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The college football transfer portal has been good to Kentucky at times but also underwhelming at other times.
This season the big-name transfers did not work out well overall and Kentucky finished 4-8. However, get ready for even more players to come in — and probably a lot to leave.
“The turnover is real, right? And as I said a couple of weeks ago. And again, I think you guys have done the research but I think the number one team (Oregon) in the country has 14 portal players, right? They recruit pretty well. Not every team needs to have massive turnover, some of them do,” Stoops said after his team’s loss to Louisville. “Ole Miss put together a heck of a football team with a lot of turnover. “
Stoops admitted he felt the “normal team” might turn over 35 to 40 roster spots each season counting high school signees and transfers. That could be almost 50 percent of an 85-player roster.
“It’s different everywhere. It’s going to be most definitely different. Are there things we can do better in that area? Absolutely. I didn’t think or ever say that was portal or perfect or the end-all be-all,” the Kentucky coach said.
“I said that last time, it’s not end-all be-all. You have to have a strong nucleus of some good players and then supplement it. But it is everywhere. It is every program.”
What would Stoops tell players on the roster that he wants to stay at UK?
“We will cross that bridge when it comes. I told them that if they stay here they’d better be ready to go to work. You know, to fix that culture that we are talking about and make sure that we get back to being who we are,” Stoops said.
“That is a tough disciplined football team. That’s the first message. If they don’t want to do those things, then don’t come back here.”
How hard is it to keep players accountable if you have to convince them to stay and not transfer?
“It’s not hard to keep them accountable. They stay here, if they want to be here they are going to be here,” the Kentucky coach said. “Listen, there’s going to be some change and there needs to be some change, clearly. Again, we will go through that at the proper time.”
12 Responses
The biggest need is to fill the coaching portal exit.
HOW TO START RECOVERING UK FB:
Hire Neal Brown immediately as OC.
Guarantee he will not be under Stoops control!
Stoops should also offer $3 Million of his own money and allow Brown to choose and hire the new OL coach.
Once you start patronage you’re on a slippery slope – Bobby Bowden hired his son, left him on and that brought on his demise. And ole Bobby had a pretty good record – as in 15 or so 10 win seasons.
Stoops has stated that he wants to keep the coaching staff in tact. I think that is a bad move because some of them are part of the problem of not being a disciplined team. I am not very high on Hamdan or Wolford because I didn’t see a single during the season where I could say they actually improved. Not one.
Hamdan had more time to work with Cutter, and he played terrible. The more he worked with BVG, the worse he got.
The OLine is a disaster and that falls on Wolford and Hamdan. Hamdan should be telling Wolford what he wants to run and Wolford should get it done by teaching the kids how to block and what to look for in the defensive schemes they will be facing. Saban was not please with Wolford, either. At Bama, Wolford had the best OLine money could buy and he failed terribly.
Its interesting that both teams where Hamden and Wolford coached and left are better after they left. Chemistry is everything I guess.
Vysen Lang, 6’4", 340 lb. offensive lineman at Tennessee just entered the portal. He never considered Kentucky in his first recruiting phase, but it would be worth reaching out to him and look into why he is leaving UT. We may need to get a better OL coach first…and an Offensive Coordinator,..and a Defensive Coordinator,…and a Head Coach…before we try to attract talent to UK…just saying.
Aww, the golden age of college football. Players getting paid, shaking down fans for more and more money every year with no stipulations, sit out of games if they deme them not important enough. Transfer yearly if they are the slightest unhappy or face adversity. Soon these overpaid minor league athletes will start drawing a paycheck directly from the universities at what I feel will be at the detriment of all the non ‘revenue generating’ sports on campus. We truly are in the golden age.
The only loyalty will be to the dream football schools – like UK, UNC, DUKE in basketball. Billionaire money can buy coaches and players for the lessor schools – if they are fortunate enough to have them. The only rule now is King Cash. Sad.
At age 76 I am fortunate to have lived during the golden era of college amateur football. Yeah, there has always been under the table money and free cars etc, but when a player committed to a team, he pretty much finished his career there. The word "team" meant something. I don’t want to put college football higher on the social ladder than it belongs but team sports means something to young people and have a positive influence on their future. Young people who will not have that experience in the future are the less for it I’m afraid.
