Can Kentucky end losing streak to Florida, at last?

Though the power structure of college football is built on the assumption that the history-laden program always is supposed to beat the little guy, every underdog eventually gets its day.

Everyone, that is, except for Kentucky against Florida.

For three consecutive decades, the Wildcats have tried to get out from under the thumb of the Gators. And no matter whether it was Bill Curry vs. Steve Spurrier, Rich Brooks vs. Ron Zook, Joker Phillips vs. Will Muschamp or Mark Stoops vs. Jim McElwain, no Kentucky coach since Jerry Claiborne in 1986 knows what it feels like to beat the Gators.

“I do feel the importance of it, and I’ve always accepted that as I’ve accepted rivalries and all the negative streaks you guys are so good at telling me about,” Stoops told reporters this week in Lexington. “I take it personally. I do. I care. I care about our fan base, I care about the history even though I wasn’t here.”

After so much futility against Florida, this might be the perfect time for Kentucky to finally break through. The Wildcats are 3-0, coming off an impressive win at South Carolina. The Gators are trying to come down off the high of beating Tennessee on a 63yard touchdown pass as time expired.

If not now for the Wildcats, whose 30-year losing streak to Florida is the longest in Southeastern Conference history and

fourth longest of any continuous series in college football, when?

“I’m sorry we didn’t get the job done. But it will be broken one day, and maybe this will be the time,” Curry told USA TODAY Sports on Thursday. “It’s painful, but it’s something you have to face. And you just know one day someone is going to break the streak, and you hope it’s soon.”

Though he last coached Kentucky in 1996, Curry still has skin in the game — “skin, bones, guts, everything,” he joked — in finally ending Florida’s dominance. He looks back at a couple of games — most notably, a 24-20 loss to a Gators team that went on to win the SEC in 1993 — as missed opportunities that might have prevented the streak from growing to historic proportions.

“We couldn’t finish the job,” he said. “When you’ve got a program that isn’t accustomed to beating the champions and playing someone who has a big streak on you, you have to do something to make your guys believe so they’ll finish the job. They have to believe they’re going to do it, and once you break the streak, it’s an unbelievable boost for every aspect of the program.”

Curry, of course, has the excuse of facing Florida at the height of the Gators’ dominance under Spurrier. The five coaches who succeeded him weren’t necessarily facing the same kind of opponent, which makes it all the more perplexing why Kentucky hasn’t just lucked up on occasion. Despite playing in just eight bowl games since 1990, the Wildcats have beaten every other historical SEC power at least once in that span, including Tennessee in

2011, Georgia and Auburn in

2009, LSU in 2007 and Alabama in 1997.

Florida remains the outlier, and the Wildcats better hustle if they want to avoid catching the three longer streaks in front of them in the NCAA record books: Notre Dame’s 43 in a row vs. Navy (ended in 2006), Nebraska’s

36 in a row against Kansas (ended in 2004) and Oklahoma’s 32 in a row against Kansas State (ended in 1968).

“Honestly, I haven’t addressed that before (with the team),” Stoops said. “It’s never been in my approach. These guys haven’t been here for 30 years. We’ll see. I’ll go with my gut and how much we talk about that or if at all. Every year is a new year; this is a new team. I know these guys hear it, because the media and just social media and everything that’s out there, there’s so much information, and it’s not like you can hide it. They know what’s going on, but I have great confidence in our team that won’t affect us at all.”

FAUX PAS OF THE WEEK

How deep does the blame game go at Texas A&M right now? Former Texas A&M athletics director Eric Hyman, who typically preferred to operate in the background, told the Fort Worth StarTelegram this week that Kevin Sumlin’s $5 million annual contract signed after the 2013 season essentially was handed to him by the board of regents and that he was instructed to get it signed.

“I have done this job a long time, and I don’t blame Kevin Sumlin,” Hyman told the paper. “If someone is going to give you $5 million a year for six years, it would have been stupid of him to turn it down. But the contract was given to me, and it was, ‘This is what we are going to do.’ I looked at myself and I was stunned.”

Asked why the people above him felt the need to lock Sumlin down with such an extravagant contract, Hyman said, “Because people didn’t know what they were doing.”

The entire interview, which contains other interesting nuggets, is a piece of stunning honesty from Hyman, who is now out of the business. And whether he intended it to come off this way or not, it’s further confirmation of what most people in college athletics already suspected: That Texas A&M has some meddlesome boosters, and the political

forces inherent to that school make the football coach’s job far more difficult than it needs to be.

YOUR WEEKLY HARBAUGH

Rather than make headlines for something goofy, Jim Harbaugh brought up a great point this week. Why does college football not have a rule like the NFL where only two players (or an eligible receiver in motion behind the line of scrimmage) are allowed to release downfield on punts before the ball is kicked?

Harbaugh brought up the topic on his podcast, and it makes a lot of sense. Why does college football have a rule that basically allows 10 players to sprint downfield on punt coverage?

“I think the college rule

should be like the pro rule where only two eligible players are allowed to leave before the ball is punted,” Harbaugh said. “In college anybody can leave before the ball is punted. It’s a player safety rule —to have 10 players converging on a punt returner who is a defenseless player doesn’t seem like what we want in our game.”

Harbaugh said he would try to get momentum behind looking at that rule, which would have to go through the NCAA’s Football Oversight Committee.