Kentucky Beat: Why UK football can be 2025 CFP version of 2024 Indiana Hoosiers

Hopes springs eternal doesn’t just apply to the diamond. It can also apply to the gridiron. Take the Kentucky Wildcats football program, for example. With spring practice over, the August 30th season-opener against Toledo is the next big moment for Mark Stoops and his program.

Kentucky is coming off a disappointing 4-8 season in 2024, the Wildcats worst season since 2013, Mark Stoops’ first season as the Wildcats head coach. Kentucky’s 4-8 record in 2024 snapped a streak of eight straight bowl game appearances.

“In this year, we didn’t do a good enough job in any area. There’s just no ways around it. We failed in that area,” Stoops said at his postgame press conference following Kentucky’s 41-14 embarrassing home humiliation against Louisville. “We didn’t have the discipline that we needed. We didn’t play as good as we needed to. Every level needs to improve. Accountability needs to happen.”

That led to an offseason of fixing the culture, reestablishing what’s made the Wildcats successful for most of Stoops’s first 12 seasons in Lexington. Stoops said on Saturday, following Kentucky’s Football Spring Showcase, that he’s happy with the way the Wildcats roster responded to the drastic changes this offseason brought.

The tone after spring practice this season is a lot different than it was in 2024. That’s largely due to Kentucky’s roster being healthier at this point of the offseason.

“I felt like going into (Saturday) that we got the work done throughout the previous 14 practices, things we weren’t able to do a year ago,” Stoops said. “When you get into those critical third-and-ones, third-and-two goal lines that we got stopped on so many times, we were able to do that full tilt this spring and get that work done with the bigger bodies in there. Those are the areas that I’m talking about.”

The Indiana Hoosiers took the College Football world by storm and complete surprise in 2024, finishing 11-1 and earning the No. 10 seed in the College Football Playoff. It was just one year removed from a 3-9 season, and the Hoosiers made the Playoff in their first season led by head coach Curt Cignetti. Not to mention, the Hoosiers played in the hyper-competitive Big Ten Conference.

Could a similar season be in the works for Kentucky in 2025? Wide receiver Ja’Mori Maclin certainly thinks so.

“We’re going to surprise a lot of people,” Maclin said. “We just got to work on what we got to work on and just focus on what we got to do. A lot of people are probably counting us out. They don’t know much about us, but that’s what we like. We just go out there and work.”

Landyn Watson is another player that has high hopes for this Kentucky team. The linebacker played on TCU’s 2022 team that, led by first-year head coach Sonny Dykes, made an improbable run to the College Football Playoff National Championship. That run included an upset of No. 2 seed Michigan in the CFP Semifinals and an undefeated regular season. The previous season, the Horned Frogs went just 5-7 and wasn’t bowl eligible.

“I can just tell that guys on the defensive side of the ball are dialed in,” Watson said. “They don’t want to have a repeat of last year.”

Watson said a big reason for TCU’s surprise 2022 season was their culture changing. It wasn’t just a head coaching change. Watson emphasized that Horned Frogs team having veteran leadership being a crucial part of their run to the National Championship game, and he believes that can be the case in Lexington this fall.

With the 12-team College Football Playoff, there’s a greater chance for surprise teams to be selected for the Playoff. Kentucky being in the SEC really helps their cause. If this team really does have a bounce-back season, like 10-2 or 11-1, that could get them in the Playoff.

There’s obviously a lot of work still to do, but this program has a lot more momentum through spring practice than it did in 2024. A bounce-back season is very much in the cards, and there may even more than that coming for the Wildcats in 2025.