The predicament Mark Stoops finds himself in as Kentucky flounders this season should be familiar.
Though Kentucky basketball is in a different universe than Kentucky football, Stoops should have learned a lesson from his frenemy, John Calipari. And the lesson is this: If a coach stays anywhere long enough, the fan base will almost certainly grow tired of you.
Calipari found that out in Year 15. He took the Kentucky job intending to stay a decade. In retrospect, it would have been better off had he stuck to that timeline and found somewhere else to go. The last few years of Calipari’s tenure in Lexington were highly uncomfortable before he took the Arkansas job last April.
Stoops, much like Calipari, has stayed in at Kentucky longer than anyone thought. He makes $9 million a year and is among the 10 highest-paid coaches in the country, largely because he’s turned down multiple opportunities to leave. You’d probably stay too for that kind of contract, the theory being that life will be good if you win seven or eight games. Unlike most fan bases in the SEC, Kentucky fans are never going to expect a national championship in football.
But after 12 years, has it grown stale? Should Stoops have said goodbye before Kentucky fans turn on him the way they did Calipari?
It’s a legitimate question after Kentucky dropped to 3-5 with a decisive 24-10 loss at home to Auburn, which was previously winless in the SEC. Unless the Wildcats pull a big upset somewhere down the stretch, they will miss a bowl game for the first time since 2015.
Kentucky administrators will argue that even if Stoops never comes close to an SEC title, he’s worth the money because they remember how bad the football program was before he arrived.
That’s a fair argument, but it will also fall on deaf ears. Yes, you can say that the coach who follows Stoops will be worse for Kentucky. But after so many years living in that 7-6 range, why is it so hard to imagine a world where someone else could do a bit better?
Stoops has raised the floor significantly at Kentucky and has been handsomely rewarded for it. Fans should and will celebrate that. But you’re never going to convince them that paying Stoops $9 million a year is the only path to having a nice, competitive football program – the same way fans eventually concluded that Calipari wasn’t the only coach who could win championships there.
Maybe that’s correct, and maybe it’s not. But when you stay in one place too long, those are the conversations that start to take place.
Stoops can be forgiven for a bad season, which this clearly has become. But after a dozen years, it’s easy to lose a fan base’s enthusiasm for struggling to make minor bowl games and losses to South Carolina, Vanderbilt and a bad Auburn team.
By the end, Stoops and Calipari didn’t really get along. The power struggle between a perceived underachiever on the basketball side and an overachiever on the football side resulted in tension that sometimes even spilled out into public view.
But now, Stoops has pretty much become Calipari on a smaller scale – and may ultimately have learn the same lesson about passion and loyalty in the Bluegrass State.
That’s why Kentucky is No. 1 in the Misery Index, a weekly measurement of which fan bases are feeling the most angst.
HIGHS AND LOWS: Winners and losers from Week 9 in college football
Four more in misery
Oklahoma State: What’s gone on in Stillwater this season is really strange. Oklahoma State went 10-4 last season and returned enough of that team to be picked third in the Big 12, including a lot of first-place votes. And after Saturday’s 38-28 loss at Baylor, which marked the first time in Gundy’s career that he’s had a five-game losing streak, his diagnosis was that players “need to do some soul searching.”
It’s hard to know exactly what that means or if Gundy is signaling some kind of locker room issue or lack of focus, but a team with this much experienced talent should not be 3-5 and dead last in the Big 12 standings. Something is off.
Gundy is in an interesting phase of his career. He’s still relatively young at age 57, but this is his 20th season at Oklahoma State. He’s had a ton of success at a tough place, but so many things have changed around him including player compensation and the makeup of the Big 12. They’re not even playing Bedlam anymore after Oklahoma’s departure to the SEC.
And honestly, in Gundy’s post-game press conference Saturday, there wasn’t much fire. He was very low-key and matter-of-fact about how poorly this season is going.
Gundy has been good enough for long enough that maybe it’s an anomaly. But he didn’t seem like a guy who was too bothered about being in the midst of his worst stretch ever.
Maryland: Recruiting was the primary reason the Terrapins hired Mike Locksley as the head coach nearly six years ago. Despite a 2-26 record in his first head coaching job at New Mexico, his connections to players in the Washington, D.C., area plus a three-year stint in Nick Saban’s coaching redemption car wash made him the obvious choice.
And it hasn’t been a bad choice, if the goal was to make Maryland a passably competent program that could win some games against bad teams and avoid embarrassing the school. Maryland has posted three consecutive winning seasons and could do it again, even though this season has been a mild disappointment at 4-4.
The bigger issue is that Maryland just seems stuck, with no chance at upward mobility under Locksley. Over the past month the Terps have lost to Indiana, Northwestern and now Minnesota in a 48-23 shellacking. Has Locksley given Maryland fans any indication the program will break out of this mediocre cycle over the course of six years? No. In fact, they’ve never managed to even post a .500 record in the Big Ten. Is that enough for a program that sits in the middle so much talent?
