The following post was written in the early morning hours of Dec. 28, just hours after Rich Brooks announced that he was “80 percent” sure he was retiring. As we all know now, that decision has become 100 percent certain as Brooks announced Monday that he was stepping down as the head coach of the Kentucky football program.

Although the post has old quotes and old news, I thought it would be appropriate to repost it now that we know the future of Brooks. As for the program? Well, read on.NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Rich Brooks walked into a never-ending pit of probation-riddled quicksand seven years ago. Surprisingly, maybe a bit miraculously, he planted pillar after pillar and built a tradition of stability and winning, two terms that had become foreign to the Kentucky football program.Now that Brooks has decided he might not return next year to coach the UK football team, the foundation he worked so steadily and fiercely to build might be shaken.The question is, with a rare bowl loss, the departure of an irreplaceable senior class and quite possibly the loss of Brooks, will it be a critical splinter?UK lost a bowl game Sunday night, but with or without the man that got them there, it can ill-afford to lose more than that.For the first time in four years, UK must face an offseason mired in disappointment. Brooks had talked Saturday about what a bowl game – both positively and negatively – can do for a team in offseason workouts, practice and recruiting, and now his team will get a firsthand taste of what that downside is like.How the players handle it will go a long way in determining where this program heads. In the big picture, a bowl loss is hardly the tell-all of a football season or a program. But it was one of celebration and jubilation for the last three years.Now with a loss, UK will have to discover what it feels like to end another good season on a bit of a down note. Does it remain a seven-win team content with late December bowl games, or does it build off the bitter feeling of disappointing losses to Clemson and Tennessee to end the season?All that would have been hard enough to forecast as is, and then Brooks dropped the bombshell – albeit a foreshadowed bombshell – that he is “80 percent sure” he will not return next season.”I’ve been thinking about (retirement) the last week,” Brooks said after UK’s 21-13 bow loss to Clemson. “I haven’t had enough time because of the game preparation and everything. I think it may be time for a change and time for Joker (Phillips) to take it over. I’m not totally sure, but I just feel like maybe it’s time.”That puts a rather encompassing cloud over the state of the program. Not that it’s Brooks’ fault. He has, after all, as Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart said following the game, earned the right to decide when he wants to step down.But that doesn’t make the aftermath of Sunday’s bowl game any easier to swallow.Even if Brooks decides to come back and Sunday just turns out to be a loss for the stats sheet, how UK handles a loss in a bowl game and rebounds from a so-so season will be the final telling point of this era of Kentucky football.Because for all the good feeling about four straight bowl wins, a magnificent achievement, now is when we’ll find out whether this program is content with where it is or if it’s ready to make a jump forward.One need not channel their inner wisdom to hear that Brooks isn’t content with where UK ended this year, even as his retirement plan is about to kick in. When asked how to characterize the season, Brooks was far from calling it another success.”A lot of disappointment,” Brooks said of the season. “We would have liked to have extended our non-conference winning streak and win four straight bowl games because not a lot of schools have been able to do that. … It’s a disappointing season. We were able to do some good things, but not as much as we wanted to.”So why walk away from it now if there is more to be done? Well, quite honestly, Brooks feels like he’s placed the program where it needs to be to take that next step with Joker Phillips at the helm.Whether it’s he or Phillips making trips to New Year’s Day bowls in the future, we’ll always remember Brooks as the one that ignited it all. If Brooks could do what he did at Kentucky, we should all have faith in him that he knows what he’s doing.”(The program) is a lot better (than it was five years ago),” Brooks said. “We have a full complement of scholarship players, we have much better talent and it’s been a program that’s gone to four straight bowl games. I would think it’s in pretty good shape and I think it can continue to go up whether I’m here or not.”With or without Brooks, it will be the defining moment of the next era in UK football history. With the close of a historic chapter of UK seniors – cornerstones like Corey Peters, Micah Johnson, Trevard Lindley and more – how will the next page be written? Is this the prologue or the epilogue of a wonderful turnaround?A murky picture as unstable as quicksand has crept around the program again, but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, that unstable situation at the beginning of the Brooks regime is what got this program here anyway.”He gave great foundation and stability to a program that needed it,” Barnhart said. “He brought it from a position of the basement. He brought it from that spot and gave it life again.”Great things never stop evolving, and maybe that’s what this program now needs – the next step in its evolution. Maybe a bitter pill of disappointment for once and some uncertainty is good. Maybe it reignites Brooks and inspires him to come back. Maybe it’s the end of one great thing but the start of something better.Really, no one knows. But make no mistake about it, the end of this season and quite possibly the Rich Brooks era marks a crossroad. Will it be another opportunity to springboard off of or step back from?With questions galore, consider a bowl game another defining moment in UK football history.