Vols4us
The Name's John Lee Pettimore
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Tennessee vs Kentucky –
What’s the difference?
In 2013 Mark “Malarkey” Stoops was hired as the Head Football Coach at Kentucky. In 8 seasons he has won 24 SEC games and lost 42. He has only had 1 winning season in the SEC, 2018, where he went 5-3. In those 8 years he has beat Tennessee 2 times and lost to Tennessee 6 times.
During the same 8 years, starting with our new coach, Butch Jones, in 2013 and through Jeremy Pruitt, Tennessee has won 24 SEC games and lost 42. No difference, right? Well, we’ve actually had 2 winning seasons in conference (2015 & 2019), plus we’ve beat Kentucky 6 times and only lost twice.
The real difference and what will likely always separate us from Kentucky in football is we expect to do better – so we fired Butch (4-1 vs UK), then fired Jeremy (2-1 vs UK), and now we have our 3rd coach beginning his run in 2021. No matter what else happens it seems inevitable that Josh Heupel will have a winning record against Mark “Malarkey” Stoops. jmo.
In the 2 wins Kentucky had against us over the last 8 years they got to face Guarantano at QB, first in 2017 and then in 2020 (Even JG beat them twice). Perhaps the person most disappointed to see JG transfer away from Tennessee is Mark “Malarkey” Stoops.
In addition to losing Guarantano, Kentucky also lost both starting cornerbacks (biggest loss was Joseph, who had 4 Ints last year including 1 of the pick sixes against us), their edge rusher (18.5 career sacks), MLB (102 tackles in 2020), and their starting NT.
They fired two of their offensive coaches, Eddie Gran (OC) and Darin Hinshaw (QB), and brought in the “Assistant” to the QB coach for the Rams to run their new offense. The guy was previously the “Assistant” to the receivers coach for the Rams.
Kentucky also has a new offensive line coach (replacing an interim OL coach) and a new running backs coach/special teams coordinator.
Mark “Malarkey” Stoops said during spring practice that he was really excited about his new offense but sorry, just like Dan Mullen at Florida, it’s not yet ready for a spring game this year. Need more time.
Any suggestion that in the normal course of things we should be seriously worried about Kentucky this year is likely just a bunch of “Malarkey”. jmo.
100%.
Other than tightening up their D, which was good at times and mediocre the rest, Eddie Gran was the only reason they won at all with the lack of talent they had on O. He devised a couple of excellent schemes to use the talent they had to its utmost. The problem was and will continue to be that later point - lack of talent. As a result top assistant coaches will not go there generally. Cannot recruit well there and Malarkey has topped out with his own competency.