This brutal Kentucky TV stat is another reason to be furious with Mark Stoops

Not that any Kentucky fan needed more reason to be frustrated with how the football program is tanking, but there's another one. Kentucky is one of the most-watched football programs on TV. In the entire nation! According to Nielson viewership ratings, Kentucky is the ninth-best program in terms of viewership for football. They are a top-10 program in households tuning in, and yet they are abysmal on the field.

Here's the list:

This feels like a game of: "Which of these is not like the others?" There is only one program in that top 10 that had a losing season. The only others that even came close are Florida and Michigan, which both ended the year at 7-5. Kentucky on the other hand, had one conference win and yet still pulled 4.5 million viewers.

Big Blue Nation is starved for good football, and it continues to be denied to them. Kentucky is in the top 10 in two embarrassing football statistics: highest-paid coach and TV viewership. And the only reason that is embarrassing is because the team is bad. BBN could be proud of those stats if they were great or even moderately good. Yet, Kentucky pays a lot of money to lose and has a lot of people watching the Wildcats lose. It's not good.

Not only is it consumers watching on TV, Kentucky had no problem selling tickets to games. Sure, by the end of the season the attendance dropped off for the home games, but at the beginning of the year the stadium looked like this:

And like this:

What makes matters worse is that Kentucky is also in the top 20 in NIL estimations for football. Some donors intentionally send more money to basketball than football. Imagine if they had more faith that the football program wouldn't waste their money.

Kentucky athletics needs to wake up to the reality that they have the potential, the NIL, and the fanbase to be really good. Don't lose the window and the fanbase with a poor product year after year.