By Joshua Huff

[email protected]

The UK football program is stuck between a rock and a national champion.

With its Buckeye neighbors just to the north and the breadbasket of the Southeastern Conference to the south, UK is cemented in the twilight zone of college football recruiting. As UK head coach Mark Stoops nears the end of his third season, the progress that was promised after consecutive top-30 recruiting classes has, so far, failed to fully blossom. Stoops is 11-21 in three seasons and is currently riding a three-game losing streak after Saturday’s loss to Tennessee.

This may be due in large part to Stoops’ recruiting splurge in Kentucky and in Ohio.

UK currently has 19 players on the roster from Ohio and 21 players from Kentucky. According to 247sports, UK’s class of 2016 includes 16 additional commitments from the two states. Of the eight SEC teams that currently reside in the premature top-20 team recruiting rankings for 2016 per 247sports, not one has a single commitment from players from Ohio and Kentucky.

They may be on to something.

In the 2015 recruiting class, the nine SEC teams that finished the recruiting cycle in the top-20 combined for just two commitments, one from Kentucky (Alabama’s Damien Harris) and one from Ohio (LSU’s George Brown Jr.). The combined record of those nine teams (Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, LSU, Texas A&M, Auburn, Ole Miss, Mississippi State and South Carolina) this season is 51-23.

Six of those teams currently sit in the top-25. UK, on the other hand, has fallen on hard times. In the past couple of weeks the talent discrepancy for UK and its past two opponents (Miss St. and Tennessee) have been obvious. The Bulldogs beat the Cats 42-16 and Tennessee won 52-21 on Saturday. Tennessee has just four recruits from Ohio on its roster while Miss. St. has none.

The problem for UK is that as the northern-most SEC team, the abundance of talent that the teams in the heart of the south enjoy doesn’t trickle into the Bluegrass, adding to UK’s woes is the presence of Ohio State. Of the top-10 highest rated recruits in 2015 from Ohio, six of them committed to Ohio State. UK’s tight end C.J. Conrad was the Cat’s highest-rated recruit (No. 13) from Ohio.

Without the same pedigree as its basketball team, UK’s football team is regulated to the doorstep of the SEC. Without a deep talent pool in Kentucky and the lure of Ohio State to the north, the struggle to draw in high quality talent has forced UK to ride a wave of mediocrity for years.

As UK continues to be gripped in between the vice of the SEC and the Big 10, the pickings from the recruiting tree are slim. In a sense, UK seems to be content with the apples that have fallen from the tree after season’s end. In Stoops’ three years of recruiting, starting with the 2014 class and ending with next year’s 2016 class, he has just 10 four-star recruits and no five stars, according to 247sports.com.

In contrast, UK’s nemesis to the south, Tennessee, has had 37 four-star recruits and one five-star throughout 2014 to 2016. Granted, its record over those years has been sub par, but in head-to-head match ups against UK, the Volunteers, since 2013, have defeated the Cats by a combined 129-53. And since Butch Jones has become head coach of the Volunteers, Tennessee has rarely headed north to pouch recruits, focusing more in Tennessee and in talent-rich Georgia.

It’s obvious the gap in talent level between UK and top SEC programs is hardly narrowing (UK is 4-18 in the SEC since 2013). Save for the narrow Florida defeat, the Cats are struggling to find the talent comparable to SEC teams in the deep south. Should the trend continue, UK will remain as the outlier in the SEC and forced to compete with No. 1 Ohio State for quality talent in the north.

Take Western Kentucky University for instance: it has 42 players on its roster from Kentucky and is 7-2, 5-0 in Conference USA. The talent from Kentucky translates well to lesser conferences, but when faced with programs from Power-5 conferences, the talent doesn’t translate — except for when WKU faces UK. The Cats all-time record in the SEC proves that Kentucky’s talent pool is inferior to that of the deep south.

Though it needs to be mentioned that despite the struggle to bring in quality recruits from Ohio and SEC country, the current UK roster is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was before Stoops arrived. And as UK continues forward, should Stoops and Vince Marrow remain, the talent level will indubitably increase. The question about whether that talent will be comparable to where it matters the most, the SEC, remains as unanswered as the Cats’ current struggles.