Mitch Barnhart Breaks Kentucky Football Silence with Poorly Used Three-Word Phrase

There is a phrase used around the Joe Craft Football Training Facility that needs to be removed from the Kentucky football program’s vernacular. No, they do not need a rebrand. The “Blue Collar” stuff has worked in the past and it can work again. There’s one other three-word phrase that does nothing but insult the program’s proudest supporters.

“One-year blip.”

In the middle of Kentucky’s 4-8 campaign that snapped an 8-year postseason streak, that phrase got thrown around quite a bit by folks around the program, particularly its two most prominent talking heads, Mark Stoops and Vince Marrow. Fortunately, that was nowhere to be found when Stoops spent 30 minutes speaking with the media last week. You can’t say the same thing about his boss.

Kentucky director of athletics Mitch Barnhart spoke at length with the Herald-Leader’s Jon Hale about the program’s shortcomings and the changes to correct the course this offseason. The first quote popped off the page.

“I’m confident that (Stoops) loves his place. He’s the all-time winningest coach here, and that’s saying something. There’s been a lot of people who tried hard here and couldn’t sustain it and couldn’t work at it,” Barnhart said.

“… A one-year blip is not what I would call ‘not sustaining it.’ Now, if we go two or three more, a couple more years, and we’re still not back where we want to be, sure, then you have to have a conversation about, what are we trying to get to here? And how do we do that? But he’s absolutely engaged with our guys. Staff is over there, working hard at it, and we’ve got a good group of guys coming in.”

This will be a one-year blip in season ticket sales, but for the folks spending a significant amount of money to support the program, that phrase ignores the back-slide that’s happened since the Cats won 10 games in 2021.

The schedule was teed up for Kentucky to win 11 games in 2022. They went 7-5 and lost the saddest Music City Bowl ever. Ray Davis‘ heroics salvaged some of 2023 season’s shortcomings, particularly the Top-10 win at Louisville to end the regular season.

However, Kentucky hasn’t won a power conference home game since Davis ran for 280 yards against Florida in Sept. 2023. They haven’t beaten Vandy at home since 2020 and have three straight losses to South Carolina. That’s not a “one-year blip.”

[Herald-Leader: Mitch Barnhart assesses UK Football, “We’ve got to find a way to recover.”]

Barnhart isn’t Publicly Pressuring Stoops

While I spent the last few paragraphs focusing on the “one-year blip,” the rest of the quote is even more telling.

Many Kentucky football fans were ready for Mark Stoops to pack up and move after the 2025 season, but financially, it wasn’t viable. Kentucky would have owed Stoops in the neighborhood of $40 million within 60 days of his termination, plus another $10 million to get rid of his coaching staff. That number would decrease by $9 million after the 2025 season, but as Adam Luckett has frequently pointed out, that’s not a significant difference.

In short, Mark Stoops is not operating on a hot seat this season. Facing what will likely be one of the five most difficult schedules in all of college football, regardless of the final win-loss record, Mitch Barnhart is telling fans who are eager for change to practice patience.

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