Offensive coordinator churn, less emphasis on recruiting pipelines helped lead to Vince Marrow leaving Kentucky

The Vince Marrow news is just about a week old but we’re all still reacting to biggest Kentucky football bombshell in recent memory. Perhaps the face of the program will now be on the other sideline when the 36th meeting of the Governor’s Cup takes place. That will be quite the sight on Thanksgiving weekend.

But why did Marrow make this move?

We’ve been unpacking that all week at KSR. But on Friday, we heard from Vince Marrow for the first time since the news broke when the new executive director of player personnel and recruiting at Louisville jumped on “Just the Cats” with Michael Bennett. During an interview that lasted more than 15 minutes, Marrow discussed that some recruiting philosophy changes and constant offensive coordinator churn played a part in him bolting down I-64.

“There was more what you do with the coordinators and everything. It got to the point where even position coaches start recruiting their own,” Marrow explained. “And I really don’t believe you go that way with that. I just don’t. I would never believe that.”

“I think when you look at, I mean, we had several coordinators,”

On the most recent episodes of “11 Personnel“, Nick Roush and myself have discussed how position recruiting seems to be taking over. That is not necessarily an uncommon practice in college football but isn’t one we’ve seen Kentucky use. For many years, Vince Marrow was allowed to recruit multiple positions and go out and sign a high volume of players on both sides of the football. That practice seems to have been shutdown recently. But this wasn’t the only big issue.

The constant offensive coordinator churn has been a massive issue for this football program. We’ve heard Mark Stoops discuss this. Now we’ve heard Marrow go on record about how difficult the constant resetting at the top of the offensive room was difficult to deal with from a recruiting standpoint. The Cats had a different offensive coordinator every year from 2020-24. Marrow believes that churn ultimately led to a decreased emphasis on UK’s three big recruiting areas: Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan.

“When Neal Brown was here, he’s from Kentucky. He knew Ohio passed. So Neal Brown was very excited about recruiting Ohio. He couldn’t believe that that, man, we got in there and we was getting these players from Ohio. Neal leaves. OK, we bring in Shannon Dawson. Shannon Dawson was at West Virginia. Shannon Dawson says ‘Man, I lost so many battles’. So that’s why you’ve seen a lot of guys from Ohio. Matt House, who is a d-coordinator, and Dan Berezowitz (former UK director of recruiting and chief of staff) who was over (football recruiting). They had Midwest ties,” Vince Marrow said. “When you keep having turnover, a new coordinator comes in, they don’t understand Ohio is right there. Kentucky is right here. Michigan is five hours away. When you look at our rosters over them years, I mean, 60 percent of our starters were from three states, and we went to nine straight bowl games.”

“Like Bush Hamdan, he comes from Boise State, he used to recruit other areas. Brad White came from other places. Now, we got some guys out of Ohio on defense, but it wasn’t just Ohio. It was Kentucky. It was Michigan. Bob Stoops told Mark and us years ago, he said he came to visit early when we was here, he was like, ‘Man, you got a gold mine there. You got Ohio right there.'”

Vince Marrow opened up on how things have changed in college football. The recruiting star believes that college football organizations now must have a front office apparatus headlined by a general manager and player personnel staff that scouts and evaluates prospects both in high school recruiting and in the transfer portal. Kentucky seems to be shifting that way but the general manager gig went to Eddie Gran and not him in Lexington. Now he gets to step into a real front office role at Louisville. However, this move was not an easy one. A lot of things happened during his time in Lexington to cause a strained relationship.

A lack of stability on offense and a change in recruiting philosophy were two big reasons why the Big Dog left.