On a map, Oregon and Kentucky might as well live on different planets. One is Pacific Northwest rain and neon uniforms, the other is bluegrass, bourbon and Kroger Field Saturdays.
But if you start tracing coaching careers, facilities and even player movement, you find something weirdly consistent: Oregon football keeps popping up at some of Kentucky football’s most important turning points since 2000.
It started with Rich Brooks. Now it’s Will Stein. And the Duck-Cat connection is suddenly one of the more fascinating cross-country ties in college football.
Rich Brooks: The original bridge
Rich Brooks is the thread that first stitched these two programs together.
He took over Oregon in 1977 and spent 18 seasons dragging the Ducks out of irrelevance, ultimately winning a Pac-10 title and leading them to the 1995 Rose Bowl. The impact was big enough that Oregon literally put his name on the field at Autzen Stadium, Rich Brooks Field.
Fast forward to 2003, and Brooks pops up in Lexington, inheriting a Kentucky program dealing with probation and malaise. The record (39–47) doesn’t fully capture what he did: four straight bowl games from 2006–09 and a level of stability that hadn’t existed since the 1950s. He brought them to respectability on a shoestring budget. Papaw did some work.
Kentucky eventually honored him the same way Oregon did. The indoor practice field inside the renovated Nutter Field House is now named Rich and Karen Brooks Field, a nod to the coach who helped modernize the program.
Two schools. Two fields. One coach. Brooks is literally written into the turf at both places.
How Rich Brooks and Will Stein connect Oregon football to Kentucky football
Brooks built the bridge. Will Stein is now sprinting across it.
In December 2025, Kentucky fired Mark Stoops and hired Oregon offensive coordinator Will Stein as its new head coach, bringing home a Louisville native whose dad played defensive end for the Wildcats and who grew up watching UK play.
Stein arrives with a fast, efficient, quarterback-friendly offense that just helped send Bo Nix and Dillon Gabriel, and Dante Moore into the national spotlight and Heisman contention. And he’s doing it while finishing Oregon’s College Football Playoff run.
The Oregon fingerprints don’t stop with the playbook:
Staff and infrastructure: Stein is expected to lean on people he worked with in Eugene, from recruiting and personnel voices like Pat Biondo to potential defensive staff members. That means Kentucky’s roster management and scouting processes will look a lot more like what worked for the Ducks.
Players: There’s already been crossover in the portal. Ashton Cozart and Dante Dowdell have bounced through Oregon-related stops before landing at Kentucky, and Stein’s presence only makes that pipeline more logical going forward. Austin Novosad is a name to watch here.
Spring-game mentality: Stein has talked about importing Oregon’s spring game model, an actual, physical scrimmage with fan-friendly touches, to Lexington. It’s a small thing until you remember Kentucky has often treated spring like a glorified walkthrough.
Then there’s the symbolism. Brooks, the coach who laid foundations at both places, has been spotted back in Eugene on spring game weekends, standing on the field that bears his name and chatting with Stein. The two have known each other for years, a mentorship that now has a very literal Kentucky chapter.
Add in the financial side and the picture sharpens. Kentucky just extended its multimedia rights deal with JMI Sports through 2040, a agreement projected at more than $465 million and structured to give UK more flexibility and revenue share to invest in football facilities, staff and NIL support. That’s the kind of infrastructure you need if you’re going to hire an Oregon play-caller and say, “go build that here.”
The programs have still never played each other in football. There’s no on-field rivalry to point to. Instead, the connection lives in the people and the projects that reshaped both places, a coach whose name is on two fields and a new hire whose Oregon playbook is now the blueprint in Lexington.
For Kentucky fans, that’s the real intrigue of the Duck-Cat connection. If Brooks gave the Wildcats credibility, Stein has a chance to give them something else: a modern, Oregon-flavored path to actually chasing the SEC’s big boys.