Ahead of Louisville game, multiple reports have Mark Stoops as candidate for Texas A&M job

In the hours before Kentucky football’s regular season finale at Louisville, UK coach Mark Stoops was linked to the opening at Texas A&M by multiple national college football reporters.

The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman reported Saturday morning Stoops was a “name to watch” in the Texas A&M search. Matt Fortuna, a former national college football reporter at The Athletic and ESPN who now hosts an independent football podcast, also linked Stoops to the job. Nicole Auerbach, Feldman’s colleague at The Athletic, retweeted Feldman’s report with the addition that Stoops was “definitely a name to watch at A&M.” Stoops was one of five candidates for the job listed by ESPN’s Pete Thamel during an appearance on College GameDay. Thamel said the “next 24 hours will be critical for (Stoops’) candidacy.”

After Kentucky’s 38-31 upset of No. 10 Louisville Saturday, Stoops declined to address the reports linking him to the Texas A&M job.

“Come on, you know better than that,” Stoops said when asked about the morning’s speculation. “This is a big win for our state and our program and our team. You know how good I’ve been at keeping my concentration and focus on this team. That’s all it is.”

Texas A&M fired coach Jimbo Fisher, Stoops’ former boss at Florida State, this month. The Aggies job is perceived as the best open head coaching position.

Kentucky needed to beat Louisville on Saturday to clinch a winning record this season, but Stoops was already Kentucky’s all-time winningest coach. He has led the Wildcats to two 10-win seasons since 2018, something that the program had not accomplished since 1977 before Stoops was hired.

On paper, Stoops seems like an odd fit at Texas A&M considering his Kentucky tenure has been plagued by similar poor offensive showings that cost Fisher his job, but there are real questions about whether Stoops has hit the ceiling at Kentucky after 11 seasons on the job and if he might look for a new challenge. The Wildcats have reached eight consecutive bowl games but have failed to meet raised preseason expectations the last two seasons.

Just two years ago it looked as if Kentucky had passed programs like Florida, South Carolina, Missouri and Vanderbilt in the SEC East pecking order, but the Wildcats have lost to three of those teams in the last two seasons. Kentucky dropped a second consecutive game against South Carolina last week as season-long offensive inconsistency reached a new low in a 17-14 defeat in Columbia. With Texas and Oklahoma joining the SEC next season and the league ditching its two-division format, Kentucky’s schedule is likely to get more difficult moving forward, regardless of whether the league stays at eight or nine games.

Earlier this season, Stoops created headlines when he clashed with a caller on his weekly radio show who complained about the Wildcats’ inability to compete with SEC powers like Georgia and Alabama.

“You’ve got to own it, you’ve got to solve it and then you’ve got to go do it,” Stoops said of his team’s response to the 51-13 loss to Georgia. “The other side of that is, if you want to do that, complain, deny or make excuses. And we’re not going to do that. It is what it is.

“Fans have that right. I give it to them. I just encourage them to donate more, because that’s what those dudes are doing. I can promise you Georgia, they bought some pretty good players. You’re allowed to these days. We could use some help.”

Those comments were the latest in a string of public pleading to improve Kentucky’s name, image and likeness situation over the last two years. Texas A&M has been reported to have one of the best NIL operations in the country after signing the No. 1-ranked recruiting class in the country two years ago.

“That’s what they look like, you know what I mean, when you have 85 of them,” Stoops said of Georgia later in the radio show. “I encourage anybody that’s disgruntled to pony up some more.”

Stoops has since walked back those comments in multiple news conferences, reinforcing his respect for fans regardless of how much they donate to the program, but the caller’s initial complaint has only been amplified over the second half of the season as Kentucky followed the Georgia loss with losses to ranked foes Missouri, Tennessee and Alabama. The Wildcats have yet to beat a team this season that has clinched bowl eligibility.

There is history between Kentucky and Texas A&M in coaching searches too. Legendary coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the coach Stoops passed for UK’s career wins lead last season, left Kentucky for Texas A&M in 1954.

The buyout for Stoops to break his UK contract, which runs through the 2030 season is $4 million. Stoops is the seventh-highest paid coach in college football with a $9 million-per-year salary. Texas A&M reportedly owes Fisher more than $76 million after firing him.

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