Ranking the top 20 college football coaches for 2021

19. Mark Stoops, Kentucky

All told, Mark Stoops’ overall record with the Kentucky Wildcats doesn’t necessarily stack up to the majority of the other coaches that make the cut for the top 20 of these rankings. He’s only 49-50 over eight seasons with the program, which is incidentally his first head coaching job. But when you think about the expectations in Lexington, it’s hard not to be impressed by what Stoops has done.

Kentucky was coming off of a 2-10 record in the 2012 season when Stoops took over and they replicated that effort — along with a winless run in the SEC that year — in his first season. Since then, however, the Wildcats have never won fewer than five games in a season and, prior to last season, had three straight winning seasons, including going 10-3 in the 2018 campaign and surviving a multitude of hardships to claw out an 8-5 season in 2019.

Stoops has substantially raised the floor of a Power 5 program that, frankly, didn’t have much of a floor before he arrived. His ability to maximize and develop roster talent is on par with the best in college football and his teams are almost always well-disciplined and coached.

The Wildcats aren’t ever going to be consistently on the level of the likes of Alabama, Georgia, Auburn and so on in the SEC. However, the fact that Stoops has Kentucky being consistently competitive in such a loaded conference while also popping on occasion speaks to the work he’s done at the helm of the program.