Vince Marrow filled in on the Mark Stoops Show and compared Cutter Boley to Tim Couch

Were you expecting updates from Mark Stoops tonight on the Mark Stoops Show? Us too. Instead, it was Vince Marrow chatting with Tom Leach for an hour on Monday without notice, the head coach calling it a day after his regularly scheduled game week press conference at noon ET.

Maybe he just didn’t want to answer any additional questions regarding his future after being asked if there was any truth to the speculation he would be retiring at the end of the season?

“Zero percent chance I do that,” he said earlier in the day. “Next question.”

No touching that one with a ten-foot pole tonight, clearly. A heads up on his absence would have been nice, but zero percent chance he’d do that, either.

The night wasn’t a total lost cause, though, because we got a pretty substantial player comp for a popular Wildcat who may be making his first start in Lexington against Murray State. Cutter Boley, come on down. You just got compared to arguably the greatest quarterback to ever wear the uniform, Tim Couch.

“He was very highly-recruited young man, some people said he was a five-star. He had every offer in the country, which you see with him,” Marrow said. “He has the height — he’s about 6-5 — and he has an elite arm. He’s a young man that really fits in well with this team.

“This is what you want as a quarterback. He’s going to — he has leadership capability, but I like Cutter because he just fits in and he’s driven. He comes from a very athletic family.”

There was a sequence in practice that made the Big Dog drop his jaw, Boley hitting a wide receiver on an absolute rope to the sideline. It was in that moment that Marrow felt the future may not only be bright for the blue-chip talent out of Kentucky, but the now, as well.

And you may not have to wait long to see it.

“I was watching him today in practice and he threw an out route, it was just on a dime. I’m just like, ‘Wow, this kid, his future is really going to be good, but the future may be now,'” Marrow said. “He’s playing a little bit now and I know we plan on playing him. I know Coach Stoops was saying we were going to play him in this game.”

It was eerily similar to something Big Blue Nation saw plenty of from the No. 1 pick in the 1999 NFL Draft. Couch’s son played with Boley at Lexington Christian Academy and was in the stands for every game watching the future Wildcat play.

Now he could be watching him put up numbers at his alma mater as early as Saturday.

“I’m excited because I told Tim Couch — I saw him Saturday and I said, ‘Man, Cutter kind of reminds me of a young you the way you throw the ball,'” Marrow added. “I really believe this young man really has a bright future.”

Why is there confidence in Boley’s future as a Cat? He’s got that indescribable ‘it’ factor as a quarterback. You either have it or you don’t, and he’s got it.

“You gotta have leadership, and you gotta have moxie. You gotta have that dog mentality as a quarterback,” Marrow said. “I look at Baker Mayfield, even when he was at Oklahoma, he just has that dog mentality. That’s what I see in Cutter. Cutter really — I just think he has that moxie and what you that ‘it’ factor. He rallies a lot of different nationalities. They really, really want to play for him.

“He really has it. I can’t wait to see it unleashed when he actually takes the reins.”

The early word is that Boley could be in line to start against the Racers. Is the future beginning now?