Signed, Sealed, and Delivered

Today is one of my favorite sports days of the year.  Sure, it doesn’t rival opening day of the MLB season, the opening rounds of March Madness, or the Super Bowl but for a day in early February, it’s something for college football fans to get excited about.  Of course, I am talking about National Signing Day!  Today is the day in which thousands of young men all across the country sign to play college football and in so doing give each fan a glimpse of what their favorite program will look like this coming fall.

For years, there hasn’t been much to get excited about on this day if you were a University of Kentucky football fan.  I am one of the few who I know that would pay attention to the Wildcat signees and try to learn more about them and how they could help the program.  Overall, there wasn’t much interest from casual fans.  They would latch onto the biggest names in the crop of talent and then expect them to dominate the SEC as soon as they stepped foot on campus.  Or they would bemoan the fact that UK was either 11^th or 12^th in the SEC in recruiting and go on a negative tirade about it being a loser program and why couldn’t the football team be more like the basketball team.  Well, it’s just not that easy.

But this year brings an excitement to National Signing Day that I have never seen before.  New UK head coach Mark Stoops has the fan base excited.  He has been able to do things that many have assumed were impossible at Kentucky: he has been able to sell a lackluster program to highly ranked kids and get them to come to what many consider to be the worst football program in the SEC.  He steadily preached about a change of culture and the university has stepped up to give him unprecedented support.  And for the first time in my memory, here we are in the middle of February and there is more talk about UK football than there is about the basketball program.  (Some of that speaks to the fickleness of fans.  The basketball program is 16-6, 7-2 in SEC, and many have given them up for dead.)

Just last week, the UK football team released a You Tube video promoting signing day.  During the Super Bowl, UK football ran an ad on Lexington station WKYT showing clips of past UK greats in action and featured a voiceover of former UK receiver and new offensive coordinator, Neal Brown, saying, “Come be a hero.”  The energy was pulsating across Big Blue Nation.

And now, on National Signing Day, no one could have anticipated the kind of first signing class that Stoops was able to haul in.  Eight of the kids signed were considered 4-star players by one of the major recruiting services (Scout, Rivals, ESPN).  Three of those were ranked in the top 250 of this signing class in the nation.  To put that in perspective, they had only signed one of those kids in the top 250 of a class in the past five years.  Two of these kids were Kentucky kids who had not been likely to attend UK until Stoops and his staff came on board.  Ryan Timmons, a projected wide receiver and return specialist from Franklin Co. High School, chose Kentucky over Ohio State and Florida (where he was being recruited by Joker Phillips) and Jason Hatcher, a former USC commit from Trinity High School in Louisville, will have the opportunity to leave their mark, along the lines of Tim Couch, Andre Woodson, Craig Yeast, and Jared Lorenzen, as kids who stayed in-state and became legends at UK the past fifteen years. 

Many of these kids are going to have the opportunity to play immediately at Kentucky, which certainly has to be one of the key selling points to young recruits, but any turnaround will not come overnight.  The one thing that I see from these young men that I like is that they already seem close and they already seem to have defined leadership.  Jaleel Hytche, the young cornerback prospect out of Ohio, was one of Stoops first commitments and has waved the banner proudly for UK.  He has been aggressively talking to other prospects on Twitter encouraging them to come be a part of something special.  For the first time I can remember there has been a campaign set in motion that it may not be so bad to play at Kentucky and these recruits truly seem to believe that.  They seem to understand exactly what it is going to take to be successful at UK and are helping convince others along the way.

As excited as I am about this class, I must urge caution to Big Blue Nation.  If there is to be a turnaround for UK football, it will take these kind of classes year in and year out.  Remember, most of the same fans who are getting excited about Fall 2013 are the ones who abandoned the Cats in Fall 2012.  I admit that I am as excited as anybody about the future of the program but that excitement should be tempered with patience.  I hope that Coach Stoops will get the one thing from fans that Coach Phillips never received: unconditional support.  Check your negativity at the door; there’s no place for that if this program is to move forward.  That’s all I am asking of anyone. 

But for today, let’s just enjoy the prospects that have signed and talk them all up like they are All-Americans.  The Stoops staff has done a magnificent job of going in and getting guys from hotbeds that had previously been untapped by UK.  Stoops said when he was hired that he would concentrate on the states of Kentucky, Ohio, and Florida.  As it stands right now, he has three top players each from Kentucky and Ohio and nine from the state of Florida.  He has flipped kids from nationally prominent schools like Nebraska and USC convinced them to come to a lower tier SEC school.  Just think, if he can do that in just over two months of recruiting, what is the class of 2014 going to look like when he has a full year to get after it?