The talk the last two days has been Kentucky’s 2014 recruiting class, which the best in school history. ESPN, CBS, and Sports Illustrated have all been giving Kentucky national exposure.
Here is an excerpt from Can Kentucky ride its improved recruiting to SEC success?
At first, Drew Barker didn’t know why his mailbox was overflowing. It was March 26, 2013, and the four-star quarterback from Conner (Ky.) High was still a junior. He was used to getting missives every day from college football coaches who wanted him to play for their teams. But when he peeked inside, he found much more than the 15 to 20 recruiting letters to which he’d become accustomed: The box was jammed with 115 letters, all of them from the Kentucky Wildcats. After toting them inside, Barker laid the correspondence out on his kitchen table.
The message from Kentucky coach Mark Stoops and his staff was clear. “I felt like it really showed how much they wanted me,” Barker said. Less than two months later, on May 10, he sat at a table centered on the stage in his high school auditorium and slipped on a blue baseball cap with CATS emblazoned across the front. He had verbally committed to Kentucky.
Barker was the sixth commitment of the Wildcats’ 2014 recruiting class, which ranks 13th in the country in Rivals.com’s team ratings, ahead of Texas, Stanford, Michigan, Oregon and Oklahoma, among other major conference powers. Kentucky’s 27-man haul includes 10 four-star prospects, and one player (defensive tackle Matt Elam) who has been rated a five-star prospect by another service. It is the most heralded class the Wildcats have signed since at least 2002, as far back as Rivals’ rankings go.Former coach Joker Phillips did not sign a class that ranked higher than 50th in his three seasons in Lexington. He confronted the same challenge that now faces Stoops: recruiting players to a program that has struggled to win games. The difference? Stoops is landing the types of players that inspire hope that Kentucky can be a winner again.
“I think this class is really good,” Barker said. “We’re definitely taking a really big step with this recruiting class towards what we want — which is to turn Kentucky back around into a winning program.”
The Wildcats’ recruiting pitch involves articulating a vision of what the program can achieve in the future — not what it hasn’t in the recent past. Though Kentucky went 2-10 (0-8 SEC) last season, Stoops and his staff have not hesitated to compete against big-name programs on the recruiting trail. And Kentucky has won more than a few of those battles: The Wildcats beat out Louisville, Tennessee and South Carolina for Barker; Auburn, Clemson and LSU for all-purpose back Stanley Williams; and Alabama, Notre Dame and Ohio State for Elam.
Stoops said that he wasn’t worried about his team’s win-loss record hurting its chances of landing certain prospects, stressing that building Kentucky into a winner was not going to be an overnight process.
“We’re not worried about our record,” he said. “They know that we’re in for a rebuilding and that we need to build our program and we need some high quality recruits to help us do that.”
Let’s hope Kentucky can carry this recruiting momentum into the season and keep the national media talking about the good things Mark Stoops is doing for Kentucky Football.
[adsenseyu4]
