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?

In a Stoop-or

The inevitable came on November 4th when University of Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart released an open letter to fans announcing that after three seasons, Joker Phillips was going to be let go as head football coach.  I was one of the last Joker supporters left standing at that point and up until the announcement was made, I was hopeful that the passionate UK alum could get things turned around at his alma mater.  But even Ray Charles could see what was coming when less than 20,000 people rolled through the gates of Commonwealth Stadium to watch the Wildcats get completely obliterated by the Vanderbilt Commodores for the second consecutive season.  Even though I knew it was coming, I was still not thrilled with the prospects of watching my beloved Cats start a coaching search that I was not convinced would land someone that could truly excite the fan base (a fan base that at times is so misguided that they actually think UK is dream job for elite  coaches).

Well, twenty-three days after the process began, color me stunned and amazed.  The much (mostly unfairly) maligned Barnhart was able to pull off the coup.  By getting Mark Stoops to come to Kentucky, the UK AD was able to get one of the most sought after coaching commodities to commit to Big Blue Nation and the best part of the whole matter is that Stoops approached Barnhart about the job and presented a plan for why and how the Wildcats could win consistently in the brutal SEC.  Yes, the coordinator of the #2 defense in the nation wanted to come to the Bluegrass!  How amazing is that? 

As a lifelong fan of UK football, I could not be more excited about the hire.  While Stoops does not meet some of the criteria that I would have thought essential in the new coach (he has no head coaching or SEC experience),  he more than makes up for it with his resume.  Here are five reasons that I believe that Stoops has the potential to be the perfect fit for the UK football program.

1) He wants to be in Lexington.  As mentioned earlier, he approached Barnhart about the job and he did so with a PLAN.  If he holds true to his brothers' style (brother Bob is the head coach at Oklahoma and brother Mike was the former head coach at Arizona and now is Bob's D-Coordinator) he will be a defensive coach who brings in a talented offensive coordinator with an explosive offense.  The cupboard is not bare at UK like it was in 2002 when Rich Brooks came to town.  The Cats return three QBs with playing experience, a stable of four experienced running backs, and a bevy of nice young receivers.  The rumors that keep swirling is that UK alum and current OC at Texas Tech, Neal Brown, may possibly return to his roots and orchestrate Stoops's offense.

2) He is a defensive coach.  This was very high on my lists of musts (not that Mitch contacted me and asked for my opinion in the matter) but I think it is imperative for the Cats to improve their defense in order to have any kind of success in the treacherous SEC waters.  Stoops, like his brothers (and even his mother if you ask former UK signal caller, Dusty Bonner), has proven that he knows how to orchestrate a defense.  He improved a terrible defense at Arizona when he was brother Mike's DC and turned Florida State's atrocious defense from a laughing stock to the second best in the nation (on paper).  His defensive units are also known for forcing turnovers , which a team like Kentucky must have in order to compete with the elite in the conference. 

3) He has ties all over the country and may be able to tap into some new recruiting markets that have not been open to the Wildcats in the past.  Stoops was born in the football savvy city of Youngstown, Ohio and played his college ball in the Big 10 at Iowa.  He went on to have assistant coaching stints at South Florida, Wyoming, and Houston before landing on Larry Coker's staff at Miami in 2001.  In his three years at the U coaching defensive backs, Stoops was able to win a national championship in 2001 and play for another the following year.  From there, he moved on to Arizona when his brother, Mike, was hired and became a D-coordinator for the first time.  After the 2009 season, he moved on to Tallahassee where he has helped rebuild the Seminoles into a contender.  The point of all of this is that he has ties to certain hotbeds in the recruiting world.  He may be able to get players out of Florida, Ohio, Texas, and the west coast that otherwise never would have considered coming to Kentucky.  He has a reputation as a tireless recruiter which should pay dividends.

4)He has a championship ring.  As mentioned in the previous section, he was the DB coach when Miami won the National Championship in 2001.  He is used to the spotlight and having expectations.  While he has never coached a full season in the SEC, he has a winning record as a coordinator against the SEC (3-1) and his defenses have only allowed 17 points per game and 317 yards per game (two of those wins coming against Florida).  In other words, while he may not have head coaching experience like fellow candidates for the job Mike MacIntyre, Gary Andersen, or Butch Jones, he has coached at high profile universities in high profile games and that means something.

5) He's not Bobby Petrino.  Nuff said.

And for those who were dogging Mitch Barnhart for doing his job in a professional manner and not listening to the rabid fan base, he once again has proven his worth to the university.  While only time will tell if Stoops is a homerun, keep in mind that most rallies are started  not by hitting a long ball but by getting runners on base and getting them over.  So if he isn't a homerun (which can sometimes be a rally killer), maybe he will be a rally starter, which in the long run may prove to be even better.