Barnhart Rips Narrative That Kentucky Lacks NIL Resources: “Ridiculous”

It was a celebration of Kentucky football when Will Stein was introduced to Big Blue Nation. Once the press conference ended, Mitch Barnhart took questions from the media. If you thought they had plenty of fireworks when Stein walked up to the stage, wait till you see what Mitch had to say.

Mitch has had “Enough” of Questions about NIL

Will Stein comes from Oregon, the home of Phil Knight and Nike. Their roster-building war chest is large. How does Kentucky’s look?

It’s a fair question, especially since the Wildcats moved all NIL Collective efforts in-house under the JMI umbrella. Barnhart and JMI’s Paul Archey shared why they are doing it, but have not explained how it will work. It’s a question Mitch Barnhart did not want to hear.

“We’re confident in what we’re doing. People ask that question 19 different ways with all that stuff that’s been going on, and it’s exhausting. Enough. Enough about, ‘Have we got enough?’ We’ve got enough. And we’re working at it just like everyone else is working at it,” said the Kentucky athletics director.

“We’re no different than everybody. We’ve got JMI. They’ve got Learfield. They’ve got Learfield. We’ve got JMI. They’ve got Learfield. They’ve got PlayFly. This notion that we don’t have enough is ridiculous.”

Barnhart continued: “We’ve got enough. We got to resource it the right way. We got to assess talent the right way. We got to acquire it the right way, and we got to make sure we’re within the boundaries of the rules. We’re not going to break the rules. That’s flat-out, we’re not doing that. We will do it the right way, we don’t need to do that, we’re good enough at what we do, we’ve got good people. That’s why we hired this guy; he’s really smart. He’s put together a really good gameplan of how they’re going to do it and on the first day they’ve made some really nice adjustments to what we’re doing, and we’ll be fine. That notion, all this nonsense that’s been created, by a variety of places, we don’t have enough or we’re not working at it, it’s gotta stop. That’s enough.”

Rules. What rules? The biggest criticism of Kentucky’s in-house NIL move is that it falls under rules that are not being enforced. Lawsuits were filed to ensure NIL Collectives could maintain business as usual, even after the House settlement passed. Those rules could only be enforced if the SCORE Act. Congress was supposed to vote on it today, but you’ll never guess, it was postponed.

Barnhart: General Managers are just “Semantics”

On Wednesday afternoon, a report confirmed some Drew Franklin scoop. Former Oregon director of recruiting Pat Biondo will serve as Stein’s general manager. When KSR asked the new Kentucky head coach how the front office would be structured, Stein essentially described Biondo as the budget balancer. Barnhart had a different description of the general manager position.

“I think it’s just semantics. General manager, player personnel, talent acquisition coordinator, I’ve heard all that stuff. There’s 19 different titles out there. The structure, it all comes down to the same thing. It comes down to talent evaluation, talent acquisition, and putting things in place that legally allow you to compete,” said Barnhart.

“All this notion that coaches aren’t controlling their rosters and they’re not making decisions, it’s ridiculous. At the end of the day, the coach is going to put in that program who he wants to put in that program to make plays. Period. Or he’s not going to be the coach very long. If he’s allowing someone to sit down the hallway and make those decisions for him, he will not be the coach very long. So it has to be integrated. It has to work together. It will work together for us.”

Barnhart says Stoops was “Great” During Final Conversations

Today would not have happened if Mark Stoops was unwilling to negotiate his buyout and allow it to be paid over time, rather than in 60 days. The way Barnhart tells it, Stoops might’ve still had a job if Kentucky won one more game this season.

“I don’t want to get into all of that, other than to say we were still competing for postseason play the last two weeks of the season, and that was important for this team to have an opportunity to do that and for us to have an opportunity to move forward,” said the Kentucky athletics director.

Barnhart commended the way Stoops carried himself and the success he had during his tenure at Kentucky. However, he got riled up and said it “irritates the snot” out of him when people criticize the former Kentucky football coach.

“I want to focus for Mark on the eight years he gave us in that middle stretch where we went to eight straight bowl games, and 10-8-10 (win) run that we had in the middle that was spectacular. We hadn’t seen that ever here. People all get hung up on the very beginning when it was a struggle, and he inherited a program that was really, really difficult, and they want to get hung up on the end, where it was a struggle, and we weren’t doing what we wanted to do. Forgetting the middle, where he absolutely gave this program a new set of boundaries, moved the goalposts for us — you can call it whatever you want to call it — he raised expectations. It’s what this place needed here.”

Barnhart continued: “So let’s not get hung up on what he didn’t do. He did a lot. That really irritates the snot out of me when people take shots. He was GREAT on Sunday, spectacular. He’s a good man and has a lot of love for this program and this city. Don’t ever walk out of here thinking I don’t have an unbelievable amount of respect for Mark Stoops and what he did here. We all need to be grateful for what he did. He did change expectations here.”