How Mark Stoops Prepares Wildcats for Week One Nerves

Every football team plays with a little extra juice in the first week of the season. It does not matter who is on the calendar, Alabama or Alabama A&M. The Kentucky Wildcats are no exception to this norm. After weeks of practices and months of offseason workouts, the anticipation is intolerable, even for Mark Stoops.

Now entering his ninth season as Kentucky’s head coach, he shares his players’ excitement. This offseason has injected even more enthusiasm into the program.

“We’re really excited to get going. A new offensive coordinator for us. This will be our first true test,” he said at Monday’s press conference. “Everybody’s anxious. It’s always a long offseason. Through the winter, through spring players busting their tail all summer. Everyone is excited to get back out there. We really can’t wait to get going.”

Stoops loves to say that he would rather say “woah” than “giddy up,” however, it’s possible to have too much “giddy up” on a sideline.

“The biggest thing is, early in the season players want to do too much. They want every play’s a touchdown or every play’s a stop or a sack or whatever, and you fundamentally sometimes lose sight of things,” said Mark Stoops.

“It’s truly about fundamentally doing the things necessary to take care of your responsibility. Players always want to do too much, too early. That can be a problem. It’s truly one play at a time. Work on all the the things we’ve worked on fundamentally and trust your teammates and execute. It takes all 11 on every play and sometimes early on it’s not for a lack of want to, but you just have to be very disciplined and do the things necessary and count and trust the people next to you to do their job.”

New Year, New Stoops

Mark Stoops doesn’t need his Wildcats to play hero ball in week one. Execution must be priority No. 1 against ULM, although he completely understands why everyone in the BBN is so fired up to watch this team play.

“The opener is different because there’s a lot of anticipation… You just want to see what your team really is, so those nerves — I’d say the anticipation more than nerves — are always there. To me, it feels new. It feels like year one. I guess it’s maybe with a lot of the changes in the offense and in the office in general. For me, it’s just an exciting time.”