Kentucky head coach Will Stein is backing his new defensive coordinator, Jay Bateman, and that alone is enough to get Texas A&M fans rolling their eyes.
Bateman’s name still carries plenty of baggage in College Station. Aggie fans have long pinned much of the defense’s struggles over the past couple of seasons on him and former defensive line coach Sean Spencer, and they were hardly broken up when Bateman left for Kentucky this offseason.
Even before that move, the situation in College Station had already shifted. Last season, Mike Elko was widely viewed as the one steering the defense for most of the year, even though Bateman held the coordinator title on paper. Lyle Hemphill’s arrival also mattered, since he helped clean up a lot of the issues Texas A&M had on the back end from the year before.
This offseason, Elko turned the defense fully over to Hemphill, while Bateman headed to Kentucky with his contract renewal status in College Station very much up in the air. For Stein, the hire makes sense on paper. Bateman should help recruit better players than Kentucky is used to landing, but the coaching and scheme are another matter.
That’s where Stein’s comments started to sound familiar to Aggie fans for all the wrong reasons.
Here’s @TylerShawSports asking new Kentucky head coach Will Stein about his hiring of former Texas A&M defensive coordinator Jay Bateman for the same role with the Wildcats: pic.twitter.com/roQiQl9Ger
- 𝕋𝕣𝕒𝕧𝕚𝕤 𝕃. 𝔹𝕣𝕠𝕨𝕟 (@Travis_L_Brown) July 20, 2026
There’s nothing unusual about a first-time head coach showing faith in one of his first hires. That part is easy to understand. What jumps out to Texas A&M fans is the praise for Bateman’s scheme, because that was one of the biggest problems during his time in College Station.
Bateman did have an elite defense at Army years ago, but his stops since then haven’t come close to that standard. He deserves some leeway for working as a co-defensive coordinator at North Carolina, but when he was paired with one of the best defensive minds in the country in Elko, the results in College Station still should have been better.
There was even a specific moment late in the 2024 season when Elko called out the defense for not being able to run zone coverages. That’s a coaching issue, plain and simple, and it lands directly on the former coordinator’s shoulders. It also doesn’t exactly scream mastery of the teaching side of the job.
Maybe Bateman does better at Kentucky than he did at Texas A&M. That’s possible.
But Stein and Wildcats fans expecting elite scheme work might want to keep the expectations in check. Aggie fans have already seen enough to know how this story can go.
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For Texas A&M fans, the reaction has been almost as satisfying as any on-field result, because the skepticism theyve long had about Texas is now getting aired out on a much bigger stage. Even with the hype, there are still plenty around the SEC wondering whether the Longhorns have the depth to match the spotlight, especially with the new nine-game schedule looming and the margin for error getting smaller. [Read more 🡒]