Well, the 2024 season has come to an end, and like much of the season, the final game was a disappointment.
The Kentucky Wildcats just rolled over in a rivalry game against Louisville, ending the six-game winning streak for the Cats in the rivalry and wrapping up a 4-8 campaign that saw them finish with just one conference win and none at home.
We could use a lot of space to diagnose the state of the program, what went wrong this season, and a variety of other topics, but we’ve done a lot of that already, and you’ll probably see more in the very near future.
Here, we’re going to look ahead to the transfer portal, where things are expected to get wild, to say the least.
First off, as I’m writing this, there are no definite portal decisions that have been announced, but there are rumors beginning to float, and Mark Stoops has already said there will be changes
We can reasonably expect that Kentucky will be very active in the offensive line market and likely in the defensive line market. Some reports out there suggest that Kentucky will take a different approach than last year in going after starters on Group of Five teams as opposed to backups at major programs.
That’s a departure from the portal approach last season, which did not produce quality results.
We should also reasonably expect several current Cats to hit the portal. We’ve seen Barion Brown’s name pop up a lot. While there is no guarantee Brown will hit the portal, there is a lot of smoke out there, so that’s definitely worth paying attention to.
On the heels of such a disappointing season, it’s reasonable to expect a lot of portal departures from this year’s team. How many will be the main question, and which guys make that leap?
The portal officially opens on December 9th, one week from tomorrow, so this should be an interesting couple of weeks.