, Woodson, knew that Kentucky had been blessed, in a strange way, with a great run of home grown quarterbacks. That will not always be the case. Stoops has not benefited from that same level of strong quarterback play, which had previously been thought to be an essential ingredient to success that was believed to be improbable. It's fair to wonder how much better UK might be if Terry Wilson builds on what he's done in recent weeks. And that's a big variable that should make UK fans very happy.

Stoops' teams have not always or often played great defense at Kentucky but his work in building a true SEC-caliber, nationally respected defense is another major feather in his cap. Why? Because it was believed to be highly improbable, if not impossible. It's a lot easier to take two and three-star offensive players and mold a system that can rack up points and yards against average teams than it is to take three and the occasional four-star defensive players who can line up and hold their own against most opponents. But that's what the Wildcats have done this season.

One thing Stoops has not done that Rich Brooks did three times was win a bowl game. That's something he obviously wants to change badly. UK's performance in the TaxSlayer Bowl against Georgia Tech two years ago was a poor showing, but the Wildcats looked much better prepared and played at a higher level against a 9-win Northwestern team, in a game that was decided by three points, last season.

This year Kentucky is likely to face a "name" Big Ten opponent in the Citrus Bowl, but one that is very beatable if you dig into how those seasons have gone at Penn State, Wisconsin and Michigan State. So Stoops could change his postseason fortunes this year.

Not everyone will agree with my conclusion that Stoops has been Kentucky's best, most successful coach since Bear Bryant. But the numbers and the recent history allows me to make the case in all earnestness.