Mark Stoops seems to have UK set to continue to move up in the SEC. (SEC Photo)
Since it’s beginning to look a lot like football season — well, spring football season anyway — it’s also time to write those “talking” articles that get all the SEC football fans worked up over, as Shakespeare described it, “much ado about nothing.” I just finished reading one of those articles on “Saturday Down South,” a digital sports site dedicated to SEC Football coverage.
The article was written by Connor O’Gara and was titled “Who will be the SEC Championship Game’s Next First-Time Winner? Ranking The Candidates”.
The link to the complete article is here – https://www.saturdaydownsouth.com/sec-football/who-will-be-sec-next-first-time-winner-ranking-candidates-2021/.
But if you decide to read it just know beforehand that O’Gara, who says he is a huge Mark Stoops fan, like every other media person outside the confines of the Commonwealth seems to have little respect for the Wildcats under Stoops.
O’Gara says as a preface in the article, “This year will mark the 30th SEC Championship Game. Those 29 titles in the SEC Championship era were claimed by a total of 6 programs — Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, LSU, and Tennessee. That’s it.”
He then goes on to rank the likelihood of the other eight teams that have never won a title game in the last 29 years winning an SEC Championship Game. Of course, there is no need to read the article to know that O’Gara believes of the eight teams — Missouri, South Carolina, Kentucky, Vanderbilt, Texas A&M, Mississippi, Mississippi State, and Arkansas — Vanderbilt should be ranked dead last at No. 8 and UK should be ranked next to last at No. 7.
As I said previously about media people outside of the Commonwealth — they have very little respect for the improvements Mark Stoops has made in the Kentucky Football program over the last eight years. I understand some of their negativity, I really do. Kentucky has struggled to beat Florida and Georgia during Stoop’s tenure and to even reach a title game UK would have to beat at least one, and maybe both, in the same season.
I’ll let O’Gara explain his position concerning the Wildcats. “When Kentucky ripped off that 10-win season in 2018, it was the program’s first year with a winning SEC record since 1977. Kentucky essentially hosted a division title game against Georgia that year, and it still lost by three scores. The Wildcats haven’t beaten Georgia since 2009, and that was a year in which the Dawgs lost five regular-season games. (Excluding SEC Championships, they have 4 regular-season losses in the last 4 years under Kirby Smart.) This is also a Kentucky program that has one win against Florida in the last 34 seasons.”
Now you will notice that the same reasons he picks the Cats to be No. 7 are the same reasons that they could just as easily be No. 2 or 3 on his list.
He says that UK has only beaten Florida once in the last 34 years. That is true. It’s also true that Kentucky has been a play or two away from beating Florida multiple times during the Stoops era. I know, the doubters can say, “Yes, but they didn’t” and I would agree. But I wouldn’t agree that it was because of a huge talent gap between Florida and UK.
And yes I realize that Florida signs a Top 15 recruiting class each year and UK does not, but I also realize that games are won on the field and not on some media analyst’s opinions of how a kid played in high school. If that were the case Tennessee would be in the SEC Championship game every year, but the Vols are not. They struggled to even have a winning record over the last 10 seasons. Every team that he lists from 3 through 7 has the same warts UK does.
So my point is this — like the disclaimer you see on a mutual fund’s prospectus, recent past performance provides no guarantee for future performance. If Georgia can lose five games in a season in 2009, they can do it again. If UK can beat Florida, on the road in the Swamp, they can do it again. I’m sure no one thought that UK Basketball could finish the season with an overall losing record in 2020 either but it’s going to happen.
What most media writers and sports analysts sometimes fail to realize is that everything changes over time — coaches leave for other jobs, players leave through graduation and transfer and high school kids today don’t even realize who was winning championships 10 years ago. That seems to have much less bearing on what school they choose to attend than it did say, 20 or 30 years ago.
All of that doesn’t even take into account the potential impact of changes like pay for player’s name, image, and likeness, elimination of transfer restrictions, and any other new laws or regulations that will govern college football going forward.
Like I said at the beginning, spring football season is the beginning of the “talking season” and it has already begun in earnest this year. This article from Saturday Down South is probably no different from past “talking season” articles except in one way — college football will be changing dramatically over the next 10 years and I believe that Kentucky is poised to take advantage of those changes.
I also don’t believe that O’Gara’s teams ranked 3 through 6 — Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi State, and South Carolina — have any better shot at winning an SEC Championship game than UK does. In fact, the whole premise, in my opinion, is laughable. I think at this point all those teams could be thrown into a hat and pulled out randomly and that ranking would be just as valid as O’Gara’s.
It’s fun to talk during “talking season” but it’s like two small boys on a playground saying what they’re going to do to each other if they just step across that line. None of the talking matters until someone steps across that line in September.
— Keith Peel, Contributing Writer