Texas-San Antonio: This time last year, most people in college football had Jeff Traylor penciled in for a bigger job. The former Texas high school coach had gone 12-2, 11-3 and then 9-4 last year after making the move from Conference USA to a tougher American Athletic Conference. Surely someone would lure him away. But for a variety of reasons, including a poor interview with Texas A&M, Traylor had nowhere to go and returned to San Antonio. At the time, UTSA fans thought that was great news. Today? They’re not so sure. If this is UTSA’s first losing season under Traylor – and it might be, as the Roadrunners are 3-5 – Saturday’s 46-45 loss to Tulsa will be a huge part of the story. UTSA led this game 20-0 early in the second quarter, 35-7 at halftime and 45-32 with five minutes to go. Somehow, though, Tulsa put together a 10-play, 75-yard drive in fewer than three minutes and an 8-play, 92-yard drive in 61 seconds to take the lead. Sure, UTSA is rebuilding. But when you lose a game in that fashion, the Roadrunners won’t have to worry about losing Traylor anytime soon.
Missouri: Despite SEC commissioner Greg Sankey engaging in early College Football Playoff lobbying by floating the idea of eight teams getting into the 12-team field, natural selection is a real thing in college football. And Missouri is basically extinct as a contender after a 34-0 loss to Alabama.
What a disappointment. After starting at No. 11 in the preseason US LBM Coaches Poll, the Tigers have absorbed 31- and 34-point losses to the two best teams on their schedule, with their 41-10 wipeout at Texas A&M earlier this month proving to be a harbinger of their mediocrity. Missouri fans are not the SEC’s most demanding, but after going 11-2 last year and returning a lot of key skill players, they came into this year with arguably as much optimism as they’ve had in a generation. Instead, there’s a legitimate chance they’ll go 10-2 and feel like it’s been a disappointment because they’ve fattened up on bad teams and won’t have any win that gives them credibility with the College Football Playoff selection committee.
Miserable but not miserable enough
Mississippi State: We are looking at one of the worst SEC teams in recent memory, and that includes decades of bad football from the likes of Vanderbilt and Kentucky. We saw this possibility developing when the Bulldogs lost by 24 points at home to Toledo in Week 3, but there hasn’t even really been much of a glimmer of competitiveness since. Mississippi State is 0-5 in the SEC with an average margin of 16.4 points following a 58-25 loss at home to Arkansas. The Bulldogs also rank in the 120s nationally in total defense. Jeff Lebby will get some time to right the ship if for no other reason than his predecessor, Zach Arnett, lasted just one season. You can’t change head coaches every year, even though Mississippi State fans might want to at this point.
Southern Mississippi: Firing head coach Will Hall last week was a necessary catharsis for Golden Eagles fans after his record sunk to 14-30, including this year’s freefall to 1-6 and a total inability to compete against Sun Belt opponents like Jacksonville State (44-7), Louisiana-Monroe (38-21) and Arkansas State (44-28). The question for Southern Miss’ administration now, though, is what it will take to stabilize a program that has underperformed dramatically since 2020, winning just 17 of 56 games. Southern Miss was one of the best and most consistent programs outside the power conferences from the late 1970s until 2011. Southern Miss fans expect more, and getting lapped by its regional peers in the Sun Belt is an embarrassment for which there is no excuse.
Liberty: There won’t be many bigger upsets this year than the Flames losing 27-24 on Wednesday night to Kennesaw State. As we wrote a few weeks ago in the Misery Index, Kennesaw State had been comfortably the worst team in Bowl Subdivision largely because they weren’t ready for this level of football after rushing to move up from FCS in last year’s realignment shuffle. In fact, just a week earlier, Kennesaw State lost 14-5 to a Middle Tennessee team that is now 2-6. So maybe Liberty, which came into the game 5-0 and nearly a four-touchdown favorite, didn’t take the Owls seriously and committed nine penalties for 100 yards in a sloppy performance. No matter what happened, though, it’s a costly loss. Had Liberty won Conference USA with an unbeaten record, it would have been a contender for the Group of Five’s playoff bid. With this huge blemish on the record, that’s almost certainly not possible now.
Rutgers: We have reached the point where Greg Schiano 2.0 is trending toward failure. Though he was the best coach in program history from 2005-11, bringing relevance to a program that had languished for decades, his return has been underwhelming. After Friday’s 42-20 loss at Southern Cal, Rutgers has gone from 4-0 to 4-4 this season amidst injuries and an underperforming defense. More concerning is that Schiano’s Big Ten record is now 10-31. There just hasn’t been a ton of progress from Year 1 to Year 5. Meanwhile, Rutgers doesn’t have a full-time athletics director because Pat Hobbs resigned in August amid murky circumstances that include a school investigation into a possible inappropriate relationship with the gymnastics coach, as NJ.com reported earlier this month. Rutgers is one of the toughest jobs in the Big Ten, but none of what’s happened this year points to getting back in the mix.
Wyoming: The Super Bowl of Stink took place Saturday in Laramie, and the home team didn’t disappoint. Wyoming, under first-year coach Jay Sawvel, dropped to 1-7 after a 27-25 loss to 2-6 Utah State. It’s a pretty wild season given that Wyoming hasn’t had a losing season since 2015 if you don’t count the 2-4 COVID year in 2020. In fact, this is looking more like the Vic Koenning era when Wyoming went 5-29 over a three-year stretch.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: College football Week 9 Misery Index: Kentucky has Mark Stoops dilemma
