I told you we'd be here.

Back in the preseason, I walked myself from 4-8 to 5-7 and eventually landed on a 6-6 prediction, not because I thought Kentucky would be significantly better than a year ago, but because the math forced me there. In trying to map out a five-win year, I ran into the same immovable truth that I wrote about then:

A 5-6 Kentucky team is not losing to Louisville with a bowl game on the line.

That was the entire point of my preseason prediction, and here we are, standing exactly in that spot. The same exact scenario. The same exact math. I had Kentucky losing to Ole Miss, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, then getting hot to finish the year with four wins in the last five weeks. My initial prediction had a win at Vanderbilt, not Auburn, but I flipped those predictions as the season went on and saw that Vanderbilt was for real and Auburn wasn’t.

And now the motivation heading into the Governor’s Cup is even stronger than I imagined.

Louisville beat Kentucky 41-14 in Lexington last year. You remember. That alone should be enough fuel for the Wildcats. But this is also the first time Mark Stoops will coach against Vince Marrow since Marrow’s shocking summer exit. Two guys from Youngstown, the two builders of the modern Kentucky Football program, now standing on opposite sidelines in the rivalry game. Stoops downplayed the Marrow angle in his comments today, but it still exists for many of the players and, certainly, the fans.

Then there’s Cutter Boley.

He made his first career start in last year’s Governor’s Cup, only to watch the second half from the bench. The true freshman QB, thrown into action ahead of schedule, threw two INTs on 6-for-15 passing in the first half of the blowout loss in the 2024 finale.

Now Boley returns to the Governor’s Cup with experience, a record for TDs in SEC games, and the fifth-highest completion percentage in the conference. He already found redemption once this year against Florida. He has a chance to do it again, this time in a rivalry game that defines the season.

It all comes down to the exact situation I laid out in August. Kentucky is at 5-6 with one game to reach a bowl. All that is left is finishing the job against a Louisville team in shambles. Mark Stoops typically gets his team fired up in this spot.

I told you we’d be here. Now the rest is up to them. And if it breaks right, I might have accidentally nailed the Duke’s Mayo Bowl prediction, too.