playAlex ScarboroughOct 21, 2026, 07:00 AM ETCloseCovers the SEC.Joined ESPN in 2012.Graduate of Auburn University.Multiple AuthorsOpen Extended ReactionsWill Stein said right from the outset what he planned to do.”I didn’t come here to be average, to be mediocre,” he told a room full of Kentucky supporters and media at an introductory news conference in December. “I came here to win and win championships.”The college football world should have known then that the now 37-year-old rookie head coach was different. That he couldn’t care less about the low football expectations at a basketball school, where it has lost more games on the field than it has won. That he would have the gall to tell a room of reporters at SEC media days in the summer that he believed he could win at Kentucky simply “because of me.” That, a few months after that, he’d forgo a couple of easy extra points to extend overtime in games against South Carolina and LSU and instead hold up two fingers to signal that he wasn’t all talk, that he was willing to roll the dice and go for the win on two-point conversions.
In Stein’s mind there’s no room for doubt, only the distance between Point A and Point B and what you’re willing to put on the line to get there.That’s who Will Stein is. It’s all he has ever been.Go back to when he was a state champion quarterback at Trinity High in Louisville when he turned down Division III invitations to pursue a spot at an FBS school because he wanted to play among the best. Kentucky — the team his dad played for, the program he grew up living and dying with as a fan every fall — didn’t even want him as a walk-on. So he stayed home and walked on at rival Louisville.
After seniors Justin Burke and Adam Froman were injured during a Week 7 loss to Cincinnati, a redshirt freshman Stein got the start against Arkansas State. The Red Wolves were 2-4 and holding on for dear life in the Sun Belt, and yet when their defensive players saw the 5-foot-10 (in shoes) and 185-pound (soaking wet) Stein trotting onto the field, they laughed. “Is that your quarterback?” they asked incredulously. Rocco Gasparro, Louisville’s sports information director at the time, was told how Stein responded to those jeers: “It doesn’t matter because we’re going to kick the crap out of you.”Stein threw for 232 yards and won the game.
In the aftermath, Gasparro tried to prepare Stein for the inevitable questions about his lack of size and star power. But, Gasparro said, “He didn’t care about either. He was so confident in his ability.” A matter-of-fact Stein told reporters, “I don’t back down.”And if he could do all that, if he had the willpower as an undersized walk-on to become a starter at a place like Louisville, if he could respond to the Cardinals later bringing in five-star Teddy Bridgewater by telling coaches, “That’s fine. I’ll go toe-to-toe,” and then only lose his job to Bridgewater after separating his shoulder, then who is anyone to tell Stein what is and isn’t possible?
Of course he’s audacious enough to believe he can turn Kentucky into a championship program — life has never given him a good reason to entertain other people’s expectations.Because of Will Stein, the Wildcats are in the College Football Playoff hunt. After being picked to finish 14th in the SEC in the preseason, they’re not only 6-1 and tied for second in the conference, they’re drawing comparisons to another basketball school that quickly morphed into a football superpower thanks to a similarly bold head coach — Indiana and Curt Cignetti.Stein’s former offensive coordinator at Louisville, Shawn Watson, tried to describe his former pupil last week. “He’s a tough, gutty, get-it-done guy,” he said. Then, after thinking it over, he used a word you don’t hear a lot in football: “Brave.””He’s become the coach that he was as a player,” Watson said.
“I mean, his ability to lead, people gravitate to him.”Rallying the Wildcats fanbaseWhen Rich Brooks joined Stein for the pregame walk into Kroger Field before the LSU game earlier this month, the stadium erupted in applause. In the early 2000s, Brooks lifted Kentucky out of obscurity and into something more resembling respectability. After three sub-.500 seasons, Brooks and the Wildcats played in four straight bowl games, winning three of them.Then Brooks retired and the handoff to Joker Phillips, Brooks’ former assistant, didn’t go well. Phillips went 13-24 before he was fired.
Mark Stoops worked miracles as his replacement, though. Over 13 seasons, the Wildcats went to eight bowl games and won 10 games twice. But the air came out of the balloon toward the end — and it happened quickly. Maybe things had simply run their course by the time Stoops was let go after going 5-7 last season.
Maybe he wasn’t as adept at navigating a shifting college football landscape as he needed to be.Sources at Kentucky still have a lot of respect for Stoops and what he built. During Stein’s introductory news conference, he thanked Stoops personally and said, “I think we all owe him an incredible amount of debt for his efforts and success here.” But those same sources believed that Stoops had become too fixated on what Kentucky didn’t have in terms of funding for player acquisition compared with other programs. Stein, those sources said, was refreshing in that he didn’t spend all his time complaining about a lack of resources and instead set about improving the situation by rallying the fanbase to his side.Bringing back Brooks and other Kentucky legends like former No. 1 draft pick Tim Couch was part of that effort. Stein also brought back the beloved “Power K” logo that had gone unused for decades.
A Kentucky kid embracing all things Kentucky has resonated with a fanbase that had perhaps grown tired of Stoops’ preoccupation with winning the state of Ohio in recruiting.Brooks said to witness Kentucky’s takedown of LSU was “surreal.”It took steel you-know-whats, Brooks added, to go for two in overtime like that.But more than anything, Brooks appreciated seeing progress up close. The fans. The atmosphere. The facilities that were supposed to be built before he retired and wound up taking much longer than that.Right now, Brooks said, Stein is a “hero.”He isn’t shying away from the Indiana comparison, either.”Well, yeah, I believe Will can do something very special at Kentucky,” Brooks said.But he does have a bone to pick with one narrative in the media.
It came up when he was asked whether he saw Stein’s viral moment at SEC media days. Stein was asked why he thought he could win at Kentucky and said, “This is going to sound like really … I think because of me, to be honest.” Immediately, people connected the dots back to when Indiana coach Cignetti said, “I win. Google me.””I did,” Brooks said of the sound-bite of the summer.
“And then I saw the rest of the interview that the media cut off on television. Because of me, because I’ve had experience being in these programs and learned from great coaches at two or three different stops and had the ability to see firsthand how to build it. See, he went on and explained why me. He is a cocky guy, but I think the media did him a disservice in that, isolating that quote.”But guess what?
He’s backed it up.”‘Sunshine Will Stein’Stein’s final season as a player at Louisville ended with a Sugar Bowl win over Florida. Head coach Charlie Strong then hired him as a graduate assistant the next season and the Cardinals went 12-1. He stayed on under Bobby Petrino the next season before reuniting with Strong and Watson at Texas in 2015.It was there, in Austin, that he moved in with Jeff Traylor, then a special teams/tight ends coach and soon to be the head coach at UTSA. Traylor said that Stein was the ideal roommate: always a clean room, always eager to talk ball.”I call him Sunshine Will Stein,” Traylor said.
“He ain’t ever had a bad day. Always had a smile on his face and thought he was going to conquer the world his entire life. He has the perfect
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