Kentucky Wildcats Football: Five hurdles for Stoops and his staff
By Kyle
Right now the Kentucky football program is riding an all-time high. Head coach Mark Stoops injected a new shot of adrenaline into the fanbase when hired, the new coaches assembled one of the top recruiting classes the school has ever seen for 2013, the spring game was a huge success, and Kentucky is currently in the top 15 recruiting classes nationally for 2014. Things really couldn’t get much better right now.
However…
Let’s not kid ourselves. Joker Phillips and company did not leave the program in the best shape and many fans have already forgotten that the 2012 season ended with a 2-10 record. Mark Stoops and his staff will have some hurdles to overcome early on, and these are the five biggest…in my opinion.
#5 – THE QUARTERBACKS
Whether you adore the signal caller position or think quarterbacks are red jersey-wearing sissies, everyone can agree that the position is crucial to an offenses’ success. It appears that Neal Brown has his quarterback of the future in rising high school senior Drew Barker, but he won’t be on the roster until after the 2013 season’s completion. The sophomore trio of Maxwell Smith, Jalen Whitlow, and Patrick Towles duked it out for the starting quarterback job this spring, but a clear-cut leader did not emerge. The staff will continue the competition into camp where they will hope to name a starter early on. The smart money is on Smith winning out, but Whitlow seriously outperformed expectations in the spring and brings an added dynamic to the position. Towles probably has the most natural talent of the bunch, but has yet to put it all together. Regardless of who the starter is, the staff needs to square away the position so that the offense can be built around the skill-set of a single player. The three contenders are just too different from one another for coach Brown to be able to simply plug someone in. Figuring out the quarterback position as early as possible will be crucial to the team’s success in 2013.
#4 – THE WIDE RECEIVER POSITION
Things could be worse at receiver. I’m not exactly sure how, but I’m positive they could be worse. Currently, Demarco Robinson, Daryl Collins, Rashad Cunningham, A.J. Legree, Bookie Cobbins, and Demarcus Sweat are the teams only scholarship receivers. While six returning players might seem like enough, it’s not as peachy as it might appear. Robinson has struggled to get open against SEC competition in his first two seasons and Collins has fought injuries in both of his years at UK, even being forced to sit out his freshman season. Legree and Sweat will both be true sophomores and both played sparingly last season. Cunningham and Bookie were completely non-factors last year and neither has ever caught a pass in a college game. Add to all that that Sweat and Cobbins have both experienced well documented academic struggles and neither is a guarantee to even be on the roster in 2013. Adding incoming freshmen Jeff Badet, Ryan Timmons, and Alexander Montgomery will help and junior college transfer Javess Blue will be counted on to contribute from day one, but the reality is that Kentucky may very well be attempting to run an air-raid offense with only eight scholarship receivers in the 2013 season. On top of that, four of them will be members of the most recent signing class.
#3 – FAN EXPECTATIONS
Whether it’s right or wrong, fans are at an all-time high. So much is going right for UK football right now that it is sometimes hard to remember how bad the team was just six shirt mints ago. Stoops and his staff will have to manage the unrealistic expectations many fans have while navigating the #1 toughest schedule in the country. There has been message board talk of eight wins this fall and that just probably isn’t plausible. Luckily, most reasonable fans have set the bar somewhere between four and six wins in 2013 and are readily going to offer the year up as a rebuilding project. A victory over Western Kentucky in week 1 would help kick things off in the right direction and a victory over Louisville would be enough for most fans in 2013.
#2 – RECRUITING
Many will wonder why recruiting would be so high on the list when this is an apparent strong suit of the new staff. I would remind those fans that it is still only the first week of June AND that the class is only half full at this point. The two battles that Stoops and his staff have ahead of them are finishing out the class strong, and keeping all these highly regarded players in the fold, with an emphasis on the latter part. Kentucky fans are not accustomed to receiving four-star players commitments in the spring and summer but will find that those highly regarded players are tough to keep ahold of as signing day nears. The nucleus of the class appears to be solid to Kentucky, but things could change if the season doesn’t go well. Honestly, this will probably be Kentucky’s highest rated class ever even if the Cats go 0-12, but anticipating the decisions of 17-18 year old kids is always tough to do.
#1 – BEING “THE MAN”
It’s hard to believe, but Stoops has never been a head coach before. He’s done most everything right early on, but this fall will be his first experience calling the shots. How will he balance recruiting and game preparation? How will the depth chart change when injuries occur? How will he prepare his team for different opponents? All are questions that no one can really answer at this point and Stoops will have his organizational abilities tested to the max this fall. Luckily, his schedule breaks down into halves. The first half features two probable wins (WKU & Miami) and five straight probable losses in games against teams that are likely to be ranked in the top 25 (Louisville, Florida, S. Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi State). The back half of the schedule will be much more manageable and will be the difference between a 2-3 win season and a 6-7 win season. The buck will stop with Stoops though and he has a monster of a task ahead of him.
Don’t let this article get you down though. Things are going as right as they possibly could for UK right now and everyone is riding the momentum. There will be speed umps in the way though, and the more prepared fans are for them, the easier they will be to deal with.