Saturday’s Kentucky-Texas A&M matchup comes with a strange little coaching thread running through it. The schools have barely crossed paths on the field - this will be just the fourth meeting - but the Kentucky sideline and the Texas A&M job have been linked in ways that stretch from Bear Bryant to Mark Stoops.
Start with Bryant, because that’s where the connection gets its shape. Before Texas A&M became an SEC opponent, the Wildcats had only seen the Aggies twice.
Bryant was coaching at College Station when Texas A&M students carried Kentucky players off the field after UK’s 10-7 win in 1952. A year later, the Aggies beat Kentucky in Lexington, and that turned out to be Bryant’s final season leading the Wildcats.
Bryant’s Kentucky run was no footnote. He finished 60-23-5 in eight seasons and built the Wildcats into one of the country’s top programs after World War II.
Kentucky won an SEC title in 1950 and then stacked Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl and Cotton Bowl appearances in consecutive seasons. But while Adolph Rupp’s basketball program was drawing ugly attention from the point-shaving scandal, Bryant was looking for a clean exit.
“Paul has been extremely unhappy since the basketball scandals rocked the nation and centered unsavory attention on Kentucky,” Earl Ruby wrote in the Courier-Journal the day after Bryant’s departure.
“But every time he hurdled one backwash from the scandals, he encountered another. Most of the publicity has been undeserved.
Much of it has been grossly unfair. But deserved or not it has caused innumerable boys to turn elsewhere for athletics.
In addition to this deplorable state of affairs, Paul has come to realize that the University of Kentucky is governed by basketball, at the expense of football. This and the scandal brought him to the decision that he never could achieve here the success he wants and feels will be his in football.”
It would be nearly 70 years before Kentucky would enjoy anything close to that kind of run again.
Then came the modern twist. Mark Stoops, who passed Bryant as Kentucky’s all-time wins leader, almost wound up following him to Texas A&M after a public run-in tied to Kentucky basketball.
Stoops put together two 10-win seasons from 2018-21, the best stretch the program had seen since Bryant. The summer after the 2021 season brought plenty of buzz, then the mood shifted after John Calipari’s “basketball school” comments.
Kentucky’s offense sagged without Liam Coen calling plays, and the Wildcats finished 7-5.
The next season, Kentucky found a spark again in 2023 behind Ray Davis, who powered the Wildcats past Florida and back into the Top 25. Coen’s return raised expectations, but the season still took a turn when Kentucky coughed up a win at South Carolina. Stoops looked shaken beneath Williams-Brice Stadium, and that moment became an early sign that change was coming.
By Thanksgiving, word out of College Station was that Stoops was a leading candidate to replace Jimbo Fisher at Texas A&M. More reports surfaced before the Governor’s Cup, and then Kentucky stunned ninth-ranked Louisville, which had already locked up a spot in the ACC Championship Game the next week. Ray Davis scored three touchdowns, including the winner in the final minutes.
After the game, Stoops pushed back on the reports, but by 9 PM he was still expected to be Texas A&M’s next head coach. The situation spiraled in both places as Kentucky tried to make sense of it and the Aggies’ Board of Regents learned the terms athletic director Ross Bjork had agreed to with Stoops.
Texas A&M had already handed Jimbo Fisher a $76 million buyout, and bringing Stoops in would have meant paying him more than he made at Kentucky - not far from Jimbo’s number. Stoops fit the profile, but not the price. Another coach was available at a better number, and he had already served as Texas A&M’s defensive coordinator.
By midnight that Saturday, the plan had changed. Some will say Stoops turned down Texas A&M. In College Station, they moved on to Mike Elko.
If the money had lined up, Saturday’s game would look very different. Stoops would be on the Texas A&M sideline against Jon Sumrall’s Kentucky team.
Sumrall, a former UK linebacker, had already won two Sun Belt titles at Troy after coaching linebackers on Stoops’ staff. In Lexington, plenty of people were already imagining a welcome-back scene for him that Thanksgiving night.
Instead, Stoops won nine games over the next two seasons before reaching a settlement with Kentucky, which opened the door for Will Stein’s homecoming. Elko went 8-5 in his first season and then took the Aggies to the College Football Playoff for the first time.
And when ESPN rolls out the broadcast, Jay Bateman will be one of the first names it leans on. Kentucky’s defensive coordinator spent his last two seasons in College Station, just another piece of a coaching web between these two programs that goes far beyond the limited game history.
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The last Kentucky win over Texas A&M came in 1952, a reminder of just how long this road has been. The teams have not played often, but their most recent meeting in 2018 ended with a Texas A&M overtime victory, leaving Kentucky with another reminder of how hard this matchup has been to crack. [Read more 🡒]