'Fix that culture': Change is inevitable for Kentucky this offseason

A brutal football season finally came to an end on Saturday afternoon at Kroger Field. After addressing what is coming in December for weeks, Mark Stoops and the Kentucky football program can finally close the book on a highly disappointing 2024 campaign after allowing Louisville to rush for over 300 yards in a 41-14 defeat on Senior Day.

A roster overhaul is needed at the Joe Craft Football Training Facility. A culture reset is also needed. Stoops and his coaching staff have a long list of offseason needs to check. That work officially begins in a staff meeting on Sunday.

“I feel like we have a good plan to move forward here. There will be a lot of moving pieces in the next two, three, four weeks and we’ll get it fixed,” Stoops said. “And that excites me and motivates me.”

“We gotta go back to being who we are and we gotta be very tough and very disciplined and very fundamental. We weren’t always that this year.”

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Why wasn’t Kentucky the blue-collar, hard-nosed football team that they want to be every year? Likely because there was a lack of accountability behind closed doors and that rocked the foundation of this program’s culture.

“In this year we didn’t do a good enough job in any area. There’s just no ways around it. We failed in that area,” Stoops explained. “We didn’t have the discipline that we needed. We didn’t play as good as we needed to. Every level needs to improve. Accountability needs to happen.”

“It’s just not good enough. It’s not like we don’t know how to do it. We gotta have good players. We gotta have good coaches. We gotta all do our part.’

The Kentucky head coach doubled-down on his future during postgame comments to Tom Leach. Mark Stoops has a plan. Will that plan work? There will be new players from the transfer portal joining the program in the offseason, but there will also be some returning players who will be asked to reset the broken culture in Lexington.

“If they stay here, they better get ready to go to work to fix that culture that we’re talking about, and make sure we get back to being who we are,” Stoops said. “And that is a tough, disciplined football team.”

Kentucky’s top goal this offseason will be to fix this program’s culture. That will have to happen with a lot of transfers. Is that possible? The only thing that is guaranteed is a lot of personnel movement.

“There’s going to see some change,” the Kentucky head coach said. “There needs to be some change. Clearly.”