Happy New Year and Welcome to 2010!

Happy New Year to all the followers of this site. While the 2009 football season didn't end like we all hoped with loses to Tennessee and Clemson, 2010 should be very exciting. Rich Brooks hasn't made any announcements regarding his future and likely won't until next week. With football season coming to an end, football fans will turn their attention to National Signing Day, the NFL Combine, the NFL Draft, and Spring Football Practice.

The Cats are expected to sign a full class of players in the 2010 class and many commits have received a ton of accolades already. Many people bashed the coaching staff for their new recruiting strategy, but their game plan has paid off. The Cats are a couple of pieces away from having one of their best recruiting classes in recent years. There are several recruits who expected to visit Lexington over the next two weeks including Maudrecus Humphrey and Dyjuan Lewis. Stay tuned, the Cats don't have many scholarships remaining. If one of their top targets comes off the board, they will move on to someone else.

The NFL combine and draft will be exciting for UK as well. UK has several graduating seniors who should get a look come draft day and some should sign free agent deals. One of the biggest key's to landing higher profile recruits is putting guys in the NFL. Look for a breakdown of UK players and their draft status over the next couple of days on this site.

Many people are already looking forward to Spring Football Practice. This is where the team starts to develop their depth chart heading into fall. UK will hold open competition for the starting quarterback job between Mike Hartline, Morgan Newton and Ryan Mossakowski. The Cats have to identify who will be the major competitors for playing time at several key positions including fullback, offensive line and linebacker. The good news is that UK has recruited some exceptional talent in the past two seasons, but players need practice reps to become big time contributors.

UK closes 2009 by playing in their fourth consecutive bowl game. Now, stop and think about that for a minute. In the past decade, UK has beaten a No 1 ranked LSU team, who won the National Championship and won three bowl games and sent players to the NFL and upset Auburn and Georgia twice and been ranked in the top 25. Something tells me the next decade will be better than the last.

GO CATS!