Kentucky now has more than ever riding on Mark Stoops making UK football a success

In recent seasons, the Big 12 has, arguably, been the best basketball conference in major-college sports.

Baylor is the reigning NCAA men’s basketball champion.

Two years ago, Texas Tech was in overtime in the national title game.

Kansas long has been and remains one of the iconic men’s college hoops programs in the history of the sport.

Yet since the Big 12’s two major football brands Oklahoma and Texas announced they will be leaving the league to join the Southeastern Conference, we have seen what all that left-behind basketball prowess counts for in the high-stakes game of college sports musical chairs:

Zip, zilch, zero.

Even in college-hoops obsessed Kentucky, there are implications from an athletics world in which the worth of a university to its conference is directly proportional to the value its football program brings to its league.

So even though Mark Stoops ($4.85 million) is slated to make $3.15 million less than John Calipari ($8.1 million) during the 2021-22 school year, there is a case to be made that the Kentucky football coach now has the most impactful sports job on campus.

Across the decades, one thing that has made the Southeastern Conference successful is that, in terms of league financial payouts, all schools are essentially treated equally.

That means that the universities whose football programs do not bring bring great value to the SEC essentially reap the same financial bounty that pigskin heavyweights Alabama, LSU, Florida and Georgia et al. ... receive.

Maybe it will always be that way in the SEC.

But what if the survival of the fittest ethos that underlies major-college sports realignment leads, at some future point, to the SEC’s football “haves” winnowing out the schools whose pigskin programs are not seen as adding similar financial value?

Averting the latter scenario costing UK its standing in the SEC is why it behooves Kentucky to continue to take steps to elevate its football program.

On Friday, UK football will host its annual “Media Day.” Stoops and troops will preview what shapes up as an unusually consequential and interesting season for the Wildcats.

Under Stoops, Kentucky football has already made a substantial climb. Two games into his fourth season as Kentucky head coach in 2016, Stoops stood 12-26 as top Cat, a woeful 4-21 in the SEC.

Since that point, Stoops has led UK to one of the better five-year stretches in its star-crossed football history.

Starting with the third game of 2016, Stoops and Kentucky have subsequently gone 37-24, 20-21 in SEC games. The Cats have played in five straight bowls and, over the past three seasons, earned postseason victories over No. 12 Penn State, traditional football “name” Virginia Tech and No. 23 North Carolina State, respectively.

Against league rivals, UK will begin the 2021 season having beaten South Carolina six out of seven; Vanderbilt six out of seven; Missouri five out of six; Mississippi State three out of five; and Tennessee two out of four.

Simply put, Stoops has built Kentucky from its traditional perch near the bottom of the SEC football hierarchy solidly into the middle of the league — which is not a small achievement.

Yet as good a job as Stoops has done at UK, the Cats have not yet been able to puncture the SEC’s upper tier.

Against the SEC East’s two dominant programs, Stoops is 1-7 vs. Florida and 0-8 against Georgia. Versus cross-division opponents from the perceived stronger SEC West, Stoops is 1-9 against foes other than Mississippi State.

To keep progressing, Kentucky needs to produce more years like 2018, when an upset of No. 25 Florida in The Swamp in the second game of the year ignited a 10-3 season.

Whether 2021 can yield another such breakthrough for UK football seems to largely turn on three questions:

1. Can Liam Coen, the 35-year-old, ex-Los Angeles Rams assistant that Stoops hired as offensive coordinator to reinvigorate a dormant UK passing game, get the job done? Coen’s charge is to build an aerial attack on top of what has consistently been in recent years a powerful Kentucky rushing game.

2. Will Kentucky find a proficient passing quarterback from among transfers Joey Gatewood (Auburn) and Will Levis (Penn State) — each of whom was used as a situational-running QB at their previous stops?

3. After Kentucky saw NFL teams draft two of its starting defensive linemen; its playmaking middle linebacker; and the Cats’ two starting cornerbacks, has Stoops built the UK program to a level that so much proven performance lost on one side of the ball can be adequately replaced in one season?

Given the football-centric dynamic that continues to reshape major-college sports, what is not in question is that Kentucky now has more than ever riding on Mark Stoops and his ability to build the pigskin Wildcats into a program that contributes value in the SEC.