Last season, Kentucky football head coach Mark Stoops stood alone. With Nick Saban hanging up the crimson polo and straw hat in Tuscaloosa, Stoops became the dean of the SEC coaching fraternity. When he was introduced at SEC Media Days in Dallas last summer, commissioner Greg Sankey acknowledged that he had become the longest-tenured coach in the conference.
In his 12th season, Stoops became one of just 19 coaches in SEC football history to stick with 1 program for 12 years or more. The group he joined features names like Saban, Bear Bryant, and Steve Spurrier.
“I don’t look down on some of the things we’ve done,” Stoops told the ballroom at the Omni Hotel in Dallas 11 months ago. “Since 2018, there’s only 3 other schools that have more wins than us. Again, that’s not nothing. We want more, but the consistency that you have to have in this league, it’s difficult. There’s some great schools, some great programs that have been up and down, and we’ve been relatively stable.”
Stoops has more career wins in Lexington than any other coach in Kentucky history. He has supplied more than a third of the bowl appearances. And he’s also responsible for 2 of the 4 double-digit-win seasons in school history.
And yet he is in supreme danger entering the 2025 season.
Stoops is one of several coaches throughout the SEC who find themselves on the hot seat entering the new year. I looked at Brent Venables and his Oklahoma Sooners several weeks ago, and Hugh Freeze at Auburn last week. Today, we’re focusing on the Wildcats, and what Stoops needs to do in 2025 to save his job.
Kentucky, Mark Stoops, and a “what have you done for me lately” sport
We’ll start with an acknowledgement. Many folks believe Stoops is too expensive to fire. According to his contract, he would be owed a buyout of $37.5 million if Kentucky dismissed him after the 2025 season, and the deal stipulates that all that money would be due within 60 days of the decision to move on.
You are welcome to disagree, but I don’t think anyone is too expensive to fire in today’s college football ecosystem. If they found the money to get rid of Jimbo Fisher and Mel Tucker, they can find the money to get rid of anyone. A Tyson chicken-scented gift could descend from the heavens and fall into Mitch Barnhart’s lap. If enough people want someone gone, there’s always a way.
Stoops’ task in 2025 is to combat apathy.
Kentucky basketball is on the rise under Mark Pope. John Calipari isn’t around to absorb the arrows. If Kentucky follows up a 4-8 season with another uninspiring season, Stoops is in trouble.
The Wildcats won 10 games in 2021 and finished 18th in the AP Poll. They finished 12th in the AP Poll after a 10-win 2018 season. Those finishes bought Stoops some goodwill, but consecutive 7-6 seasons, consecutive bowl defeats, and then a faceplant in 2024 have done enough to erode the once-stable foundation underneath him.
Stoops has only 2 top-25 recruiting classes in the last 5 cycles, and the crop of newcomers in 2025 skews heavily toward transfers. Only 14 scholarship players return to the offense from last year’s team. The offensive line is completely rebuilt. The quarterback position is changing hands again. The Wildcats are expected to win around 4 games, according to win totals posted at the major sports betting apps.
Transfers could catch fire, a la Ole Miss under Lane Kiffin. The Rebels have built an SEC contender through the portal, cognizant of the fact they couldn’t presently win enough battles against the top dogs in the SEC on the high school trail.
But you knew what Ole Miss was going into last season. We don’t know what Kentucky is going into 2025.
Consider the undertaking. More than half the roster was flipped. Phil Steele’s preseason All-SEC team goes 4-deep at every position, and a punter was the only Kentucky player represented on the first 2 teams. Two offensive linemen made the third team. A linebacker appeared on the fourth team.
Where’s the skill? Where’s the excitement?
ESPN’s Football Power Index projects 5.6 wins for Kentucky in 2025. The Wildcats are ahead of only Mississippi State and Vanderbilt in the preseason ratings. Reaching 6 wins is viewed as a coin flip.
Bill Connelly’s SP+ is slightly less optimistic, forecasting around 4.7 wins because of the eighth-toughest schedule in the country. The Wildcats are 43rd in Connelly’s post-spring ratings. Arkansas is 38th. Louisville is 24th.
And the Cards just poached one of Stoops’s top assistants to manage their roster and lead their recruiting efforts. Whether Vince Marrow wanted badly to work with Jeff Brohm or wanted simply to make his own choice months before it was potentially made for him is irrelevant. The optics of the situation further a narrative: Louisville has passed Kentucky.
