Kentucky

The Stoops decade changed what Kentucky football is allowed to expect. Before him, the program was Bear Bryant's early-1950s stint and then fifty years of also-ran SEC finishes — a basketball state with a basketball school that tolerated football the way big programs tolerate foul weather. Stoops came in 2013 and spent the next decade making the gridiron legitimate: bowl streaks, a 10-3 season in 2018, a Citrus Bowl win over Iowa in 2022, Kroger Field selling out. Big Blue Nation showed up for football. That happened.

Then it slipped. Back-to-back 5-7 finishes, two straight bowl misses, and a 2-6 SEC record in 2025. The school fired Stoops — the winningest coach in program history at 82-80 — and hired 36-year-old Will Stein, an offensive coordinator who becomes the youngest head coach in the SEC. The bet embedded in that hire is a specific one: the Stoops decade raised the floor permanently, so the job is real enough now that a young, offense-minded coach can hold what was built and push past it. That's a theory. The 2026 season begins testing it.

The internal fault line in Lexington is clean: one faction mourns the firing of the man who made football matter, and one demanded it because Kentucky football should be aiming higher than the floor Stoops built. Stein has to satisfy both factions simultaneously — win enough to prove the job is real, and win differently enough to prove the ceiling moved. The SEC does not offer easy semesters for young head coaches. Kroger Field will be watching.