Vince Marrow Speaks with KSR Following Louisville Rumors and "Come to Jesus" Staff Meeting

Sunday night was eventful on KSBoard. Kentucky football fans spent the night following scuttlebutt that Vince Marrow was in talks with Louisville to take a similar position on Jeff Brohm’s staff. On Monday morning, Matt Jones asked the Kentucky associate head coach about those rumors on Kentucky Sports Radio.

“Well, I’m not going to comment on that, because when you hear rumors, unless you take a job or you put out that you’re taking a job, it’s just rumors. And you know, I’m here,” he said.

“We were working all day yesterday, all through the night. Usually after the season is over, you go home and you may just come in the office for a couple hours. I mean, we were in there till about nine or 10 o’clock, (Mark) Stoops and everybody, just getting this roster together. And it’s kind of like getting ready for the NFL Draft coming up with signing day and the portal, just making sure we doing the right things and doing good background checks on people that we’re gonna go after. That’s what we were doing all day yesterday.”

Later in the interview, Matt asked Marrow to confirm that he expects to be in Lexington next year. After a brief pause, Marrow responded, “Yes. Yep. Yes.”

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More on the “Come to Jesus” Kentucky Football Meeting

In addition to the Louisville stuff, Marrow was dealing with his own recruiting issues on Sunday. Two of his targets, OL Tucker Kattus and RB Marquise Davis, flipped to Clemson and Missouri, respectively. Despite the losses, Marrow believes they aren’t done adding to this class. He expects more commitments before Wednesday’s signing day.

Personnel decisions were a big part of Sunday’s meeting with Mark Stoops’ Kentucky coaching staff. After spending most of the day deliberating, Marrow believes the Cats have a sound plan ahead of the December chaos.

“I think we get back on the right track of, you know, regrouping. We had a come to Jesus meeting yesterday with the whole staff,” said Marrow. “We sat down and talked about personnel, talked about coaching, talked about support staff. I think Mark is in the right place of how he’s starting this thing, and I feel really good where it’s going to go.”

Kentucky missed on its 2024 transfer portal class. They’re relying on the portal to fix many of these issues and that meeting was used to chart a path to make sure they don’t make those same mistakes twice.

“I think with this new portal era, you got to treat it like the NFL. In the NFL, they just don’t just go and draft the guy without doing background checks. Investigators go in to see who this kid is and what type of his makeup is. And I just think, this is the most people we took in the portal last year and I think we’re learning from this,” said Marrow.

“There’s gonna be a thorough background search and knowing who we getting, and seeing anybody had connections to this kid. It just ain’t gonna be a free fall that says, ‘Hey, you got some guys in this portal. You just bringing them in,’ because it ain’t just us. I can look at other schools who bought in more guys in the portal, and it killed their culture. And this is just me talking. I just think you got to do your homework. You have to bring in the right guys and mix them in with the guys we recruited from high school, who are guys that know what our culture is, and you bring in leaders. Whether it’s guys who’s already in our program, or guys that you see in the NFL, that they bring in high character guys that also can play. I think that’s a big combination of everything.”