Wan'Dale Robinson
With National Signing Day for college football having come and gone and spring practice quickly approaching it’s time to talk a little football. SEC Football as a matter of fact. After all, “it just means more” — more coaching changes, more player transfers and definitely more high-powered recruiting.
That’s what I wanted to talk about. Specifically how some of UK’s rivals ended up in the recruiting wars and what that might mean for the Wildcats next season.
Per ESPN, Kentucky finished 39th overall and 12th in the SEC in 2021 recruiting. They signed three ESPN Top 300 players, including two from Kentucky and they signed their first ESPN Top 300 wide receiver, Dekel Crowdus at No. 224, since 2014. Adding linebacker prospect Trevin Wallace on Signing Day — a No. 216 recruit in the ESPN 300 — helped keep UK in the running for Linebacker U. and rounded out what was already a very good recruiting class.
Don’t let the 12th place ranking in the SEC fool you. With the addition of a few transfers like Wan’Dale Robinson from Nebraska, the Wildcats filled several open holes on their roster — most notably on the offensive side of the ball — and continued to bring quality players to Lexington. UK has had a Top 40 recruiting class every year since 2016 and Mark Stoops is slowly building the type of depth he needs here to compete every year in the SEC.
But what about some of UK’s main rivals. Let’s start with the Volunteers of Tennessee. With the soap opera that continues to be called a football program continuing to churn down in Knoxville one would think that finishing at No. 18 (UT was ranked No. 2 in May 2020) would be pretty good. And it is good enough for sixth in the SEC but with the heavy losses the Volunteers suffered through the transfer portal — losing top players at several offensive and defensive positions — it will be interesting to see if new coach Josh Heupel can pull a rabbit out of a hat and get this Tennessee team to exceed the 3-7 record it had last season.
A couple of other teams that show up on UK’s schedule each year — Mississippi State and Missouri — both finished slightly ahead of Kentucky in the rankings with MSU finishing 34th and Missouri 32nd. Between those two teams, I believe Missouri will be the team to keep an eye on. Second-year coach Eli Drinkwitz has some talent to work with there and seems to be able to relate well to his players. They should be a team that can compete well in the SEC East next season.
Another couple of teams that appear annually on UK’s schedule didn’t fare so well in the recruiting wars. Vanderbilt — with former Notre Dame defensive coordinator and new coach Clark Lea — finished 57th in the country (13th in the SEC) while the South Carolina Gamecocks finished last in the SEC which should be cause for concern for new coach Shane Beamer. Inheriting a team that won two games last season while signing a class ranked 14th in the SEC could put a big dent in the job security in Columbia.
That only leaves the elephants in the room — or in this case Bulldogs and Gators — to discuss. As usual both schools — Georgia and Florida — finished in the Top 10 nationally. Georgia signed the No. 3 class (No. 2 in the SEC), the fifth year in a row they have signed a Top 3 or better class. Keep that stat in mind.
Florida finished at No.10 nationally and No. 5 in the SEC and looked to land its third Top 10 class in a row. That still puts them behind Alabama, Georgia, LSU, and Texas A&M.
But the good news is — for both Georgia and Florida — that the last 10 National Champions had a four-year average recruiting rank in the Top 10. Georgia is right there but Dan Mullen at Florida still has some work to do.
So there you have it. The rich keep getting richer — the SEC signed 99 Top 300 recruits compared to the next closest league which was the Big 10 with 55 — and the poor keep trying to get into the race. It should come as no surprise to anyone of the last 15 National Champions only three schools – Clemson, Ohio State, and Florida State – were not from the SEC.
Those statistics just highlight even more the job Stoops has done to pull a bottom tier program like Kentucky up to where now it at least has a shot to compete in games against Georgia, Florida, LSU, and Auburn. In the past, those games were written off as sure losses.
Now all Cats fans need from Stoops and Company is to continue to develop more players that fly under the radar — like Josh Allen and Calvin Taylor — into big-time SEC talents while utilizing the transfer portal to bring in guys like Wan’Dale Robinson and UK should continue to be in the mix in the SEC East. With a football program that has historically been down as long as UK’s, as a fan that’s all you can ask for.
— Keith Peel, Contributing Writer
