LEXINGTON — Kentucky football can’t afford another bad year without making a change at head coach.
Coach Mark Stoops has had the most successful tenure in program history. He’s raised the expectations and established a standard for what UK can be.
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But after a 4-8 record last season and, on paper, a schedule in which they may only be favored in four games this season, the Cats are in danger of losing all the momentum Stoops built in his run to eight straight bowl games.
The tipping point is going to be defining what bad is to Kentucky athletics director Mitch Barnhart, who spoke to reporters Friday in essentially his state of athletics address ahead of the Wildcats’ football media day.
A losing season on the surface is not good, but in and of itself, may not be all it takes to facilitate a head coaching change.
“I’m not going to sit here and say it’s this number of wins, it’s this number of things,” Barnhart said. “We’re not, not doing that. I’ve never done that, and so I’m not going to start doing that now.”
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Most of this dynamic isn’t particularly new to Barnhart. Entering his 24th season at UK, he is the second-longest-tenured athletics director in the nation and will become the longest when Oklahoma’s Joe Castiglione retires at the end of the school year.
Here’s what has slightly changed. It’s always been important for football to drive revenue for the entire department. It’s even more detrimental now in this new age of revenue-sharing with players.
Schools don’t have to pay out the entirety of the $20.5 million pool established by the House v. NCAA settlement. But the ones in Power Four conferences that don’t will undoubtedly fall behind.
Football’s success will play a large part in making sure UK can cover the bill.
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“We’ve been a place that’s embraced our coaches,” Barnhart said. “We’ve got a longevity with our coaches, and we’ve never overreacted to things. Maybe that’s something that people don’t particularly like about me. I’m not particularly caring at this point.”
Stoops’ considerable buyout of about $37.5 million, combined with Barnhart’s historic patience, means there’s no chance of a knee-jerk reaction. But if the Cats don’t show enough signs of progress, it’ll be better for the future of the program to buy out Stoops now than to wait for it to get worse.
The irony from Barnhart’s 40-minute news conference is that he said as much when talking about stadium upkeep.
“You don’t want things to deteriorate to a spot where all of a sudden the expense to fix them has become so great, it becomes not not smart,” he said.
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Barnhart can’t let UK football reach a point of deterioration.
Barnhart talked about trying to create new “buckets” of revenue outside of the five pillars of ticket sales, fundraising, sponsorship contracts, concessions/merchandise and conference revenue-sharing.
He mentioned three big investments UK is making at Kroger Field: $15 million for maintenance including reinforcing the steel structure, $13 million into the corner suites and the elevators and $8 million into an initial design for premium space and some end-zone club space on the West End.
“We continue to make sure that as we go into this new five- to 10-year period of college athletics, that we’ve got revenue streams that are coming,” he said.
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The thing about streams is they dry up quickly when there’s no enthusiasm about where the program is headed.
Going back to the five buckets of revenue, once apathy hits a program tickets sales go down, which also impacts concessions and merchandise sales. Boosters, even the most loyal ones, become a bit more reluctant to give — especially in this age where the name, image and likeness collectives have consistently tugged at their pockets to the point of creating donor fatigue.
It’s much harder to raise funds if fans no longer believe in the coach or the product.
What Barnhart made clear is that he fully supports Stoops. There’s no rift or tension between the two that would make it more likely for a change to be on the horizon.
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“We’ve been in this spot before,” Barnhart said. “… Mark is really, really good at fighting through adversity.”
He’s going to have to be.
Or UK will have no choice but to move on without him.
Reach sports columnist C.L. Brown at clbrown1@gannett.com, follow him on X at @CLBrownHoops and subscribe to his newsletter at profile.courier-journal.com/newsletters/cl-browns-latest to make sure you never miss one of his columns.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kentucky football: Mark Stoops needs to go if UK has another bad year
