Stoops Hopes Offseason Adjustments Pay Off in 2025
After posting a 4-8 record last season, Kentucky football head coach Mark Stoops knew he needed to have an outstanding offseason. And he new that it had to be approached with a sense of urgency, much like a certain situation on the field.
“For us, we have to take the mindset into this year the same way we attack the offseason,” Stoops said. “As football coaches, we use this term a lot, but for us it was like a fourth-and-one mentality, that moment in a fourth-and-one situation demands urgency, unity and execution. We obviously needed to have a strong offseason.”
What did that look like for the Cats?
“Every rep, every lift, every team meeting, no matter what we’re doing, we have to embrace that challenge,” Stoops said. “I greatly appreciate the focus and the relentless commitment that these players have had to each other.”
After UK posted its first sub-.500 record since 2015, Stoops knew that everything had to be evaluated, top to bottom.
“After last season, obviously not a very good year for us, we had to take a good look at that,” Stoops said. “When you do that and have a bad year like that, I had to take a good step back, analyze each and every thing in our program, in our staff and our players. There’s a lot of work to be done.”
While some coaches might want to leave the past in the past, Stoops instead chose to break down the things that needed adjustments.
“We didn’t want to just move past it. We wanted to make sure we made the adjustments necessary,” he said. “Any weakness we had, we wanted to try to make a strength. Just attack it each and every day. There’s a lot of good from us as a coaching staff to be able to do that. But we looked at everything, from our culture, our schemes, the way we teach, the way we connect, the way we lead. All of it needed to be analyzed to make the necessary adjustments.”
Some of the changes that Stoops and his staff made were simply going back to what has worked for the UK program in the past.
“For us, we will continue to anchor with the core values of our program: that’s attitude, toughness, discipline and pride,” Stoops said. “We need to do that with the consistency that’s necessary to make sure that you’re going to get the growth that’s needed. During a difficult year, those attributes don’t just go away. They’re something that we have to lean back into and make sure we’re doing a lot of things well, but make sure we do those things at a very high level.”
Another part of the adjustments was bringing in a large number of new players. In fact, UK will have 50 new faces on the roster this season.
“There’s a lot of new change on our campus. We have 50 new players that are coming in,” Stoops said. “That’s the most we’ve ever had in the transfer era obviously. Twenty-six transfers that come in. Thirteen of those transfers have been starters, and eight of them have been starters at the Power Five conference. We feel like we’re bringing in a lot of fresh faces there. I think that’s something that’s important for us.”
With so many new faces, and with a lot of hard work in the offseason, Stoops and the Cats hope to prove that last season was just a blip on the radar.
