University of Kentucky football fans, bless their Big Blue bleeding hearts, remind me of the classic Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown winds up on his back after an attempted place kick because holder Lucy Van Pelt snatches away the ball at the last moment.
Poor Charlie never learns. Every time Lucy convinces him that this time she’s not going to snatch away the ball and every time she does. Like UK fans, Charlie’s trust is admirable to a point. Then it becomes stupidity.
Tonight the 2016 edition of the Wildcats opens its season against Southern Mississippi in Commonwealth Stadium. Once again, we’ve been promised that the team will be bigger, faster, stronger, and better coached. And once again, at least some of the fan base is buying it.
Almost everybody seems to think the Wildcats can win six games and become bowl-eligible. I’ve also heard predictions for seven wins and as many as eight. I hope the expectations are met. But no longer am I willing to give Coach Mark Stoops and his program the benefit of the doubt.
I need proof, not promises.
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Southern Mississippi is not exactly an ideal opening opponent. In senior quarterback Nick Mullens, he Golden Eagles from Hattiesburg, Ms., have a quarterback who might be good enough to make an NFL roster next season.
Last season Mullens threw for at least 300 yards against Mississippi State, Nebraska, and Washington. He lost his two leading receivers, but should benefit from the return of running back Ito Smith, who accounted for 1,156 yards rushing last season.
So you get the idea. This isn’t North Carolina-Charlotte, which fell to the University of Louisville 70-14 Thursday night. The Golden Eagles are good enough to pull an upset if the all the hype emanating from Lexington has just been more empty promises.
Here are five things that I muse see from the Wildcats:
1. Stoops must prove he knows how to manage a game. Too many times the UK sideline has been a study in chaos and confusion. The wrong plays are called, the wrong substitutions made. Sometimes more than 11 players are on the field. Stoops and his assistants have seemed at odds with each other. And so forth.
2. If the players are as good as their pedigrees suggest, and if they have been coached as well as we’ve been told they have, they will not continually shoot themselves in the foot with unforced errors, stupid penalties, missed assignments, and dropped passes.
3. Drew Barker must show that he’s at least as good as Patrick Towles, who bailed out immediately after last season and will start for Boston College this season. (U of L plays at Boston College on Nov. 5, by the way). I’m not buying into any hype about Barker. He must show me he has what it takes. Period.
4. The last time we saw the UK defense, it was blowing a 21-0 lead against U of L on the way to a 38-24 loss in Commonwealth Stadium. Returning from that defense are six starters and 17 lettermen. I don’t know if this is a good thing or not, but it doesn’t sound like a good scenario for facing a potential future NFL quarterback.
5. The fans have been told that Stoops has done a good job of recruiting. If that’s true, then he must be doing a bad job of coaching players up. All these three-star and four-star guys need to show me they were not over-rated coming out of high school.
In the first 16 seasons of this century, UK has put five winning teams on the field, and four of those came during the halcyon days of Rich Brooks. From 2006 through ’09, the Wildcats went 8-5, 8-5, 7-6, and 7-6.
Also in this century, the Wildcats have never had a winning record in the SEC, the best being 4-4 in 2006. Overall, UK’s SEC record since 2000 is 28-100. That’s pathetic. That’s doormat territory.
The problem is not facilities. Commonwealth Stadium has been spiffied up considerably and UK opened a $145 million, state-of-the-art training facility a few weeks ago.
Even the law of averages doesn’t seem to apply to UK. Every now and then, a Mississippi State or a South Carolina or even a Vanderbilt will pop up with an outstanding team. But not UK. The Wildcats will take a string of seven consecutive losing seasons into the Southern Miss game.
The hard core of UK’s fan base is proud of its loyalty, as well as it should be, but a lot of Big Blue diehards have decided that it’s not worth the money, which is substantial, to see bad football. Many of them would hurry back if UK gave them a product that at least is consistently competitive, the way it was under Brooks and Jerry Claiborne.
So Lucy, wearing her UK sweater, has put the ball on the tee again, and the fans, who desperately want to believe, are trying to decided what to do. I’m sure many will make that pass at the ball one more time.
As for me, though, I’m not moving until Lucy is replaced or somebody pays me Stoops money to make one more run at the ball. Since that’s not going to happen, I’m just going to wait until UK proves that there’s more than just hot air in the Big Blue balloon.
Billy Reed is a member of the U.S. Basketball Writers Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame and the Transylvania University Hall of Fame. He has been named Kentucky Sports Writer of the Year eight times and has won the Eclipse Award twice. Reed has written about a multitude of sports events for over four decades, but he is perhaps one of media’s most knowledgeable writers on the Kentucky Derby