Some of these posts remind me of a youngster who claimed our struggles in football are because folks my age and older, accepted it, or caused it.
The general cause of the struggle of UK Football is easy to diagnose, and generally politically incorrect to discuss.
Bear and Collier (and for that matter General Neyland at Tennessee) all achieved winning records when segregation was the norm is the South. Oddly, given that Kentucky and Tennessee, then and now, have lower percentages of African American populations than their sister states in the SEC, segregation perversely benefitted the most northerly programs. They were excluding a far lower percentage of their native population from participation/competition than were states like Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, etc. If you doubt this analysis, check out the teams in the media guide we played in the 40's, 50's and 60's who were ranked when we played them. In the 90's and 00's, it was expected that half or more of our SEC breathren would be in the top 20. They generally weren't in the 40's and 50's.
Since the 60's, our struggle in football has been our effort to lure quality recruits from far further away, than say LSU has to travel to find them.
How to do it?
We tried about every trick, legal and illegal, to raise the profile of the program, and to lure in better quality athletes. Each hire has had very solid arguments in its favor, until the simple reality of lack of depth and talent bit each of the coaches named, above, in the arse. In retrospect, looking at a hypothetical hire of Schnellenberger will always look better than the relative mediocrity Claiborne achieved in the 80's, but is a false argument . . . . he could have just as easily crashed and burned here, if his talent base was not significantly better than Claiborne's turned out to be.
Every hire biatched about above, as proof of a conspiracy by the basketball powers, was above and beyond reproach when made. Curry's hiring might be the best example . . . . we were the toast of the town on the national media of the day, and his first class was ranked by more than one expert in the top 20 of the nation. The giant "thud" started his first season, when he failed to achieve even Claiborne's mediocre (and expected) 5 wins.
If my prescription of the true cause of our decline is correct, is there hope?
I think so. If the slow grind from the cellar that Brooks and now Stoops have undertaken can be sustained, the program will continue to lure recruits that most of our past coaches have only dreamed about.
The proof is as obvious as the nose on your face, of the beginning of this change.
Name the top 10 quality/profile recruits from 1980 until 2012 . . . . . .
Names like Tim Couch, Dennis Johnson, Al Baker and Mark Higgs show up pretty quickly. In other words, our "big splash" recruits . . . . kids ranked in the top 100 or top 250 by everyone, were almost invariably Kentucky kids. Maybe the only four true "Big Splash" type recruits we landed in 30 plus freakin' years from out-of-state were Doug Williams in what, 1980, Moe Williams from Georgia in 1992, Dewayne Robertson from Memphis in 2000, and Antonio Hall from Ohio in 2000. I'm not talking about out-of-state kids who blew up, here, unexpectedly, but true recruiting gems from out-of-state.
An argument can be made that most of Stoops's classes since his arrival have, individually, contained more out-of-state talent than the entire 30 plus year period preceding them. And if you consider that an overstatement, it ain't by much.