Cutter Boley played well enough as a true freshman Texas to get a start against Louisville last season. (Vicky Graff Photo)
Kentucky coach Mark Stoops got to tout the UK football program during a special ESPN SportsCenter visit to Lexington Tuesday afternoon to promote the Kentucky-Tennessee basketball game.
“It’s fitting that we’re in the weight room,” Stoops told SportsCenter host Matt Barrie. “Our team needs to get bigger, needs to get stronger, mentally tougher. It starts right here. So they’re in here grinding.”
The team also has to get a lot better on offense after being inefficient most of last season for a variety of reasons when UK went 4-8 overall and 1-7 in SEC play. Barrie asked Stoops about the “presumed starter” at quarterback in transfer Zach Calzada.
He mentioned Calzada’s win over Alabama when he was a freshman at Texas A&M. He later transferred to Auburn and the last two years was at Incarnate Word where he completed 65 percent of his passes for 3,744 yards and 35 touchdowns with only nine interceptions in 2024. He also ran for 332 yards and five scores. He’s been one of the best FCS quarterbacks the last two years and has now been playing college football since 2019.
However, Stoops’ answer to the question about Calzada had an intriguing spin — or at least it did to me.
“The first thing with Zach is the experience,” Stoops said. “We have a tremendously talented youngster in (redshirt freshman) Cutter Boley that we believe in strongly, but I wanted to give it a good balance.
“With Zach, as you mentioned, he won eight games in this league, which is hard to do. He brings a wealth of experience and he’s a guy who’s very mature, very tough, and so we have a lot of confidence in him.”
Nothing surprising about what he said on Calzada. However, Stoops went out of his way to mention Boley on national TV. Remember Boley did start the final game against Louisville last year when he was overwhelmed by the Louisville defense after playing well at Texas.
Stoops hit the jackpot at quarterback with Penn State transfer Will Levis in 2021 and 2022. It worked okay with transfer quarterback Devin Leary in 2023 but did not work at all last year with Brock Vandagriff after he transferred from Georgia.
Even in today’s world, it’s hard to rely on a transfer quarterback every year and for Stoops to remind everyone that he still had confidence in Boley — who I guarantee plans to compete as hard as he can to be the starter — told me nothing is set yet about who will be UK’s starting quarterback when the season opens.
5 Responses
There were a lot of issues last season, but the biggest issue in my opinion was the offensive line, look at what happened to Kansas City.
That’s a valid point, confirmed by KC. However, I don’t think KC was plagued with incompetent coaches (whereas UK sure has some issues), but believe the winners wanted that game a lot more than KC. Those KC OL did ok thru the season – but I may be wrong about that because I only looked at their W-L record and did not look at much else.
Is Stoops still the coach. Hasn’t Barnie given him a buyout at 90% of his contracted future salary if he agrees to leave the state of KY. UK has ruined more OC’s & QB’s under the Stoops watch than anyone can count – thanks to his revolving door OC plan and the bogus OL coach he picked up on the side of the road after bolting in the night from UK only to fail miserably at ALA. What a catch.
Stoops knows less about Football offense than a linebacker in a peewee league.
No… I’m not a fan of Stoops. He had it all when Coen led UK to 10 wins and now Coen is a new HC in the NFL after a big offensive year as the OC in Tampa. Stoops was afraid Coen would get the HC job so he made it unbearable to be at UK.
i just wish some of these haters would just give the man credit for what he’s done at uk stop giving out opinions without any facts mark stoops made uk a winning program beat teams we couldn’t hold down after 1 quarter i could care less on how it looks i rather be in an defensive battle then high scoring afair any day at the very least both sides doing there part to win but at the end of the day you don’t watching stoops coach at uk don’t watch he going no we’re no way he ever be fired and has nothing to do with he’s buy out it’s called loyalty for winning
all stoops has ever done is hire the best offensive coordinator in the country you blame mark for something not even on him sure he the head coach most believe liam coen was a great offensive coordinator he had one good year with levis/robinson carrying the offense now this coming year bush hadman got more to do with this offense my understanding he’s wanted bigger stronger wideouts after losing dead weight uk had the number 6 best portal results i like having big strong talk wideouts to i have faith in stoops hadman abs white to turn uk back into a winner i just hope you all would give him that when it happens stop dreaming of man who not ready for the sec in jon sumral not yet