In 2024, Mark Stoops again faces task of meeting raised UK football expectations

For most of the past seven decades, a “successful” Kentucky Wildcats football season was defined by one achievement — reaching seven regular-season wins.

Consider:

▪ Starting in 1985 through 2015, only five of the 31 football teams Kentucky fielded reached the seven-victory threshold in their regular seasons.

▪ From 1985 through 2017, no UK football team ever won more than seven regular season games.

▪ It has been 70 football seasons since Bear Bryant last trod the sidelines as UK head coach. In those 70 seasons, Kentucky has reached seven wins in a regular season only 16 times.

▪ Of those 16 post-Bear seasons with at least seven UK regular season wins, Mark Stoops has produced seven of them (one of which, 2021’s 9-3 regular season, was subsequently vacated due to NCAA rules violations) since 2016.

In a big picture sense, it is a tribute to what Stoops has achieved as Kentucky head man that the prevailing sentiment among UK football backers in the run-up to the 2024 season has seemed “we’re tired of going 7-5.”

When a team’s longtime performance “ceiling” becomes an unacceptable “floor,” a head coach has changed the paradigm of a program.

Yet as Kentucky prepares to kick off its 2024 season against visiting Southern Mississippi on Saturday at 7:45 p.m. EDT, Stoops is again facing a vexing reality.

The achievements above the historic level of Kentucky football during the Stoops era have raised the bar for Wildcats fan expectations. Yet that now means the UK head man must meet the elevated standard for what is an acceptable outcome for a Wildcats football season.

“I feel a deep obligation to put a team out there that (UK fans) are proud of,” Stoops said Monday at his initial weekly news conference of the 2024 season. “ ... We have to go play well and we want to do that, it is important to us.”

For most of the past 70 years, football seasons like the past two UK campaigns would have been deemed “successful.”

In both 2022 and 2023, the Wildcats beat their former long-term nemesis, Florida; won over their intrastate rival, Louisville; won two SEC road games; finished the regular season at 7-5; and went to a bowl.

Yet not a small percentage of the Big Blue Nation has deemed UK’s 2022 and 2023 football seasons “disappointing” — and the fans are not wrong for feeling that way. Kentucky’s win totals in both years were less than the talent level on the Wildcats’ rosters should have yielded.

The prevailing lesson of the past two seasons is that UK football has reached the point where Stoops and troops have to get more than seven regular season wins to be perceived as “succeeding.”

What makes that daunting is that Kentucky has only achieved that “more than seven regular season wins” standard twice (the nine-win regular seasons of 2018 and 2021) since 1984.

If that reality were not challenging enough, Stoops is now coaching in an enhanced Southeastern Conference.

The arrivals of traditional football powers Texas (12-2 in 2023) and Oklahoma (10-3) from the Big 12 have been accompanied by the SEC abolishing division play and altering its existing scheduling format.

I will again point out that, for 2024, Kentucky gave up games against the teams projected in the SEC preseason media poll to finish sixth (at Missouri), 14th (at Arkansas) and 15th (Mississippi State). The Wildcats have added contests with the teams projected to finish second (at Texas), fourth (at Mississippi) and 10th (Auburn) in the conference.

On paper, there is much to like about the Kentucky team that Stoops will unveil Saturday night at Kroger Field.

Defensively, UK has multiple proven veterans at every level of its “D” including All-America candidates in disruptive defensive line behemoth Deone Walker and ball-hawking cornerback Maxwell Hairston.

Offensively, Kentucky will for a fourth straight season break in a new offensive coordinator, in this case former Boise State OC Bush Hamdan.

“I love the way (Hamdan) operates, I like the way he thinks. I like the way he anticipates his calls,” Stoops said Monday.

The Cats have a veteran offensive line and proven playmakers at wide receiver and tight end.

If Georgia transfer Brock Vandagriff can play anywhere close to his five-star recruiting ranking as Kentucky’s new starting quarterback and if UK can find a reliable running back to replace departed star Ray Davis, the Cats would seem to have the realistic potential to field one of the three best teams of the Stoops era.

Yet facing a league slate made dramatically more challenging by the changes in the SEC’s scheduling process, this is the quandary Stoops faces:

The UK coach could be about to field one of the best teams of his Kentucky tenure, yet he may again struggle to meet the heightened fan expectations for what now qualifies as Wildcats football “success.”

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