The 2026 recruiting class just recently lost one of its top-rated pledges. Kentucky’s class is 9 strong now and ranks 59th nationally. It does not feature a public pledge from a Kentucky resident. Louisville, meanwhile, has commitments from 5 of the state’s top 10 prospects in the industry-generated 247Sports Composite.
Last year, Louisville won the Governor’s Cup for the first time since 2017. Kentucky turned it over 5 times in a 41-14 shelling.
The Wildcats, lacking the polish to go head-to-head with teams last season, had to play a frustrating brand of football, dragging opponents in the muck in limited-possession games. But Kentucky’s inability to play clean football turned even that strategy into a problem.
They committed 10 penalties in a 10-point loss to Tennessee. They committed 12 penalties in a 7-point loss to Vanderbilt. The passing game disappeared against South Carolina. The ground game collapsed against Auburn and Texas.
It’s a hard product to watch right now. And it all happened within 12 months of Stoops telling the fanbase to “pony up” for a better NIL budget to attract players and flirting pretty seriously with the Texas A&M job.
With college football entering a new era and revenue sharing on the horizon, athletic director Mitch Barnhart needs a fanbase that cares about its football program. If Kentucky won 5 games in 2025, but it beat Louisville and showed signs of life heading into the offseason, if it gave fans a reason to believe Stoops was steering the ship out of choppy waters, then the seat would cool.
Eight SEC teams won at least 9 games last season. Kentucky plays 5 of them in 2025. Seven of Kentucky’s 8 league games are against teams that won more than they lost last year. The Wildcats play Ole Miss in the second week of the season. They play back-to-back road games against South Carolina and Georgia, then get Texas at home off a bye. They play in Jordan-Hare Stadium. They play at Louisville.
This is an unforgiving schedule, and Stoops might be forgiven if he struggles to make a bowl game.
The optics are what matter.
“There’s been a lot of people who tried hard here and couldn’t sustain it and couldn’t work at it,” Barnhart said in the spring, per the Lexington Herald-Leader. “… A one-year blip is not what I would call ‘not sustaining it.’ Now, if we go two or three more, a couple more years, and we’re still not back where we want to be, sure, then you have to have a conversation about, what are we trying to get to here? And how do we do that? But he’s absolutely engaged with our guys. Staff is over there, working hard at it, and we’ve got a good group of guys coming in.”
Stoops has to create excitement.
He needs some of his transfers to hit.
Kentucky has to replace its top 2 receivers from last season after both left via the transfer portal. The leading rusher had less than 600 yards on the ground. The program brought in 6 transfer receivers, 2 transfer running backs, and 2 transfer tight ends. Nebraska transfer Dante Dowdell providing a consistent option on the ground would be big. Ja’Mori Maclin and Kendrick Law establishing themselves as reliable receiving options would be huge.
Can Kentucky produce a few all-conference performers from the skill positions? Can former Texas A&M and Auburn passer Zach Calzada boost a pass game that ranked 127th nationally in EPA per dropback last season? Can Kentucky pull off an upset that doesn’t feel like it says more about the losing team than the winner?
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According to Game on Paper, Kentucky’s offense ranked 120th in the country in opponent-adjusted EPA per play last year. The Wildcats have only finished among the top 60 in that particular metric once in the last 10 years, but they also haven’t ever been that bad. Better line play will help, but Stoops needs to show that he can adjust with the times.
If Kentucky is going to compete for recruits, be it at the high school level or in the portal, it needs to be able to pay. Doing so is easier when Kentucky is putting butts in seats and giving boosters reasons to open up their check books.
“This is a make-or-break year for the future of this program,” one anonymous SEC coach told Athlon recently. “He’s got a very friendly contract that makes him hard to fire, but right now it’s hard to look at the overall roster here and think they’re keeping pace with programs like Vanderbilt and South Carolina, who changed with the time.”
That’s why Marrow’s departure felt like such a blow. It signaled to the outside that this all wasn’t headed in the right direction.
More than just qualifying for a bowl game, Stoops has to change that perception in 2025.
Hot Seat Index: How Mark Stoops can save his job at Kentucky in 2025 Saturday Down South.
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