On Tuesday afternoon, Kentucky Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart spent nearly an hour talking to Kyle Tucker of the Louisville Courier-Journal about the hiring of Mark Stoops and the state of UK football. Tucker has broken up the conversation into a three-part transcript that you can read at the links below:Part IPart IIPart IIIClay, meanwhile, wrote this column about Barnhart hoping Kentucky football’s time has arrived.
“We needed new hope,” Kentucky’s athletics director said Tuesday in a 50-minute interview inside his office at the Joe Craft Center. “You go from believing you’re going to win to hoping you’re going to win to no hope. We’ve got to reverse that and go from no hope to having hope again to believing you’re going to win. I think our fans have hope again.”The reason behind the hope is 45-year-old Mark Stoops, the former Florida State defensive coordinator Barnhart picked three weeks ago to replace Joker Phillips as head coach of the Kentucky football program.Since Stoops’ arrival, there has been a groundswell of enthusiasm from a football fan base that had suffered through a 2-10 season, a drastic drop in home attendance and the firing of the head coach, himself an alumnus.
