Desperate for culture reset, Mark Stoops is 'having fun' again with Kentucky football going into 2025

“Y’all need to play for each other,” Kentucky defensive line coach Anwar Stewart said. “Y’all need to love one another, you understand that? Y’all got a year together and that’s it. This will be a different team next year, just like last year.”

“Day one, let’s set the tone for next year,” head coach Mark Stoops continued.

There is no question what the theme of spring was for this program going into a make-or-break season for the Wildcats. At their best under Stoops, they were known for their blue-collar approach and ‘Why not us?’ edge, but exchanged that for unearned arrogance and entitlement — a downward trend in recent years finally hitting rock bottom in the form of an embarrassing 4-8 campaign in 2024, their worst since the 57-year-old coach’s first season in Lexington in 2013.

Any chance of righting the ship included a mandatory culture reset in 2025, and the folks in the building knew that. And while the fanbase is in a ‘show me, don’t tell me’ stage of support — season tickets are down nearly 13 percent from a year ago — Stoops is confident he’s found the right recipe in terms of outgoing and incoming pieces to put a product on the field Big Blue Nation will be proud to watch.

“Going back to the first piece of it, I just feel like top to bottom, we built a better roster and have been very intentional about what we expect of them and leading them through,” he said in a sitdown conversation with Kentucky legend Randall Cobb for a behind-the-scenes look at spring ball for the Wildcats on SEC Network. “You know what our expectations are and what the standard is. We’re making sure we’re very hard on demanding that. You can do that when you have depth and you have other players.”

One change you’ll notice moving forward? No more hype and build-up regarding individual talent, no matter the staff’s private thoughts, as the silence suggested throughout the spring. Accolades will be handed out when they’re earned on Saturdays this fall, not after good days in practice or perceived potential.

“I’ve been very intentional this spring of not trying to point out specific people. When you’re awarding somebody something, the media or other people take it and run with it like, ‘this is our guy,'” Stoops said.

“Their ego gets big and they change,” Cobb responded.

No one had fun in 2024 — a train wreck of a season for all parties involved. That hasn’t been the case in the spring ahead of 2025 as the roster underwent a total overhaul, Stoops being intentional about bringing in the right guys willing to hold themselves accountable and desperate to get back to a winning brand of football.

It hasn’t been easy, but the challenge has been fun with a reward hopefully set to follow this fall.

“We brought in very good players, very experienced guys that are mature and fit our culture,” Stoops told Cobb. “I feel like we have a much more solid roster. I like this team, I like coaching them. I’m having fun. Just hitting that reset button as far as what we expect of this program and what the coaches have to demand and the players have to do.

“Just going through that process has just been fun, it’s been a great challenge.”

It’s one thing to say you need a culture reset and another to actually make it happen — beyond pushing a few guys out and bringing a few new ones in. That’s where the intentionality comes in, stressing relationship-building and getting back to the pillars of the program, the ‘non-negotiables,’ as Stoops described it.

“Much more intentional when we go through this the last couple years learning and growing, trying to get better. More intentional when all these guys come in — let’s be honest, I had 31 new players here this spring. That’s a lot of turnover. Some of the team was just here a year, so you’re talking about a lot of guys that are very fresh,” Stoops said. “… Really hammering (the non-negotiables) very quickly. We just have to feed it to them much faster than we used to. We prided ourselves on recruiting the best players we could get, being very intentional about developing them in all areas of their lives. Now it’s free agency and it’s all transactional.

“We can’t get away from that — a good locker room is a good locker room. Sometimes it doesn’t meet that standard and it could be fractured and splintered very easily. We’re much more intentional and force-feeding that. Having the right guys helps that. That’s what gives me excitement about what we’re doing right now.”

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