Kentucky football has never seen anything like Will Stein — and he thinks this is just the beginning

One of college football's most impressive first-year coaches is on the other end of the computer screen, enjoying an opportune moment to talk about how Kentucky, of all schools, has ended up 7-1 and ranked No. 6 by the College Football Playoff committee heading into Saturday's game at No. 13 Tennessee.

Will Stein is in his office wearing a hat with the oversized "Power K" logo, which Kentucky used back from the mid-1970s through the mid-90s but was resuscitated at Stein's request shortly after he was named the head coach last winter at age 36.

It's a curious bit of nostalgia to bring back, simply because it does not harken back to some great era of Kentucky football. Such an era, in fact, does not really exist. For most of the years with the Power K on its helmet, Kentucky lost far more than it won, save for a 10-1 season in 1977 that never got its due because the program was on probation and ineligible for the postseason.

"It's the first logo I ever wore as a kid and it's the same logo my dad wore when he played here," Stein told Yahoo Sports, referring to his father Matt, a former defensive end. "It's not symbolic of the glory days, per se, but there were some really good times in this. You make the most out of what you have and create your own history."

At that point in the conversion, the dots started to connect on how Stein has pulled this off: His mind does not work like the rest of ours.

The first clue came at SEC media days, when he waltzed to the podium and said, both matter of factly and without a whisper of arrogance, that Kentucky was going to win big "because of me, to be honest." The second clue came on the visitor's sideline in Columbia, South Carolina, when he decided in the first overtime that the game was going to end on one play — and then did the very same thing in the exact same situation a week later to beat LSU.

As Stein talked through those moments and others that have gotten Kentucky into a realistic position for a long-shot playoff bid, the most impressive part about it is how little he's impressed by any of it. There are certain people who walk through the world with a sense that the good things happening were simply supposed to happen, and now one of them is coaching the football team at Kentucky.

"I don't know if it's nature or nurture," said Stein, whose chutzpah has played no small part in rising from an assistant coach at Lake Travis High School in Austin, Texas, to Oregon's offensive coordinator to the SEC in the span of seven short years. "It's probably a combination of both, you know. I've probably been born inherently more confident in myself. I don't know why, I really don't, but I've always been around extremely strong and tough coaches and family members that were confident people themselves. If you are surrounded by the right people as a young person, you don't have that option. You're really dealt that hand."

Kentucky, the program Stein rooted for growing up before walking on as a quarterback at Louisville, was dealt a much different hand: Decades before Stein was born, it became a basketball school.

As such, Kentucky has been graded on a curve for his entire life. The short bursts of success under Fran Curci in the 1970s, Hal Mumme in the 1990s and Mark Stoops more recently are celebrated the way many schools remember championships. When Stoops reached the 10-win mark in 2018 and 2021, it felt like a monumental achievement.

But as Stein authors potentially the best season in the modern history of Kentucky football, he has managed to make it seem equally like the coolest story in college football but one we should have been expecting all along.

"I don't know if it's something magical that we do," Stein said. "It's literally just like we don't turn the ball over and we create takeaways, which give us bonus possessions and we're able to capitalize on them. We knew if what we do at practice can translate to the game, and we know what we're capable of doing, then we can win every game that we line up."

In so many ways, the new era of college football has made it possible for Kentucky to put a season like this together while also diminishing the potency of the surprise. Indiana, a traditional basketball school with a worse football history than Kentucky, hired Curt Cignetti and instantly became a playoff team and then a national champion. Ole Miss, which rarely won much of anything since integration, came within a whisper of playing for a national title and has been one of the SEC's winningest programs in the NIL era. Vanderbilt got a quarterback out of the transfer portal from New Mexico State and became a national darling. Because of one benefactor willing to spend millions on a roster, Texas Tech almost instantly shot to the top of the Big 12.

And even with Kentucky, though 7-1 would have been hard to predict, there were several smart people around the sport last December who predicted an instant turnaround once Stein got the job. Despite no head coaching history and only three years as a power conference coordinator under Dan Lanning at Oregon, Stein's experience working with transfer quarterbacks and Kentucky's willingness to invest meant there was little doubt he could improve the roster quickly in the transfer portal.

"I always saw this as a place that was more or less a sleeping giant," Stein said, and he quickly assembled a team he liked, even if it took some all-nighters trying to balance his new job at Kentucky with helping Oregon prepare for a run to the CFP semifinals.

When it came time for the season to start, Stein wasn't sure what to expect. He liked his starters but worried about depth. He built the offensive system but handed off play-calling duties to Joe Sloan. His quarterback, Kenny Minchey, had tools but never got a chance to play much at Notre Dame.

There were a lot of factors that could have gone either way. The non-negotiable was that Kentucky would take on the personality of a head coach who was confident enough to make the unusual seem mundane.

"What I can't comprehend is how we're so different than other people," Stein said. "You should see our guys every Tuesday and Wednesday when we have pads on. NFL scouts that come through here are like, 'Man, we haven't seen a practice like this here ever.' I'm like, really? What did they look like before? Is this not how you're supposed to practice? I want them to think they're the baddest dudes on the field because of how they practice. It's weird to me that people think, like, that's crazy."

The more you hear Stein talk about his confidence and how he utilizes it to build his team, you can instantly understand why he had the cojones to go for that 2-point conversion against South Carolina and then roll the dice again to beat LSU.

On one hand, it's the right play analytically. In that situation, the team that gets the ball last in the first overtime gets it first in the second overtime, where teams are required to go for two after a touchdown. But for someone with no track record as a head coach, there is perhaps more safety (and less potential criticism) in going to a second overtime rather than betting everything on one play. It turned out to be the moment all of college football figured out who Stein was as a coach.

"It's risky in terms of, visually, you're either going to win or lose on that play," he said. "But it's also risky to go back out on offense and try to score again, then have to score on a 2-point play. If you feel good about the play, why not just end it there?"

Kentucky now heads to Knoxville off a bye week, in a game that would represent a massive step toward a playoff berth if the Wildcats win. And now Stein faces a completely different kind of challenge than what he faced at the beginning of the season.

Though the bye provided an opportunity to heal bruises and self-scout everything that happened over the first eight games, Stein's team re-emerges into a different world. Anointed the No. 6 team in the country by the playoff committee, expectations are now part of the deal. It was natural for Stein to build confidence in a team nobody believed in. Now that everybody's on the bandwagon, will Kentucky continue ascend or start to hit some bumpy air?

"Last year at Oregon, we were favored in every game," he said. "This is different because the SEC is different. Dude, it's a crazy, crazy league and it truly is like a one-game season, and I don't focus on everything and the outside noise. I really don't because nobody respects us anyway. I kind of like being in this mode because it can add fuel to our fire."

But that mode might already be over. Just as he predicted in July, Kentucky is, in fact, winning because of Stein with no sign of slowing down.

When Stein brought the Power K logo back, it was a personal statement about what it meant to him to be back in his home state, back around his family and friends, back wearing the gear that he remembered.

It just never represented a particularly memorable era of Kentucky football, except for the one he's authoring in real time.