Kentucky Wildcats Football: Custis Flip a Big Deal

Yesterday Kentucky lost their first commit of the 2015 season, Georgia defensive back Montrell Custis

, when he changed his commitment to Alabama. The flip wasn’t entirely surprising, after talking to multiple recruiting experts following Kentucky’s rash of offensive line pledges Custis’ name kept coming up as the one to worry about. He was getting a lot of new prestigious offers and committed early when he didn’t have many.

Similar to the Derrick Kelly situation last year, where the staff took a commitment from an unheralded two-star who became one of the hottest commidities on the market in February, Custis is just now blowing up. It’s definitely a testament to the staff’s ability to evaluate talent and not worry about star-rankings. (Custis was a 4* on 247 and a 3* on all of the other services. Rivals rated him as a 2* when committed to the Wildcats, he bumped up a notch when Saban accepted him.) So it is most definitely a positive for those who worried about a 2* DL in Regie Meant when Kentucky had so many big names on the board or a couple of unranked offensive linemen who committed recently. Obviously this staff can evaluate and recruit talent, they come from big football backgrounds and know what a good football player looks like. It’s something that seemed to be lacking under the last staff.

Now all of that is good but the reality is that Kentucky just lost a very talented player to another SEC school. So that part is bad. It doesn’t matter if it was Alabama, whom is the top program in the country and whom the Wildcats likely will not play again during Custis’ career there. It is better that the Crimson Tide wanted to flip one of UK’s commitments and succeeded than say, if Illinois did so again. But at the end of the day, Kentucky football just suffered a blow. So it is something to be unhappy about. Mark Stoops is surely not okay with it and will likely continue to recruit Custis because this new staff doesn’t back down from anyone and that’s the only way that Kentucky football is going to be built into something that the fans, students and alumni can be proud of. The hardest part of this job is changing the culture at UK, where it’s acceptable to lose a prized player because “oh, we’re Kentucky, I mean come on” or because bandwagon basketball-only fans who root for Ohio State in football talk about how losing him was “inevitable” because he was, you know, worth signing.

That doesn’t mean riot in the streets or fill his Twitter with hateful comments like some of you do when a recruit (especially basketball) decides that another school is a better fit for his life plan. It just means that everyone needs to stop just accepting defeat on behalf of this program, the coaches aren’t going to accept it and now the roster is full of players who won’t either. Kentucky will be alright losing Custis, they have only offered every defensive back and athlete East of the Mississippi River, but it’s certainly not something to be so blaise about.