Kentucky Wildcats Football: Coordinator Search Not Simple

No sooner had the Kentucky Wildcats football team completed their gut-wrenching season finale loss to bitter rival Louisville than news broke that offensive coordinator Neal Brown had accepted the head coaching position at Troy University. It was a double whammy loss for the program that missed out on bowl eligibility by inches. Make no mistake, Brown is a loss, whether you think that you know more football than he does or not. He is a relentless recruiter and a bright innovative young coaching mind. He is a guy that UK likely never gets as offensive coordinator if he wasn’t  an alum and lifelong fan. So you can drop the notions that Brown moving on is a good thing.

But Brown is gone, so the nature of fans is to look forward to and speculate about the next guy. There’s nothing wrong with that, just because losing Brown is bad doesn’t mean that the new guy won’t be good or better. Mark Stoops has deep connections in the coaching community and the list of candidates is already long.

Early indications from sources indicate that Stoops would like to find someone who he has coached with before or perhaps is familiar with via his Youngstown connections. That is where James Coley and Eddie Gran’s name immediately surfaced. Coley, currently the OC at Miami, was on Stoops’ short list when he got hired and is a dynamo in South Florida recruiting. But Coley runs more of a pro-style offense, similar to what Joker Phillips ran when he was UK’s playcaller. There was chatter once upon a time that Stoops was pushed in the Neal Brown/Air Raid direction when he was hired in an effort to reenergize the fan base.

I have no clue if there is any truth to that rumor. But Stoops reportedly wants to stick to a similar offensive system now, so Coley is likely out. That would also disqualify Nebraska’s Tim Beck, who operates a run-oriented scheme. Gran is still very much in play here. His offense at Cincinnati operates much like the Spread which incorporates Air Raid concepts. It is certainly more vertical than Neal Brown’s. Gran was also a good recruiter at Florida State, although he hasn’t gotten direct credit for many recruits at UC.

It’s no secret that a certain site is championing East Carolina’s Lincoln Riley as Brown’s replacement, and he is a candidate, but doesn’t fit the criteria of being familiar to Stoops. Riley has coached one of the top passing attacks and top quarterbacks in the country in Shane Carden and the Pirates were ranked briefly this season. Riley is definitely one of the hot up and comers in college football and would keep the offense practically intact. The vision would be easy to sell to recruits and one would expect that such a young coach would be relatable for recruits.

Then there is the darkhorse, MSU’s Chris Hatcher, an old-school Air Raid disciple who has deep connections in the state of Kentucky, Brown’s former recruiting grounds. He sees to have Tim Couch’s blessing and is the last relic left to connect fans to Hal Mumme. The truth is that Kentucky needs to get as much distance from Mummeball as possible for future success and while Couch has been valuable in his contributions to the program, he has earned no input on Mark Stoops’ staffing decisions. Hatcher would seem a last-ditch effort.

And then there is the real dark horse. During the first round of Mark Stoops filling his staff there were several surprises than no one saw coming outside of Brown and DJ Eliot. We saw the same last year with Craig Naivar. There is a pretty good chance that we won’t have considered Kentucky’s new coordinator until the name pops up in seven days.