Deone Walker stayed at Kentucky because Mark Stoops stayed at Kentucky

Had things gone a little differently last Thanksgiving weekend, Deone Walker might not be wearing Kentucky blue this season. Yesterday at SEC Media Days, Kentucky’s star defensive lineman opened up about the interest he received from other schools last year, particularly in the hours it seemed that Mark Stoops might be headed to Texas A&M on Nov. 25.

“After our Louisville game, a bunch of that talk was being made,” Walker told On3’s Andy Staples of schools reaching out to recruit him when the reports of Stoops going to A&M broke. “I actually called him, crying to him like, ‘Coach, if you’re going to leave, just tell me. Let me know now.’ But he said that he was going to stay loyal to me, stay loyal to the university, so I had to do that for him.”

If Walker had decided to leave Kentucky, he would have been one of the most coveted players in the transfer portal. At 6’8″, 360 lbs., Walker is an offensive line’s nightmare. As a sophomore, he totaled 51 tackles, 10.5 tackles for loss, 5.5 sacks, 8 quarterback hurries, and 2 pass breakups, one of which led to an interception. He was named First Team All-SEC by the Associated Press and will likely be named Preseason All-SEC by the league’s media later this morning. Walker probably had NIL offers for huge sums, but his loyalty to Mark Stoops won out.

“It’s great,” Walker said of playing for Stoops at Kentucky. “I wouldn’t have chosen anywhere else, or anybody else. Coach Stoops, he’s a great person. He’s a family person. He’s not just a great coach but you can tell he has all the right morals too. He’s a loyal person and he’s going to reward hard work over everything.”

When asked yesterday by a Texas reporter, Stoops acknowledged the interest from Texas A&M last year but declined to go into details.

“I was pursued pretty aggressively by them and we’ll just leave it at that out of respect for everybody involved,” Stoops said on the main stage. “There’s a lot of people over the years and a lot of interactions between people but it was very brief. I was pursued. I had a job to do.”

Once the dust settled on the drama in early December, Stoops shared his side of the phone call with Walker — or rather, one “very big, large human.”

“I was getting calls by some of those guys Saturday night and I assured them from the first phone call, one very big, large human in particular,” Stoops said in his postseason press conference. “I said, I am coming back, and he said, ‘Coach,’ and I said, ‘I am coming back.’ So, early on Saturday when that first started floating, I made sure to hold down the big man and tell him that I was definitely coming back and that he needed to come back.”

Thank goodness he did because he’s a game-changer for Kentucky’s defense. Walker told Staples how he’s preparing for his junior season — lots of bear crawls — and more below. Check it out, and head over to the KSR YouTube Channel for more from Walker, D’Eryk Jackson, and Marques Cox in Dallas.