A Tale of Patience and Perseverance: The Rich Brooks Saga at Kentucky

(Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)

Throughout time, big time athletics have been a young man's game.  The people who compete in the highest levels of sport are young enough to be in the physical prime of their life, and have yet to be hampered with the wear and tear that plague athletes as they become victims of time.

While it may seem obvious that the people who play in the games that we watch aren't collecting social security money, there has been a widespread youth movement with regards to coaches and personnel in professional and college sports alike.

College football has been no exception to this emerging trend, as the average age of a Division I football coach has dropped considerably over the past few years.

Sure there are the coaching luminaries like Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden who have been at their schools for decades and have some advanced mileage, but it doesn't take a thorough investigation to see the direction that a lot of successful football programs want to head in.

Urban Meyer, the Florida head coach whose teams have accounted for two of the last three National Champions, is 45 years old, a pretty young age especially when you consider all of his accomplishments at this stage in his career.

Earlier this year, Tennessee turned to 34-year-old Lane Kiffin to take the reigns of its storied football program.

Even a man like Pete Carroll, who is 57 years old, would make you think he is twenty years younger than he really is with his unparalleled enthusiasm, irresistible charisma, and constant Twitter updates.

This "out with the old, in with the new" mindset has become prevalent in college football, virtually to the point where it could be considered the norm.

With all of this information in mind, it would probably come as a surprise to most people that there still manages to be a place in college football for a man like Rich Brooks.

Brooks is hardly cut from the same cloth as the aforementioned likes of Meyer and Kiffin, and he doesn't come close to fitting the profile of what most athletic directors and boosters look for when they're trying to find someone to head a struggling program.

This made the University of Kentucky's decision to hire Brooks back in 2003 all the more astonishing.  For months and months, there had been widespread speculation that Kentucky would bring in a household name or a coach of that ilk to come in and try to make the Wildcats a viable competitor in the rough and tumble SEC.

The name of Doug Williams, the former Grambling State coach and Super Bowl XXII MVP (who at the time was a personnel executive for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers), had been floated about, as had many other high-profile football figures.

The gossip and persistent whispers reached a climax when it was reported that Kentucky was courting Bill Parcells, who at the time was retired and out of coaching.

The prospect of bringing in such prominent figures seemed so spell-binding and surreal for Kentucky fans at the time, that disappointment inevitably set in when AD Mitch Barnhart announced that the school had chosen to go with Brooks.

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