Mitch Barnhart confident Mark Stoops '(knows) how to win' but 'this isn't about just surviving'

After two years of noticeable slippage in 2022 and 2023, Kentucky hit rock bottom in 2024 with Mark Stoops‘ worst season since his debut in 2013, finishing with an abysmal 4-8 record and zero Power Four conference wins at home. That streak of eight straight has extended to nine in 2025 following the team’s loss to Ole Miss in the SEC opener, falling in 12 of the last 14 conference matchups at Kroger Field.

Coming off Stoops’ disappointing 12th season leading the program as the longest-tenured coach in the SEC, his boss came to his defense, UK athletics director Mitch Barnhart calling it a one-off rather than a concerning downward trajectory.

“A one-year blip is not what I would call ‘not sustaining it,'” he told the Herald-Leader’s Jon Hale back in the spring. “Now, if we go two or three more, a couple more years, and we’re still not back where we want to be, sure, then you have to have a conversation about, what are we trying to get to here?”

Six months later, we’re still in wait-and-see mode for both on-field improvement and fan response. There has been plenty of good (defense) and bad (offense) in Kentucky’s first two games — and Cutter Boley is set to start Saturday vs. Eastern Michigan in hopes of fixing the bad. And as apathetic (if not furious) Big Blue Nation has been on social media, message boards and radio shows, it’s not necessarily showing in attendance, Barnhart announcing a slight dip through two weeks with an average of 57,401 compared to last season’s average of 59,516.

Whether those fans have been rewarded for their investment is another story, but they’re still showing up.

Is there pressure to quickly fix that to keep butts in seats with 83 percent of the season and five home games — including Texas, Tennessee and Florida — still to come? Certainly, but not to simply check financial boxes and pay the bills. There’s pressure to win because that’s what they’re there to do at the highest level. Barnhart is in the business of competition, not getting rich.

“Clearly, we want to (reward attendees),” the UK AD said Tuesday. “It’s not just about paying off fans, it’s about our locker room and making sure that we find our share of the wins. We didn’t get in this business to say, ‘Hey, it was a great day.'”

That’s why he’s been committed to Stoops for 13 years and running as the winningest coach in program history. It hasn’t always been pretty, but the results have been self-explanatory. If fans are underwhelmed by seven-win seasons in Lexington and consider the four-win finish in 2024 an all-systems failure, you’ve done something right up to that point.

“I think you guys know us well enough. We’ve talked about two things: diplomas in hands and rings on fingers. We’ve won a lot of championships here (as a department),” Barnhart continued. “It’s not a mistake our coaches took us to eight straight bowl games, and we’ve won ten games in two different seasons. This isn’t a team or a coach and a coaching staff that doesn’t know how to win.”

But that also doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to let your foot off the gas and use past results to excuse future failures. Stoops is a top-10 paid coach in college football for a reason — and he didn’t provide top-10 results a season ago.

Inching back to the successes of 2018 and 2021 is his job as long as it’s his job.

“We’ve had a set of circumstances that have not served us well over the last couple of years, and we’ve got to find our way back to that,” Barnhart said. “It’s important for us.”

BBN is a big reason for that push — and Barnhart used Kentucky basketball coach Mark Pope pressing the right buttons to bring out the best version of the fanbase as the best example. Football may not be the same juggernaut, but those who bleed blue are unlike anyone else in sports, passionate and wonderful in every sense.

You want to win for them because they care, not because there is a dollar figure attached to every ticket sold and human in attendance. It’s not just about winning enough to survive financially

“Our fans, there’s no one — Mark Pope said it, it is about the BBN. It is about our fanbase, and we’re trying to make sure that our kids understand what it means to serve an incredible fanbase that we are fortunate enough to have,” Barnhart said. “There’s no mistake about it. We are supremely focused on finding wins. This isn’t about just surviving and being able to make sure that all the finances work for us.

“That’s not what this is about, and if you walk out and say that, I would be supremely disappointed in that.”