What will Kentucky Wildcats basketball work on over winter break?

Mandatory Credit: Denny Medley-USA TODAY Sports

No sooner than Mark Stoops filled one spot on his staff, another has opened up. Special teams coordinator Craig Naivar is leaving the Kentucky Wildcats staff and headed back to Texas for Houston.

"In an interview with the Cats’ Pause, Naivar said he was excited about the direction the program is going under Stoops but wanted to get back to Texas, a place where he’s coached most of his life, working as Texas State’s defensive coordinator for his three seasons before moving to Lexington. “To get back in an area that I’m really, really familiar with can help recruiting wise and all that stuff, it was just an opportunity I couldn’t say no to,” the special teams coordinator and safeties coach told the Cats’ Pause. Naivar was the primary recruiter on North Carolina defensive end Kengera Daniel and Georgia defensive end Tyrone Riley, both three-star recruits. Daniel signed his financial aid papers with UK on Wednesday and will enroll early. Stoops will now have to hire his third special teams coordinator in as many seasons. His first special teams coordinator, Bradley Dale Peveto, left UK after one season to take the same job at Louisiana State. Whoever gets the job will inherit an All-Southeastern Conference kicker in Austin MacGinnis, a veteran punter in Landon Foster and Stanley “Boom” Williams, recently named a Freshman All-American returner by the Sporting News."

Kentucky Wildcats fans are excited about the potential of Patrick Towles now that Air Raid disciple Shannon Dawson has been hired as the new offensive coordinator. Fans know that Dawson worked under Hal Mumme at two different schools, but it is interesting to know that this pairing almost never happened.

"Mumme knew Dawson as a booster’s son at Southeastern Louisiana. “We had one ball and one helmet, one little tiny office and a young lady named Amber to help us,” the former Kentucky coach recalled of his first job after leaving UK in 2001. Boosters were important as the program was being built, and one booster in particular wanted Mumme to hire his son, who had played quarterback and wide receiver at Wingate, where he also coached briefly. “The last thing in the world you want to hear from a booster is, ‘Hire my son,'” Mumme said. A few days later, Mumme got a call from Dana Holgorsen (then at Texas Tech) recommending one Shannon Dawson, who was willing to work for almost nothing and had a bright football mind. “I was very interested, took all of the information down, stuck it on my desk,” Mumme recalled. Time passed, and the booster’s son, who also happened to be a good friend of Holgorsen (from Holgorsen’s own brief stint at Wingate) was in Mumme’s doorway. At that point, Mumme knew him only as the booster’s son — not as the aspiring coach Holgorsen had recommended. “I told him all the bad stuff he’d have to do: ‘I won’t pay you for six months, you’ve got to work for free,'” Mumme recalled. “‘You have to drive me around, be my chauffeur and get my laundry, do video.’ “I basically tried to talk him out of taking the job, and when I was done, he said, ‘"