Mark Stoops makes push for preseason exhibitions: "It's exhausting playing your own people."

Kentucky wasn’t the only program to go through some early-season hiccups in week one — the No. 1 team in the country scored seven points in a loss and four top-10 teams fell overall. Others won, but it wasn’t pretty with the defense lightyears ahead of the offense, and vice versa. Many of those teams, potentially even the Wildcats, will go on to figure things out and put together strong seasons. Mark Stoops has done it before — remember the ugly 35-20 victory over Central Michigan in 2018? UK led by one at halftime and by just one score going into the fourth quarter of that one, but finished the year with ten wins. It happens.

There may be a reason for that early-season rust, though, and Stoops believes it could be avoided.

“Every coach will tell you that you make the biggest jump between game one and game two. And why is that? Say what you want, but there’s a lot of anxiety,” he said during his call-in radio show Monday evening. “There’s a lot of — you’re just waiting to play week one. Sometimes you try too hard to press too much, you play with dirty eyes, you name it. You just kind of get that game under your belt, you settle in and try to play and execute better. And that’s what we’re going to try to do.”

Personally, he’s talking about, of course, the Wildcats’ 24-16 victory over Toledo in the opener. The defense was terrific and there was a lot to like about the rushing attack, but the passing game was a disaster and the self-inflicted errors were migraine-inducing. It’s particularly frustrating for Stoops because no matter the well-oiled machine your offense — or any unit, for that matter — appears to be at the end of training camp, you never know how things will look on Saturdays until the ball is kicked against live competition.

His potential fix for that? It’s no different than what we see in the NFL or NBA with preseason games, or even college basketball with exhibitions, for that matter. Most leagues give you a taste of what’s to come with tune-ups against real opponents, even if the results don’t count.

College football just has intrasquad scrimmages, at the very most, and you limit the number of those for injury purposes. Why not open those opportunities up?

“The other thing that I’ve said for a while now is that we might be one of the only sports that don’t get to play any other people except our own all spring, all summer, all through camp. I mean, it’s exhausting playing your own people over and over again,” Stoops said. “You’d like to have some practice opportunities with some other teams because we don’t have any practice games or any of that. Just seeing the way people present something is different than your own offense.”

The NCAA denied a request for Colorado and Syracuse to hold joint practices and a scrimmage in the spring after Deion Sanders first proposed the idea. At the time, they said the turnaround was too quick in terms of logistics and fairness, but would consider it in the future. It’s already allowed in Division II and III.

Some of the college basketball exhibitions we see now are fundraisers for charity or even their own schools with revenue-sharing throwing a massive wrench into their budgets. Stoops isn’t even looking for all of that, because it’s not about the money. He just wants the live reps to get his teams better prepared — even if it means simple scrimmages with Eastern Kentucky or the equivalent.

“I’d just like to give us the opportunity — even if it’s not trying to make money off it, because the minute you say that you’re scrimmaging somebody, everybody’s gonna try to make money off it and charge and all that. I’d like to just practice against some other people,” he continued. “I have a great relationship with Walt (Wells at EKU). I’m sure we could get together and just practice with EKU.

“Even if it’s just one-on-ones, half-line, seven-on-seven, just things of that nature. I think it would help.”

Whether it comes in the form of spring scrimmages or joint practices in the fall, Stoops doesn’t want Week One to be the first time his teams face real competition.