There isn't any worry about recruiting. We could have a great class, and if Tennessee and Louisville get a couple commits over a couple weeks and we don't, people start worrying about recruiting. Just because their names are in the news more recently than ours.
True. The objective of football is to win games. Every November, UK's football team pastes UL. I use the word "pastes" here because these are total beatdowns. We even beat them at their own place when they had Lamar Jackson at QB.
So if some people want to cry over a few "4 stars" committing to Louisville over NIL money, then maybe they should look at the bright side. At least Satterfield isn't buying prostitutes for these guys as far as we know, even if we have to wait for Katina Powell's next best seller to be sure of it.
UL is not an SEC school. They lost all credibility during the Powell scandal. They lost their AD, their president, and their basketball coach, because they don't just cheat, they are world class innovators in cheating. People like to forget they fired Petrino too. Outside of a couple of very illegally recruited Clemson football teams and UNC basketball teams of the past, the ACC is a wannabe conference. I don't give a hoot what goes on at UL or in the ACC.
UT is a different story. Unlike UL, UT is a founding SEC member and a natural rival for UK. UK and UT have played football every year since 1893, making it one of the oldest rivalries in college sports. Like everyone else here, I endured a lot of pain during the long losing streak from the 1980s to 2011. But as we learned again recently from the happy meal scandal, handing bags of cash to recruits has been a traditional staple of UT's recruiting process. It is what it is. But UK won in 2017 and 2020. Other games have been very competitive in recent years. Will Levis was spectacular last year, but I give lots of credit to Coach Heupel for wisely isolating his excellent receivers against UK CBs who were simply not as big or fast. At the time, UK was breaking in a pair of young defensive backfield coaches, and Heupel knew how to press his advantage. Because of that strategy, Hendon Hooker was as effective as Levis. I give them credit. It was a very exciting, but frustrating, game. We didn't win it, but I understand our team and our roster are at least equal to, if not better than, Heupel's now. It isn't about ''4-stars", even if we have our share of those now. It is about player development, as all of us learned from Josh Allen and Benny Snell.
So as far as I can telI, UT is our traditional SEC rival. UL is a wannabe. Unlike earlier in my life, I now expect to beat UT every year. When it doesn't happen, I feel the way you are supposed to feel after losing a real rivalry game. But I think last year's loss was good for Chris Collins' learning curve, and I am glad Keidron Smith is here now.
At some point, I think people just have to acknowledge the tremendous progress that has been made during the Stoops decade. If you like winning, Stoops is your guy. It's only going to get better, because Stoops is one of the top coaches in the country and Barnhart is exactly the opposite of what his uninformed critics claim.
