The House of Blue

He's absolutely right about a couple of things.

1- If UK thinks they'll be back to having 65,000 fans in the stands for every home game, regardless of who they hire, they've lost their mind.

2- The fanbase finally caught on to the fact that the administration hasn't given the football progrom a fighting chance. As a result, MANY long standing fans that bought tickets no matter what have finally decided enough is enough.

For the first time in 50 years, UK is going to be forced to earn many of the fans back. If they don't make big investments and promote football like they should, many of the fans will stay home.

In respone to 1. Who said UK would have 65,000 fans in the seats no matter who they hired?

2. This UK administration with Barnhart has committed more football than any administration in history and the product on the field is as good as it's been outside the last two seasons in the last 50 years. With the potential bonding deal coming this winter we could see the upgrades we all know we need.

3. I agree to an extent but folks are ignoring that uk was in a modern day golden era just. 4 years ago for uk football standards. We've had a taste and now we expect more. That's a good thing. Mitch knows this. That's why he fired joker and is trying to get a big time coach to uk.

Amen, ukblueforever. To say our modern day golden age is 8-5, 7-6 seasons is a PART OF THE PROBLEM. We must expect more and our administration must be ready to provide for more...

How could our most successful AD ever, produce such a loser in football? We have lost way more than we have won during his tenure and that's with the easiet OOC schedule imaginable.

Just because it's better than our typical history, does not mean that it is good enough. We must demand better NOW.

Larry Vaught is one of the more credible reporters out there.And he is correct in his assesment of UK fans.They are not going to shell out big bucks for a losing football program anymore,and as soon as Barnhart realizes, this the more apt he is to make a better hire this time around.

Is this our goal? We are doing great because look at our past? This is the same kind of self-defeating attitude that has kept UK in the SEC basement for 50 years.

It's time to set the bar a little higher. It's time someone at UK has the vision to take our football program to new heights. If we don't intend to compete for a SEC championship then why are we even playing football?

My expectations are raised. But you have to walk before you can run. Rich got is to walking. We all hoped joker could get is to running but he didn't. Now we need to get the guy who can get us to where we all want to be.

I believe that analogy fits if you are applying it to a coaches tenure, crawl first, walk next, then run. I don't believe you have to hire one coach to walk then another to run.

Larry Vaught hits the nail on the head...Another great point in this thread was the SEC record...While Brooks did a good job, he still ended up with only 1 year where he won 4 SEC games..His best team in his second to last year, they got only 3 SEC wins...Another great point was the added extra game..That has been huge in getting UK to bowl games it did, no question..So if you want to compare now with our History, we still suck in the SEC and an added game got UK to some very low tier bowl games, where we went 2-2 and basically the fourth one where the team really didn't even show up against Pitt...

John Calipari, not a person he can't get along with, actually has his own AD so that he doesn't have to deal with Mitch..He patrionized UK fans on Joker's way out...He made one of the worst hires in College basketball history with Billy Gillespie..It took Mike Pratt getting involved to get John Calipari here...Now I get it, our olympic sports have improved and if you have a daughter or son who played at UK for one of those teams, that is great and their success is noticed..However...In the grand scheme of things, an Athletic Director at a SEC school is based on one thing and one thing only, that is, how is your football team??

Joker and Mitch had the dream scenario setup ..He got gift wrapped Randall Cobb, the basketball team is back to hanging banners, all he had to do was win 6-8 games a year...Nobody out there wants to work with Mitch Barnhardt in the big boy world of college football...its that simple

It doesn't take a genius to know that Mitch offeded a lot of the football fanbase last year when he called them a "Microwave Society" for being down on Joker Phillips in what was obvious to many a failed experiment in the making. Ticket sales plummeted.

He took it a step further just a few week back when he went on the radio and declared the fans that aren't on board with Joker must have a "personal agenda" against him, essentially hinting that race was a factor in fan dissaprovement.

Since then, he has dodged the fans and the media to address the situation and lay out his vision for the program. That is an extremely poor decision and is portrayed as WEAK leadership.

Mitch has to accept part of the responsibility of UK football fans walking away for the first time in decades. He's partronized many of them, and has done nothing to try to woo them back.

He's probably a great man, but he's an absolute PR fiasco.

How can a person who sits by & allows a large funding source dry up be one of the best in the country? That non-revenue sports feed off that drying up source doesn't compute to being one of the best in the country. Skip the Directors/Presidents/Whatever Cup standings when in fact it's built on a house of cards nor reflects the full importance of football to the bottomline.