7/19/2017 football Edit

UK aiming for miracle playoff run? Laugh, scoff or doubt, but good for them

Justin Rowland • CatsIllustrated

Publisher

Justin Rowland has been CatsIllustrated.com's publisher since 2015. He covered college football recruiting at programs nationwide for 15 years prior to that.

When Rece Davis rolls into town it's big for any college football program.

On Wednesday, he tweeted an interesting picture from a tour of Kentucky's facilities in Lexington; a picture that drew quite a range of reactions on social media.

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Whether Davis and/or the ESPN crew are rolling into town for College Gameday (hasn't happened since 2007 following UK's win over LSU, with Florida in town) or even just on a preseason courtesy tour and team research mission, you want big personalities with platforms and megaphones on your campus....absent scandal, hot seats and the worst days of the pressure cooker.

Better yet, you want them contributing to the hype machine that, as coaches, you're desperately trying to create.

Davis did Kentucky's coaches a favor when he broadcasted to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, "@UKFootball has beautiful facility. Raising the standard too--check out what's on weight room wall."

So first, there's the facility reference. UK's coaches are trying to get the word out to as many people (namely, recruits) as they can about those. And based on our experience watching bus loads and bus tours of recruits from Florida and elsewhere unload and observe those facilities, they're a big hit. They're changing perceptions. Fort Lauderdale (Fla.) Dillard's last coach told CatsIllustrated.com that Kentucky and Southern Cal have the best facilities he's seen. Many South Florida coaches and 7-on-7 travel team chaperones contrasted Kentucky's facilities with Miami's as evidence for why Eddie Gran is getting such a strong reception in the region.

But what about the last part of that tweet? "....check out what's on the weight room wall."

See the picture but a few short paragraphs above.

There, in Kentucky's weight room we're told, is a sign with a College Football Playoff bracket that's empty except for Kentucky, the lone program penciled in on the top left line.

Bold statement, huh?

The picture might not have been there for Rece Davis. Or maybe it was. Or maybe it's there for the players and the staff and also Rece Davis types who might take notice.

That kind of picture is bound to be a lightning rod for blowback. And the blowback was swift. There hasn't been a painfully predictable and semi-vulgar Deadspin headline or tweet blast (maybe that's coming; it would be predictable, after all), but rival fans have chimed in.

Replies from those less than impressed have included:

— "Yay 30 year losing streak continues!" - from @CurlyShea

— A box score reminder of the carnage last year in Gainesville, courtesy of @Swamp_Swag.

— And in the most popular burn attempt by the crowd of scoffers, @bush_jason filled out the rest of the empty lines in the CFP bracket with unicorns, Santa Claus and Bigfoot.

Rece Davis praised UK's facilities on social media on Wednesday (Photo: @ESPN_ReceDavis)

What can you say?

If you're a Kentucky football fan, coach or player, that three-decade long losing streak to Florida is an 800-pound gorilla that torments you every time you start to get excited about the fall season ahead. There's no denying the sheer ugliness of that game in Gainesville last year, which reinforced all of those perceptions that come with a 30-plus year streak, and did quite a bit of damage to the narrative that Kentucky has been playing Florida tough of late.

As for unicorns, Santa Claus and Bigfoot (only one of those things is real, kids), even if your pride is stinging or your eyes are rolling — hopefully you maintain enough levity about sports that you can laugh at such a joke on your better days — what can be said that's going to change anyone's mind besides actually beating Florida, winning the East, showing up in Atlanta and maintaining a high level of national relevance for a sustained period of time?

Heck, Pac-12 fans are laughing at optimistic Oregon fans this year. Alabama fans are looking down their noses at a Jarrett Stidham-led Auburn team, scoffing at their playoff dreams. Fans across the country won't believe it 'til they see it ... from Texas, much less Kentucky.

UK didn't build enthusiasm and support for new facilities and hugely improved recruiting because they were "measured" and "realistic" (UK Athletics)

The ridicule was, and is, and will be inevitable. It's not Kentucky hate. It's inevitable and it's going to happen because Kentucky basketball fans laugh, scoff, jeer and joke with memes and social media put downs at the least bit of hype for upstart but unaccomplished SEC basketball programs.

In fact, think about how you felt or reacted the last time someone told you that Indiana basketball is bound for the big-time again. Were you duly concerned and did you take the prediction seriously, or was your reaction more akin to the unicorn, Santa Claus and Bigfoot burn?

But here's the bigger point: Just because it's going to bring on ridicule doesn't mean Kentucky should apologize for putting up that poster board. Just because it seems ridiculous to 98-percent of college football fans doesn't mean Kentucky should replace that bracket with dreams of a return to the TaxSlayer Bowl or preseason promises of back-to-back bowl games before New Year's Day.

