The reality in college football today is, when it comes to getting to a bowl, a team really only has to win about 2 or 3 competitive games to get to 6 wins. Every team starts the season with 3 or 4 games that should be automatic wins due to weak opponents. We have ODU, Akron, Vandy and Wofford that should be 4 automatic wins. The win over UK gives us 5 wins so we only need one more win to be bowl eligible. There are so many bowl games now that more than half of FBS teams play in a bowl every year. This is why being bowl eligible means very little as a barometer of whether or not a team is "good". Conversely, NOT being bowl eligible is a clear indicator that a team in not good.I really can't see Kentucky dismissing Stoops. He's their all-time winningest coach. He's responsible for 8 of their 21 total bowl appearances. They are on a streak of 8 straight bowl appearances, which is by far the longest in their history. He's responsible for 4 of their 10 total bowl wins. Kentucky has had four seasons of 10 or more wins, and Stoops has 2 of them. He's posted 7 winning seasons out of the 11 that he's been there. Only 1 losing season in the last 8.
In short, he has done at UK what we are shooting for here: become a fairly reliable 7-8 win team, with the occasional 9-win type season.
I'm sure they are all frustrated after our loss since they were likely hoping for something like a 9-win type season this year, and that seems more of a longshot now, but his overall resume there is just way too strong for them to think about dismissing him. He's proven he's going to get them to a bowl game just about ever year, which for programs like us and them, is really the most you can ask.
I think flirting with A&M last year would make it easier to fire him if he has a very bad year.
Yeah, maybe our fans should view this as a cautionary tale. A lot of people here are sky high and that is a prime setup for crushing disappointment.Possibly. However, the bottom line question for UK is this: what are the odds that anyone else can come in and do as well or better? The answer, in reality? Pretty slim. Coaching hires are a major crapshoot. What they know is they have a guy who is pretty reliably going to get them to a bowl game each year and will occasionally have a really good 9+ win type of season. I don't know how much the A&M thing really hurts him. Maybe it does, but surely UK fans have to realize the draw of going from coaching at a school that doesn't care about football (I mean, really care) to coaching big time Texas football. If they knock off one of the upper tier SEC teams on their schedule this year, the fans will settle down.
UK fans are basically where our fans were for the last week. Questioning the meaning of life after a really bad game. Reality is, they simply got their hopes way too high after a beatdown of a terrible Southern Miss team.
Yeah, maybe our fans should view this as a cautionary tale. A lot of people here are sky high and that is a prime setup for crushing disappointment.
UK might have been justifiably looking past us to Georgia and the game got away from them. Looking at the game stats, we didn't really dominate as much as the score would suggest. We had 86 rushing yards and 166 passing yards, neither of those numbers are anything to crow about. UK had 139 rushing yards. They only had 44 passing yards and Vandagriff showed why Georgia let him go without much thought and why he couldn't beat out anyone in front of him at Georgia. While that isn't some huge rushing number, it suggests our DL isn't as elite as some think it might be. I can guarantee LSU has more talent than UK and while they don't look like 2019 LSU, they will be tough.
That 4th and 1 penalty was probably one of the stupidest penalties I've seen. It was obvious the ball wasn't going to be snapped.True. The box score itself does not reveal a dominant effort. UK had 13 first downs, same as us. We did hold them to 183 total yards (but only had 252 ourselves). They had a 5-minute edge in the time of possession. Two turnovers to our 1.
We were only 3/10 on 3rd downs and 2 of those conversions were on total busts by UK.
UK really killed themselves with penalties, some of which can obviously be attributed our DL, as they were reduced to holding our DL to try keeping us back. Probably the most pivotal penalty though, was our successful attempt to draw UK offside on 4th and 1. That led to a TD and the game spiraled from there for UK. That's just a dumb dumb penalty.
But, yes, LSU is much stronger across the board than UK, so while I loved the win, I'm taking it with a grain of salt in terms of what it means for LSU.