NC State (8-3 overall, 7-3 ACC) will play Kentucky (4-6 overall and SEC) Jan. 2 at noon at TIAA Stadium in Jacksonville, Fla., in the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl. The game will be televised nationally by ESPN.
Here are five things to know about Kentucky:
1. Head coach Mark Stoops has done good work
Both Kentucky and NC State had job openings after the 2012 season. The Wolfpack hired Dave Doeren away from Northern Illinois on Dec. 1. Three days prior to that, the Wildcats had given Mark Stoops his first chance at a head coaching job. Eight years later, both are still leading their respective institutions.
Of the 31 overall hires made that offseason, only Louisiana Tech's Skip Holtz, New Mexico State's Doug Martin and Idaho's Paul Petrino remain, and Idaho has moved down to the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS).
Stoops is the brother of former Oklahoma legendary coach Bob Stoops and former Arizona head coach Mike Stoops. Mark was Mike's defensive coordinator until 2010, when he took the same role at Florida State. He held that job for three years before being hired at Kentucky.
After going 2-10 in his opening season and having back-to-back 5-7 campaigns, Stoops led UK to four straight winning records, including a 10-win campaign in 2018. Stoops was named the SEC Coach of the Year that season, and it was the Wildcats' first 10-win campaign in 41 years. This year is his first losing season since 2015. He is 48-50 overall and 24-42 in the SEC.
2. Kentucky has had trouble scoring at times this season
It does not take a football guru to see why Kentucky has a losing record. In five of its six losses, the Wildcats failed to score more than 13 points. The only time Kentucky surpassed 13 points and still lost was when it fell 42-41 in overtime at home to Ole Miss.
Overall, Kentucky ranks 107th out of 127 FBS teams that played this season in points per game with its average of 21.7 a contest.
That might explain why Stoops has made a change in offensive coordinators already since the regular season ended. He hired Liam Coen, the assistant quarterbacks coach for the Los Angeles Rams, to replace the fired Eddie Gran.
3. A lot of their losses came against ranked teams
When the SEC adjusted its fall schedule to play 10 conference-only games, Kentucky was not a winner in the new format. The SEC finished with four of the top nine teams in the final release of the College Football Playoff Rankings, and Kentucky played three of them.
The Wildcats lost to No. 1 Alabama (63-3), No. 7 Florida (34-10) and No. 9 Georgia (14-3). It also lost to a pair of teams that were, at one point, also ranked in the CFP poll: Missouri (20-10) and Auburn (29-13). Those also happened to be five of the six SEC squads that were ranked at one point in the only rankings that matter.
The only defeat against an unranked team from the conference was the aforementioned Ole Miss loss.
UK also went only 1-4 in games outside its home stadium, the lone victory being over Tennessee, who was ranked in the Associated Press and Coaches' polls at the time before tumbling to a 3-7 overall record.
4. They have not played NC State much, at all
If COVID-19 does not prevent the game from happening, it will be just the fourth time these two programs have met. However, it'll also be only the second time in over 100 years they have squared off.
The first two times they have played each other would require The Wolfpacker's resident NC State athletics historian Tim Peeler to get the details since they happened in 1903 and 1909. Both games took place in Raleigh, with UK winning the first 18-0 and the Pack taking the second, 15-6.
The only other time the teams face each other was a one-off showdown in Lexington, Ky., in 1970, when Kentucky rolled to a 27-2 triumph. That was during Earle Edwards' last year of his record-setting 17-season run as the Wolfpack head coach that saw him win a school-record 77 games and five ACC titles.
5. Kentucky's had mixed success in bowls
The Wildcats are 10-9 all time in bowl games, including 2-2 under Stoops.
Stoops' first bowl was, ironically, the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl on New Year's Eve in 2016, and the Wildcats were defeated 33-18 by Georgia Tech.
However, Stoops has won the last two postseason games he coached, topping Penn State 27-2 in the Citrus Bowl in Orlando on New Year's Day in 2019 and then defeating Virginia Tech 37-30 in the Belk Bowl in Charlotte on New Year's Eve last year.
This is just the second time that Kentucky will be participating in a bowl game in Jacksonville.
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