Mark Stoops took Kentucky football to new heights. What can Mizzou learn from his success?
Kentucky walked off the field at Neyland Stadium in November 2012 at the end of a miserable season.
Head coach Joker Phillips was fired soon after the 37-17 loss, which dropped the Wildcats to 2-10 overall and 0-8 in the SEC.
Kentucky historically had not been a particularly successful football program. The Wildcats reached four consecutive bowl games under previous coach Rich Brooks, but Phillips was unable to sustain the winning.
However, 2012 represented a new low.
"He just wasn’t up for the job, and I say that as someone who likes Joker,” said longtime Lexington Herald-Leader columnist John Clay, who started covering Kentucky football in 1987. “... They hit bottom. All the good work Brooks had done kind of bottomed out.”
That season was also a difficult one for Missouri. The Tigers were in their first season in the SEC and missed a bowl game with a 5-7 record.
Missouri would hold on and revive its fortunes in the next two seasons, winning the SEC East in 2013 and 2014. Kentucky opted to make wholesale changes that radically changed the next decade of the program. Those changes molded UK into a football program that is on the cusp of its seventh straight bowl berth.
It started with the hiring of its next coach.
'Going north'
Kentucky had long been thinking too much like an SEC school. Before Missouri joined the conference in 2012, the Wildcats were the northernmost school but refused to act like it.
The geography of Kentucky is such that arguments have raged over whether it belongs in the South or the Midwest. For years, its flagship university recruited football like it favored the southern argument.
Despite an inability to win battles for the top players in the state, the 2012 Kentucky roster featured 22 players from Georgia, according to the Football Database. UK also tried to go into places like Florida and Alabama for talent, despite the strategy not usually working too well.
"They got kids out of there, but they were the leftovers from Georgia and Florida, schools like that,” Clay said. “Really it got down even more under Joker. When Joker took over as head coach, they’d end up taking guys where the guy, his final choices would be like MAC schools.”
When Mark Stoops was hired away from his offensive coordinator position at Florida State to take over the program, he went in the opposite direction. A native of Youngstown, Ohio, Stoops knew there was talent north of Lexington.
He and his staff went to go find it. Kentucky would remain a program known for developing talent more than simply bringing in a host of five-star prospects.
Still, by looking up to Ohio and Michigan, the Wildcats could improve the caliber of talent on the roster.
"He was taking the SEC logo and going north,” said Dean Hood, currently the head coach at Murray State after working for Stoops at UK from 2017-19. “Going north, he was taking advantage of the fact that he was the northernmost school in the SEC, which I thought was brilliant.”
The move was necessary. The Wildcats weren’t going to be able to work solely off of in-state talent.
The quality of high school football has risen in recent years, but even in the 2022 recruiting class, the state of Kentucky produced only four four-star prospects, according to 247Sports composite ratings. Meanwhile, Ohio had three five-stars, 11 four-stars and plenty of three-stars to go around.
Ohio State is the juggernaut there, and Kentucky wasn’t likely to beat out the Buckeyes for the highest echelon of recruits. Still, Stoops, along with ace recruiter and associate head coach Vince Marrow, thought he could do well with the best of the rest.
“Anybody, my wife, my 14-year-old son, can watch and see a five-star,” Hood said. “But to be able to go in those areas and sign a three-star and say that this is a kid that can play in the SEC ... coach Stoops, the staff did an unbelievable job with the evaluation.”
Slowly but surely, Stoops’ plan started to work. During Phillips’ last season in charge, Kentucky’s recruiting class ranked 50th nationally, according to 247Sports, and 14th in the SEC. Stoops’ first class ranked 34th nationally and the 2022 class was 14th, good for fifth in the conference.
At the beginning of 2016, his fourth season in charge, some fans had tired of Stoops. After a 2-10 first season, the Wildcats had gone 5-7 and started the 2016 campaign 0-2.
“He had to learn how to be a head coach,” Clay said. “How to manage things, how to manage the game. He’s a much better game manager than he was back then.”
Stoops and Co. turned 2016 into a 7-6 season. Since then, the Wildcats have a made a bowl every year and won 10 games twice.
He had built a program that worked because it was bespoke to the school.
"He’s been good looking at a guy and saying, ‘We can get this guy and project that two or three years down the road, he’s going to be a really good quarterback,” Clay said. “The only thing is, to me, it’s a lot harder to take that next step to win the SEC, to get to Atlanta.”
'Made it a positive'
While Stoops was building a program at UK, Missouri was largely bone-average. The Tigers won the SEC East two consecutive seasons, but have only won seven or more games twice since then.
MU is on its third head coach during Stoops’ tenure, and the Wildcats have inarguably been more successful in recent years.
