by Greg Alan Edwards
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Big Blue Nation, the picture above is a reminder of something that never should have happened at the University of Kentucky, and that haunts every Kentucky Football fan to this day.
That picture is Pat Trammell consulting with Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant on the sidelines at Alabama during their perfect season in 1961. 1961 should have been the Bear’s heyday at UK. He should have been enjoying some really great years of coaching having built a legacy at UK of great recruits and bowl victories and SEC Championships, except for a fateful day in 1952. Mark Story has a wonderful piece about that day, and the things that either happened or did not happen as a result of it. The Bear stated on that day that the University of Kentucky was going to recruit only in-state players. Something ring familiar to some of you who claim that Kentucky does not recruit enough local talent? Bryant claimed that the idea was solely his. No one influenced him and no one else was to blame. Yeah, right. Bryant had built Kentucky on talent from all over the northeast and central United States, and had the program moving exactly where it should go. Kentucky was on the fast track to becoming the first mega sports University. The football team had been to three straight bowls (back when that meant something),won the last two, gotten their first (and only) SEC Championship, and was poised to start making themselves the premier SEC Football team. Adolph Rupp was already making the Basketball Cats into a legendary power, and in spite of the point shaving scandal that was about to happen, the University of Kentucky had in 6 years won 4 basketball championships, and in football won 2 out of three bowl games. We were the Florida of the late 40’s and early 50’s.
What led Bryant to make that move? There was a boatload of speculation on the part of a lot of people that there was a serious power struggle between Bryant and Rupp. Rupp was king of Kentucky and he did not want anyone playing in his sandbox. I was not around in those days, so I cannot claim first hand knowledge of what went on at UK, and I am not going to speculate, not even to the point that Mark does in his article.
What I am going to talk about is the downward spiral that has occurred at UK ever since. While the Basketball program has gone on to heights matched only by UCLA, the football program has labored and toiled under the boot heels of almost every other SEC team for the last 50+ years. We have had one failed coach after another, suffered through flashes of brilliance amongst decades of darkness, and through it all have begged for the Football program to step out from under the shadow of Big Brother over in Rupp Arena.
I hear people constantly talking about not recruiting enough “local boys”. How we have such great talent in Kentucky that gets overlooked as we search through every other state and a lot of foreign countries for the next great player at every position. Bryant’s “Folly” as I am going to call it, or “curse” as some others have referred to it as, has placed UK in the cellar of the SEC for as long as most of us can remember. And barring a miracle by Coach Joker Phillips and his staff and players, we will make no more than a scratch on the surface of the problem now, because we are mired in the SEC, where as everyone knows Football is king, and we have three of the greatest schools in the land sitting on our heads. Let’s face it, 4th place in the SEC East could easily translate into 1st place in a lot of conferences, but here it gets us the Music City Bowl every year.
Is this Bryant’s fault? I don’t have any idea.The school could have demanded that Bryant change the policy, if the school wanted it changed. By the time the change was made, it was just too late. I don’t know why anyone would want us to lag behind so much for so long, and would want us to be the cellar dwelling joke of the conference for so many years. Oh, we had moments where we dragged ourselves up by the bootstraps and changed things for short periods of time, but they were either followed by incredible downfalls of an NCAA nature, or just instability which prevented sustained success. So, should we simply roll over and let Bryant’s decision control the UK football program for the rest of the foreseeable future? Well, Rich Brooks didn’t think so. And I don’t believe that Joker Phillips does either. The real question is here, does the University of Kentucky, and it’s psychotically basketball dependent fan base really want the UK Football program to become successful?
The answer is yes, but. Yeah, I know, never end a sentence in a preposition. The experts say we cannot recruit in Florida and Ohio and other areas where these 5 star and 4 star athletes play high school ball. Tell that to the kids we have here now. We have more higher rated players at UK now than at any time since the early 50’s, when there were no ratings. We can make this push if the support continues to flow into UK from all areas. Joker has got to keep the pressure on every school in the SEC for every top flight prospect out there.
We need the push in football right now that we have in basketball. I want to see a picture of the NFL draft and it’s results that looks like the one pictured above. What we do not need is to stop going to every corner of every state and every country to bring in the top flight athletes we need to make UK Football the success it can be. Make no mistake, we are as able to make this happen as we are anything else at UK. We do the impossible here. We make things happen here that cannot happen other places because we are Kentucky. Let’s find a way to make Joker Phillips and his “Operation Win” the next step in the evolution of this program and bring it back to where it belongs. Atop the greatest conference in all the land.
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