NCAA probation tarnishes the UK legacies of both Mark Stoops and Mitch Barnhart

Based on what we now know, the violations that caused the NCAA to place Kentucky football on probation for two years — and led to the Wildcats vacating all 10 of their victories from the 10-3 season of 2021 — are not so severe that they will jeopardize the jobs of Mark Stoops or Mitch Barnhart.

Nevertheless, the UK legacies of the Wildcats’ most successful football coach and Kentucky’s longtime athletics director are tarnished by UK’s first significant NCAA rules violations in 22 years.

In an agreement reached with the University of Kentucky that was announced Friday, the NCAA said UK had “at least 11 football student-athletes receiving payment for work not performed between spring 2021 and March 2022.”

Ruling retroactively, the NCAA said that made those 11 players — eight of whom played in 2021 — ineligible. Those ineligible players led to Kentucky having to renounce one of its best football seasons in its history.

For Kentucky fans, that has to be a bitter weed.

Even with UK baseball’s breakthrough to the Men’s College World Series and the $82 million renovations that are converting the aging Memorial Coliseum into something sleek and modern, Barnhart is having a challenging 2024.

Between football probation and the much more alarming allegations of sexual harassment made against a former UK swim coach in an April lawsuit brought by two former Kentucky swim team members, Barnhart’s athletics department has now garnered embarrassing publicity for the University of Kentucky twice in four months.

Along with the football violations, the NCAA on Friday also cited the Kentucky swimming and diving program under its previous coaching staff for having violated rules that govern how much practice time is permitted.

When former UK President Lee T. Todd hired Barnhart some 22 years ago, UK athletics was seeking to move forward after NCAA improprieties in the Wildcats football program during Hal Mumme’s coaching era led to crippling sanctions.

Since then, one of Barnhart’s primary tasks has been to avoid the kind of adverse headlines Kentucky has faced in the past four months due to the swimming scandal and, now, football probation.

It is to Barnhart’s credit that Kentucky went 22 years into his tenure without significant NCAA violations. For UK, which previously drew NCAA penalties for rules violations in 1953, 1964, 1976, 1988, 1989 and 2002, that is not a small thing.

However, just as the Mumme-era football scandal tarnished C.M. Newton’s legacy at the end of his run as UK AD, so are the current swimming and football controversies potentially muddying Barnhart’s Kentucky track record.

In video statements released by UK, both Barnhart and University of Kentucky President Eli Capilouto emphasized that it was UK itself that uncovered and reported to the NCAA the violations that were announced Friday.

Said Capilouto: “We uncovered. We reported. We fully cooperated in the investigation. We respect the process. We respect the decision.”

Said Barnhart: “For over a couple of decades, we have worked really hard to make sure our compliance and our integrity (were) at the highest level. In this case, our processes worked. Our compliance office uncovered both of these violations and worked through them over the last three years to find a solution.”

For Stoops, the 10 win seasons he directed Kentucky to in 2018 and 2021 have been the twin pillars upon which his legacy of success at Kentucky most relied.

To have one of those seasons discredited knocks down one of those pillars.

It was after the second of those 10-win campaigns — two of only four double-digit win seasons in all of Wildcats football history — that UK signed Stoops to the lucrative contract that will pay the coach $9.013 million in 2024.

The alleged “no-show” jobs from which Kentucky players were allegedly benefiting were with UK HealthCare.

In its news release, the NCAA said the college sports governing body and the University of Kentucky ”agreed that no staff member in the athletics department knew or reasonably should have known about the payment for work not performed.”

Color me skeptical that 11 football players organically discovered a way to access the UK HealthCare system and acquire jobs that paid but did not require work without someone helping them.

I don’t expect Stoops to personally monitor every job program that employs UK football players.

The captain, however, is responsible for what occurs on his ship. Football players taking money out of the university’s health care system without working for it was not a great look.

Like Barnhart, Stoops, too, is in the midst of a rugged public relations stretch.

At least some UK backers remain miffed at Stoops over his flirtation with the head coaching job at Texas A&M after the 2023 regular season.

The mood did not improve after Kentucky turned the ball over four times in the fourth quarter of last year’s Gator Bowl as a 21-10 fourth-quarter Cats lead morphed into a 38-35 loss to Clemson.

Now, the second of Stoops’ two 10-win seasons as Kentucky head coach has been sent up in smoke by the NCAA due to rules violations.

All of which is why Friday was not a good day for Stoops, Barnhart nor the University of Kentucky.

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