There's nothing wrong with dreaming. In sports, especially college sports when motivation doesn't come as easily for everyone during the dog days of summer as it does during a pro's contract year, dreaming is what you've got to do.

There's that incredibly corny adage that you probably heard as a child. "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars." Putting aside the fact that the moon is 238,900 miles from the earth and Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to earth besides the sun, is 4.22 light years from us, this much is true from that bumper sticker slogan: If you don't set high expectations, you won't get great results. If you set high expectations you aren't guaranteed great results, but you're very likely to end up with better results than you'd have had if you were "realists" to the point of sucking out any and all excitement from the sport.

Soldiers from time immemorial haven't rushed headfirst into war because they were thinking they'd help their side score a small tactical victory that may or may not have any decisive, lasting impact on even a solitary battle. They've done it because they've been convinced that their sacrifice and valor are the seeds of greatness, of transformation and the kinds of things that echo through eternity in history books and humanity's shared memory.

Football players don't put in extra time in the weight room or give that extra 10-percent, when Raising Cane's is looking like a good remedy for a hot July day, because they're thinking about how fun it would be to spend the holidays in Nashville prepping for an upper-middling ACC opponent.

That's not to diminish the accomplishments of last year's team, which played well and broke through with seven wins. It's just to say that they didn't get to seven wins thinking they were going to get to 8-4 in the preseason.

Last year's team got to seven wins from five, and the previous two teams to five from two before that, because of the same shared locker room energy that prompted Vince Marrow to seek out a camera after returning to Lexington from that win over Louisville, so he could yell and call everyone out who had labeled the Cats an underdog against the Cards. The same healthy athletic confidence which borders on ridicule-worthy delusion motivated Kash Daniels' attitude, finally expressed after that same Louisville game when he reminded everyone that he was 1-0 against the Cards.

Is Kentucky likely to play in the College Football Playoff this year?

No. Unequivocally, the answer is no. We could say stranger things have happened in sports, but truthfully not many stranger things would have happened in the entire history of college football. Kentucky would have to make it through a 13-game schedule that would include Alabama and hordes of Alabama fans in Atlanta, with no more than one loss, for that to become a reality.

It's true that Missouri wasn't far from the very top of the national rankings in their best overachieving SEC years under Gary Pinkel. But even those magical teams, powered by big, impressive receivers and imposing, freakish men on the defensive line, ran into Auburn and Alabama ... and couldn't finish, no matter how much heart they had.

But why would you fault a player, a coach and a locker room full of both from dreaming?

It makes the summer grind a little easier to bear. It creates a lofty common purpose that makes sacrifice and smart, hard choices a little easier to justify.

But most of all, the poster board playoff bracket is a good thing because any coach or player who would bristle at that bracket simply isn't going to succeed. While others laugh, mock and shake their heads, those players and coaches with the right mental makeup to succeed will use that doubt as fuel for the fire.

Whether it ends in the College Football Playoff or not, and every single outside observer will predict that it won't, Kentucky's poster board pipe dream isn't only something you should be able to understand. Even if you scoff, you should be able to recognize that it's exactly the kind of "us against the world" bravado that will always be required for Kentucky football to beat the odds.

Kentucky football didn't start to recruit top 20, top 25 or top 30 classes, nearly every single year, because they skimmed past four- and five-star players who smiled at them. They've narrowed the gap because of the same bravado that motivated that poster. The ambitious building project that led to some of the nation's best football facilities at Kentucky was driven by the same hope-against-all-odds optimism that caused a person to put Kentucky on that bracket, knowing full well that rivals would point and laugh.

Finally though, really, what are the odds? How much of a long, long shot is this long shot?

It's a long shot. Really long. But in this day and age the right combination of a turnover-forcing defense, a poised quarterback and a great offensive line, coupled with some breaks, can lead to close calls. Texas Tech nearly did the unthinkable one year under Mike Leach. TCU has come close, shortly after ascending to the Power Five level. Boise State, even as a non-Power Five, has been close multiple times. Missouri, as mentioned, wasn't too far away from a Cinderella story. Kansas won the Orange Bowl and 11 other games, losing just once, in a season under Mark Mangino.

But the point right now isn't how likely it is that we'll look at the poster maker as Nostradamus one day. It's just a good sign that someone put it up and nobody has taken it down.

If you really want to believe anything's possible, 2017 and recent years probably haven't changed your tendency towards optimism. For 90's children like myself (giving away my age, here), it's remarkable that we're in a world where the Royals and Cubs have been recent World Series champs, Cleveland's championship drought is over, Butler went to back-to-back college basketball national championship games, and well, Kentucky's recruiting really talented players in football.

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