Though it may be easy to forget with the likes of Arkansas and Texas A&M, two former rivals of the Texas Longhorns, in the newly anointed SEC conference, Texas has yet to build a history with many of the nation’s longest-running athletic departments.
Take Kentucky, for example, a school that has fielded a football team since 1915, playing 1,000 miles away, but has only played Texas once in its program’s entirety. The 1951 matchup between the Wildcats and the Longhorns was a true shootout, ending in an uneventful 7-6 score in favor of the Longhorns. The teams wouldn’t meet for another 73 years, with the streak breaking on Nov. 23 as the Wildcats head to Austin.
Leading the Wildcats is a familiar last name in Texas football lore. The Stoops brothers, a trio of collegiate football coaches, have a combined 305 head coaching wins in college football between Mike Stoops, Kentucky inside linebackers coach, former Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops and Kentucky head coach Mark Stoops. Bob Stoops is the name that sticks out for Texas fans, as the College Football Hall of Famer won 12 Red River Showdown games in his 18 years coaching the Sooners. Mark will look to be another Stoops that plagues the Longhorns in pursuit of a national championship.
Mark Stoops enters his 12th year with the Wildcats with an overall winning record, even winning SEC Coach of the Year in 2018. Stoops has little connection to the Longhorns, apart from cheering on his brother in past matchups in Dallas, but does employ a familiar name on his staff.
Jay Boulware, Kentucky running back coach and special teams coordinator, played two years at Texas in the early nineties, with an expectation that he would be a starting offensive tackle in his third season. Tragically, Boulware was diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmia, a career-ending diagnosis due to irregularities in his breathing and heart rate. Still, Boulware stayed loyal to Texas, joining as a student coach and graduate assistant from 1994 to 1996. Boulware began to climb the ladder in the coaching world, even making it back to Texas for a COVID-19 year assistant head coach gig, but was not invited to be on new head coach Steve Sarkisian’s staff. Instead, Boulware has found his way in Kentucky, where he has already helped turn Vanderbilt transfer Ray Davis into a fourth-round NFL draft pick.
Offensively, the Wildcats have some playmakers. Texas has to be aware of the two junior wideouts Barion Brown and Dane Key, one of the fastest duos in the nation who combined for over 1,300 yards as true sophomores in 2023. Kentucky also used the portal effectively in 2024, adding Brock Vandagriff, a top-five transfer quarterback and former top-five quarterback recruit from Georgia. Running back Chip Trayanum is another portal addition that new offensive coordinator Bush Hamdan has at his disposal.
However, the most successful Kentucky teams win on the defensive side of the ball, like Stoops’ 2018 team, which ranked sixth in the nation in points allowed per game. In 2018, future top-10 pick Josh Allen headlined the Wildcats pass rush, and Stoops may have his next first-round hopeful on the roster. Defensive tackle Deone Walker was in the top 10 in both sacks and tackles for loss in the SEC as a true sophomore, building off of that already successful 2022 recruiting class. Walker, alongside cornerback Maxwell Hairston, are the only two defensive Wildcats on the preseason All-SEC first team, as voted by the media.
The expectations for Texas remain the same when Kentucky comes into town: win games like this so you can worry about games against your biggest rivals. Kentucky enters the year predicted to finish 11th in the SEC, as voted by the media, while Texas is expected to make the SEC championship game. With the Kentucky matchup marking the one-week point before the Texas A&M game, it’s important that the Longhorns don’t drop a game they should win. Texas will need to keep it clean in Austin against the Wildcats in preparation against the Aggies.
