Football Crazy in Kentucky

Kentucky. Nobody noticed, but Kentucky has become a football state rather than a basketball state. Louisville and the University of Kentucky both convincingly won their bowl games over ACC opponents and both should be ranked after all the bowls are done with Louisville in the Top 5. To the contrary, neither the Louisville nor the Kentucky basketball teams are ranked and neither looks like it's going to go anywhere.

But it goes farther than that. The main reason that the Louisville and Kentucky basketball teams have declined is the broader decline of high school basketball in Kentucky. High schools in Louisville, the Mountains, and Western Kentucky just aren't churning out championship caliber basketball players like they used to. The last consensus top recruit to come out of Kentucky was Rajon Rondo of Louisville three years ago. The next top guy will be Darius Miller, a junior out of Mason County who's already got scholarship offers from Kentucky and other top schools. That's just not enough for either Kentucky and Louisville to be the Top Ten teams they used to be.

Big time football recruiters have no such problem. Coaches from Tennessee, Ohio State, Notre Dame, and the Florida powers swarm the state every year from Mayfield near the Mississippi River to Ashland on the Ohio. With a population of only 3.6 million, Kentucky can not have the same volume of great football players as Florida, Georgia, and Texas, but star quarterbacks and 270 pound linebackers have replaced skinny basketball players from the Mountains as the state's top sports icons.

The transition from basketball to football is probably not a good thing. Football is a much more conservative game than basketball and Kentucky has become a more conservative state as football has become more prominent. But it's important to be good at something. And given that the state of Kentucky has gotten good at football, I'm all for it.