Tigers coach Eli Drinkwitz praised Stoops during his press conference on Tuesday.
“He took a job in this league that had not had a whole lot of success and went and built an identity and stuck with his process,” Drinkwitz said. “You can see the identity of that team every time you watch it. Whether it's been in 2020 when we played them or this year when we played them, the identity of how they plan to win shows up.”
On the surface, Missouri is the program most like Kentucky in the SEC. MU is a geographical outlier, sitting further north than any other school in the league.
Also like Kentucky, the Tigers lack access to the top talent in traditional SEC recruiting hotbeds such as Georgia and Florida. Even Stoops acknowledged that the programs have some things in common.
“I think there’s definitely some similarities,” Stoops said on Wednesday during the SEC coaches teleconference. “I think we all understand, accept and embrace the challenges of coaching and competing in this league, and for us and Missouri to be a little bit unique in where and how we have to recruit.”
Like Kentucky, Missouri doesn't have fan and program expectations of immediately competing for a national championship. In his early years at UK, Stoops wasn't even the most successful program on his campus, with Kentucky men's basketball expected to make NCAA Tournament runs yearly.
Both schools also have made or are making major facilities upgrades to better compete with the rest of the conference. According to Hood, that made the pitch at UK much easier.
"Early on before the facilities got fixed, you’re telling (recruits), ‘Hey, we’re in the SEC and we want to compete for championships and all that, and then the kids come on campus and see something that didn’t match up,” Hood said. “Now I think Kentucky’s facilities are up there in that elite category.”
Unfortunately for both of them, Missouri and Kentucky are somewhat reliant on other programs' struggles to accomplish their greatest success. When MU won the SEC East back in 2013 and 2014, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee combined to lose 34 games in those two seasons.
The same conditions largely held for most of Stoops’ run of success at Kentucky. However, given the geographic advantages of those other schools, success comes faster and the heights can be much higher.
Georgia won the national championship last season. On Saturday it will play Tennessee, which sits No. 1 in the College Football Playoff rankings after a 44-6 dismantling of Kentucky last week.
Even Florida could soon be on the rise with new head coach Billy Napier. The same SEC East that Stoops exploited might be gone and he has built up expectations for himself.
“I’ve never bought that Mark Stoops could stay at Kentucky and they’ll build a statue to him for what he’s done because all they expect is to win six, seven, eight games a year,” Clay said. “Kentucky’s like any place else.”
Unfortunately for Missouri, it doesn’t even have the same available recruiting grounds as the Wildcats. Cincinnati is over 460 miles away from Faurot Field, and the Tigers have only two players from Ohio currently on the roster.
The state of Missouri is more fertile for recruiting than Kentucky. In the 2022 class, the Show-Me State produced eight 247Sports composite four-star prospects, compared to just four in Kentucky.
Missouri also produced more three-stars (29) than the Bluegrass State (17). Drinkwitz has made it clear that recruiting in-state is a major point of emphasis.
However, neither of those states are anywhere near the recruiting grounds found elsewhere in the conference. And Missouri doesn’t have an obvious talent-rich state nearby that doesn’t already have an SEC school in it.
The closest Missouri could come to an Ohio would be Kansas, but that state produced just one four-star and 14 three-star recruits last year. There's a chance Kansas could eventually blossom into a better football state, since 2020 census numbers showed its population rising by 7.4%, but that would take time and other places are growing far faster.
Then there’s Texas. Former Missouri coach Gary Pinkel made a long career out of plucking three- and two-star prospects out of the Lone Star State and turning them into stars in Columbia.
The state continues to be talent-rich. It was also one of the fastest-growing states in the nation according to the 2020 census, so even if MU can’t pull the top players, there will likely still be excellent talent available.
Missouri lost some of its access to Texas when it joined the SEC, but the Tigers still have more Texans on the roster than any other state besides their own. Could the University of Texas joining the conference help MU make a better pitch to recruits there?
“Honestly that’s not a hypothetical I’ve even got into mentally,” Drinkwitz said when asked before the season in June. “I’m still trying to make sure I’ve got a quarterback. I mean, it’s a great question, but I just don’t know.”
Still, the lesson of the Stoops build isn’t necessarily a call to recruit any one state or area. UK’s coach simply surveyed the job he had, figured out what its strengths were, and exploited them to great success.
“He took that negative and made it a positive,” Hood said. “You know, ‘Hey, we’re the northernmost school in the SEC, let’s go get kids from the north.’ And those kids starting winning and now he’s getting kids from Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida, Georgia, because they’re winning.”
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Missouri football: Can Mark Stoops' Kentucky success be replicated?
