Speaking hypothetically, there are reasons Mark Stoops might have for leaving Kentucky that UK cannot do anything to mitigate.
At 54, Stoops may feel he is at a point in his life when there is likely time for only one more major professional challenge.
The most-successful Wildcats head football coach in six decades may yearn for a chance to test himself by leading a program where the national championship is realistically within grasp on an annual basis.
During a period of personal transition, Stoops could just want to make a fresh start in a different town.
In any of those cases, there isn't anything UK could do to counteract those impulses.
What Kentucky and Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart cannot allow to happen, though, is for Stoops to leave Lexington because UK was unwilling to meet reasonable requests for program enhancements.
The perception of that would be a public-relations disaster for UK Athletics.
If the scuttlebutt around town is correct, Stoops has asked UK 1.) to stop talking about and start moving on the creation of a football-only indoor fieldhouse; 2.) for greater availability of private planes to use in recruiting; 3.) an enhanced assistant-coaching-salary pool.
In a world where Michigan State just signed a less-proven head coach, Mel Tucker, to a 10-year, $95-million contract extension, Stoops would not be wrong to think his current salary of $5.25 million is under market value, either (and, yes, I know these coaching salaries are beyond obscene. But the market sets the price).
With a gusher of TV money coming once the SEC's new $3 billion contract with ESPN kicks in with the 2024 college football season, those ought to be "asks" that UK can handle.
One of the fascinating things in watching Stoops be linked with some of the premier openings available during the current coaching carousel is how negative the fan reaction has been at places such as Florida, LSU and Oklahoma.
Part of that seems to be negative brand association with "Kentucky football," a program which obviously has historically languished.
But it also seems to come from not understanding the context of Stoops' coaching record.
It is one of the more impressive 58-53 marks one will ever see.
Stoops inherited a UK program that had gone 2-10, 0-8 in the SEC the season (2012) before he arrived.
He then went 12-26 to start his Kentucky tenure.
Starting in the third game of his fourth season (2016), Stoops has subsequently gone 46-27.
Those 46 wins over a six-season span are the second most in UK football history.
The only better six-year stretch of Kentucky football came in the final five seasons of the Bear Bryant coaching era (1949 through 1953) and the first season of Blanton Collier's tenure (1954) when the Wildcats won 47 games.
Since World War II, UK has had five — count'em, five — regular seasons of at least nine victories.
Stoops has now presided over two of them, 2018 (9-3) and this year (also 9-3).
Since the Southeastern Conference began in 1933, Kentucky has had a grand total of nine seasons in which it compiled a winning league record — and Stoops is now responsible for two of them, 2018 (5-3) and this year (also 5-3).
Being 25-25 in leagues games since 2016 may not sound like much to the folks in Baton Rouge, but Kentucky has never before won 25 SEC contests in a six-year span (and, yes, I know part of the reason is more games are played now than in the past).
Kentucky has also won 15 straight non-league games, a stretch that includes six victories over other Power Five conference foes — including three straight annihilations of intrastate archrival Louisville.
If your mark of good coaching is winning the close ones, Kentucky is 19-9 in one-possession games (margin of eight points or less) since the start of 2016.
Bottom line: Mark Stoops is a coach who has done impressive work in a historically challenging job in a brutal conference.
While I have not seen scientific polling on the topic, my sense is that Stoops presently has the highest approval rating among the UK fan base of any current, major Wildcats sports figure.
A son of blue-collar Youngstown, Ohio, he has proven a very good "fit" in the commonwealth.
It would behoove Stoops to think long and hard whether it is worth giving that up even if one of the football blue-bloods ultimately makes him an offer.
If Stoops nevertheless decides he wants a new challenge, UK and Wildcats fans should thank him for a job well done and wish him well.
Barnhart, however, needs to remember he works at a university whose football fans have been haunted for three-quarters of a century by an apocryphal story of UK giving Adolph Rupp a Cadillac and Bear Bryant a cigarette lighter to show appreciation for their championship labors.
At the school which "lost Bear Bryant," what Kentucky cannot do is let its current successful football coach leave because any reasonable request for program upgrades went unmet.
