Notebook: UK's Brooks trying to do the seemingly undoable

Rich Brooks the football coach sounds a lot like Travis Ford the basketball coach did this week. Both are at Kentucky universities. Both are in impossible situations.

Rich Brooks says if the status quo could be upended in the Pac-10, it can happen in the SEC, too. (AP)

"The experience factor alone is outstanding, let alone size and speed," said Brooks, sizing up the competition. "It's very difficult playing against the perennial top 10 teams in the nation."

A cynic might surmise the obvious difference: Ford, Eastern Kentucky's coach this week in a first-round NCAA Tournament game against the second-seeded Wildcats, actually had a shot.

Not so for Brooks, the Kentucky football coach, who is suffering through one of the worst football probations in recent years. The Wildcats just finished with sanctions that docked the program 19 scholarships over three years.

Predictably, Kentucky, 2-9 last year, has sunk to the bottom of SEC East.

Not a good place to be in 2005.

The division qualifies as one of the nation's toughest conferences next season. Four of the five remaining programs (Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Florida) have superstar coaches. At least two schools -- Georgia and Tennessee -- will challenge for the conference title. The Vols should be a preseason top five with their best team since the 1998 championship season.

Kentucky? Proof that you-know-what runs downhill. The mess left by Hal Mumme in the Albert Means recruiting scandal ripped the program apart. The fallout at least had to be a decision by his replacement, Guy Morriss, to leave two years ago for lowly Baylor.

Four coaches have left Brooks' staff during the offseason. Linebacker Dustin Williams, arguably the team's best defender, quit.

What should gall Kentuckians the most is that Mumme has a new job (New Mexico State) and has a better chance to win right now than Brooks.

"It doesn't take a genius to figure out that 2004 was going to be the toughest year," Brooks said, "that's when the full impact of the scholarship limitations would hit."

That's the thing about sanctions, though. They're the gift that keeps on giving -- or in this case, taking away.

Brooks, 63, was given the job basically because he was willing to take on an impossible situation. He started with 68 scholarship players in 2003. Last year there were 73 (the max is 85), the lowest number in the SEC. A combined 20 starters and key reserves then missed at least one game because of injury.