I kind of liked those old days, too, RJohn but they are gone and we just have to adjust
Yep. But I don’t have to like it! 🙂
Stoops has completely lost it. In the span of the last 3 seasons, it has been a very gradual slide, but the slide has been steadily downward little by little, then this year it finally just crashed and burned in a dramatic way. The SCAR loss basically ended the season before it had even gotten started, and they gave themselves a chance to still salvage it with the win at Ole Miss–but that 3-game stretch after the bye was the season-defining stretch, and was the most reflective of everything that was wrong with this team. That stretch of games was the stretch most key to them having a successful season, along with SCAR and LOU–and all of them were disasters. This team beat a bad Murray St team, a bad Ohio U team, a bad Southern Miss team in a weather-shortened game, and a fluke upset road win over a top-15 SEC team on a fluke miracle pass play on a 4th-and-8 that our coach would never go for 99 times out of 100 and that this team would never execute 99 times out of 100. And the thing is, looking back, SEPT was the best ball this team played! SCAR was really the only bad game they had out of that whole month, which is what tricked ppl into thinking that was just a fluke, that it wouldn’t happen again–plus the performance against GA, that was taken as a moral victory by this coaching staff and the team–they were all "proud" of themselves for that effort as if they had won the game! But it was a completely diff team after they came back from that bye week—it went to a new low, and then it went to another new low in the last couple of weeks. They must all go out and get drunk with Stoops for 2 weeks during those bye-weeks, because they come back off those looking clueless and lifeless. The Vandy game was the game that ended this season for good–they nvr recovered from that one. And I knew after that one what kind of team they really had. They were basically unwatchable from then on. And the LOU game was a display in complete, total disarray and collapse. Even with as bad as the season was, fans didn’t expect a win, but they expected the team to show up for LOU and at least hate them enough to fight (in the football sense). Good luck getting any NIL money or the same amount of fan support going fwd–its clear now that nothing is ever going to be the same with KY FB from here on, at least not as long as Stoops is still here. I think Maclin and Wimsatt might have been the only two left who cared. I can’t believe how quickly from where this program stood in 2021 that it became this level of unrecognizable from what it was just three years ago. Stoops is done here, as is the recruiting, and the transfer portal, not to mention assistant coaches–personally I think they should all go, but who’s coming here as long as he’s still here? But maybe that’s exactly why they’re all staying. The house needs to be cleaned. And I dream of the day Marnhart retires, the same way I dreamt of the day CAL would be gone. We need a real AD who is interested in ATHLETICS–not in being a politician! And we need an AD who is interested in holding his coaches accountable instead of handing out lifetime contracts to all of them all because he is desperate to not lose anybody that he really wanted to get, and scared to death of having to find somebody new knowing himself he doesn’t have the personality to attract anybody with any kind of flair or style. He is a scared little man who needs to retire, and he needs to take his buddy Stoops along with him, and drop him off at a rehab facility……I know the signs of collapse stemming from addiction when i see it, and i don’t want to see our football team dragged down into that hell. One day we are going to wake up to see a story that Stoops’ health came up and made the decision for him to step aside. If I was him, I would be shopping for an open DC position somewhere. That’s really where he belongs–somewhere he could just do what he wants to do in regard to coaching defense, and not have to worry about the offensive side of the ball, and he could just do that, and go home every night and drink his bourbon and pass out and be happy. And then in turn we could get the complete and total makeover that this program desperately needs right now. The FB program is in exactly the same place as the BBALL program was last year after we lost to OAK. We are stuck with a coach who is nvr goin to change his ways, his style, his system, his coaches, or his offense (or lack thereof). As long as he is here, we r nvr going to have a QB, or a passing offense, or a star receiver–hell, we don’t even have running backs or an O-LINE anymore. And even the strength of what Stoops is about, meaning the defense, even they fell apart and collapsed on us, slowly but surely, as the season went on. Just a total, all-systems failure in every way, every aspect. We need a coach so badly right now who is like the football answer to Mark Pope: a coach with fresh energy, fresh and new ideas, some kind of answer and imagination when it comes to having an offensive identity and how to move the ball down the field. A coach who knows how to develop and coach a QB and has a semblance of how to call plays to suit the strength of their offense, and how to call plays against SEC defenses. We need a new coaching regime who has a specific offensive philosophy and identity that they have confidence in themselves that they can run and win with in the SEC, and that they know they can recruit specific talent who can run it, who will be suited to it, and who can make a success of themselves with it…… Any other school in this situation would be scrrambling right now, trying to make changes or taking some accountability, taking some actions of some kinds, showing that they grasp the severity of the situation. Instead, what do u get? Complete silence from Marnhart. Complete silence from Stoops. Marrow made one statement this week, but said a whole lot of nothing. I really believe that the situation is worse than any of us know. And the fact that this could go on, and EVERY SINGLE PERSON INVOLVED IN IT WOULD BE ALLOWED TO KEEP THEIR JOBS, unless they wanted to leave on their own, is INCREDIBLE to me!!! Good luck drawing fan interest, good luck drawing money, and good luck filling seats next year. Until there can be a complete house-cleaning made of the program, I’m checking out. Welcome to the CAL equivalent of football, and Joker 2.0