There are two competing realities about Mark Stoops. The first is that he brought Kentucky football out of the abyss, and we owe him a statue or something. The second is that the Wildcats have been regressing since he signed his contract extension in 2022. Both can be true because they are both true.
Look at the data from when he signed that extension. Stoops just came off a 10-win season. In his previous two seasons combined, he was 18-6 and 9-6 in the SEC. He signed that 2022 contract and has since gone 11-13 overall and 4-11 in the SEC.
He currently has Kentucky at 1-4 in the SEC. There is not an easy slate of games coming up, and the path to a bowl is looking harder and harder. It’s not ideal, and now even the national college football websites are starting to catch wind of what’s happening in Lexington.
SaturdayBlitz.com, a Fansided college football website, published an article today titled, “5 schools who can’t afford to fire their terrible college football coaches.” And guess who made the list? Stoops? Actually, he didn’t. He was the honorable mention at the end of that article. Basically, a “here’s one more coach that probably should be included.”
Let me give you a little snippet of what this article says about Stoops: “The game this weekend between Hugh Freeze and Mark Stoops may quickly determine which coach gets to keep his job and which coach finds himself firmly on the hot seat. The big difference here? Kentucky would likely owe Stoops about $20 million more to fire him than Auburn would if the Tigers fired Freeze after his second season as the head coach. That lofty buyout — good enough for 11th-highest in the nation according to USA Today — might just keep him around no matter what the Kentucky faithful think at the end of the year.”
Truly, the analyst is right; Kentucky can’t afford to fire Stoops at such a steep price, and the contract is currently biting Mitch Barnhart in the rear. Things could actually get worse before they get better, let’s hope not but the upcoming schedule features only one truly “winnable” game. The rest will actually take a top-notch effort from the Wildcats, which we’ve only seen twice this year. Two of the final games are against rivals, and that will be a bitter pill to swallow if Stoops can’t get those games figured out.
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