This post is sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

Thanks to all for reading and commenting on the "Where I Came From" series of sponsored posts.  I enjoyed doing them.

A message from our sponsor, EA Sports:

When you go to particular school or grow up a around college football you are more than just a fan. It’s who you are. We thought we could leverage this pride in your roots and show that ‘where you come from’ is more than just a statement about geography. By positioning NCAA Football 11 as a game that understands this pride and is authentic to these traditions, the takeaway should be that anything that is in college football is in NCAA Football11.

And this doesn’t just include game play (though that’s a huge part of it). It’s rivals and mascots; it’s legends and stories. It’s those things that are at the very fabric of the game itself. Of course the game is great this year as well. With authentic entrances, mascots and specific offenses for each team the term "where I come from" takes on a much larger meaning. While playing NCAA Football 11 is ultimately a great sports sim, it should also give you a sense of the pride and emotion one has for being a fan of a team they will never not be a part of.

For you gamers out there, enjoy the game!

This post is sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

So now we come to it.  After looking back at why we are fans, our favorite Kentucky team, tailgating traditions, our favorite players and our most memorable moments, we look forward to expectations for 2011 for Joker Phillips first year as UK coach.

Rich Brooks was coach at Kentucky for six seasons, from 2003 to 2009.  In those six seasons, he managed to get Kentucky to four straight bowl games with a record of 3-1 in the post season against mostly traditional football powerhouses like the Florida St. Seminoles and Clemson Tigers.  There is no doubt that he resuscitated a mostly-dead football program, just as Miracle Max resuscitated Wesley in The Princess Bride.  Brooks' miracle pill took a little longer to work, but in the end, it got the job done.

So now, Joker Phillips takes over the team from the Offensive Coordinator position (I don't buy the "Head Coach of the Offense" crap UK created out of thin air last year), and has made some very good hires along the way in the person of former Tennessee Volunteers standout Tee Martin and former Kentucky player Greg Nord.

This years incoming recruits look much like those of the last three years -- good but not great.  Few, if any, of the incoming freshmen are likely to make a real impact on this year's team, but they don't need to.  What they need to do is learn the game at the collegiate level and get in line on the depth chart behind the solid players that Phillips and Brooks have lined up over the last four years.

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This post is sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.


Memorable moments.  When you say "memorable moments" to a Kentucky fan, they will immediately respond with 1992 vs. the Duke Blue Devils in the national semifinals, or the James Lee highlight-reel dunk vs. the Duke in the 1978 national championship game.  Or perhaps the 3-pointer by Patrick Sparks to send the Wildcats into overtime vs. the Michigan State Spartans in 2005.

But Kentucky football has many memorable moments, too -- far too many to discuss in one article of reasonable length.  So instead of trying to do them all, I'll just constrain it to three.  I encourage everyone to add their most memorable moments, particularly the ones I'll leave out.

My criteria for judging memorable moments, in general, are the ones that jump straight into my mind when I think about the question.  I'll discuss them after the break.

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This post is sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

It's always fun to think about who your favorite players are at Kentucky, and I have several.  It's easy, of course, to pick out the stars, and I have some of those.  But I also have some guys who were not stars, but were every bit as important to the team's success as the stars were.

Not all of my favorite players come from winning teams.  Sometimes, decent football teams wind up with ugly records, and looking back on those seasons after a while sometimes reveals that those teams were better than they were given credit for.  Of course, the other side of the coin is true, also.  Sometimes teams wind up with better records than they deserve.

But this post is about players, not teams.

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This post is sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

Tailgating is a subject, quite frankly, that I know little about, largely because it is a phenomenon that passed me by.

When I was in college, there was no tailgating as we now know it.  In the mid to late 1970's, when I was at Western Kentucky University, the fraternity houses served as a pre-game "tailgate," and it mostly involved imbibing copious quantities of social lubricant as well as typical barbecue foods.  The party would begin two or three hours before game time and continue after the game, regardless of the outcome.

But times have changed, arguably for the better.  Even though I have not participated in tailgating at UK (I live 70 miles away in Louisville, so I tend to get there near game time and leave as soon as it's over), I can talk about some of the places and things that can be done on any given Saturday in "LexVegas," as Lexington is sometimes called by the locals.

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This post is sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

My all-time favorite UK football team is a close call.

In my earlier article in this series, I talked about what a great year 1976 was, and a few memories of the teams of the early to mid-1970's which featured Sonny Collins and Derrick Ramsey.  1976, when Kentucky won the SEC championship and the Peach Bowl was unquestionably one of the greatest years in Kentucky football history, if not the very greatest.

But after careful consideration, I have to say that my most favorite UK Wildcat team was more recent, even though they enjoyed limited success by the lofty standards of 1976's SEC championship and Peach Bowl bid.  1976 was everything we hope a Kentucky team will be these days.

My favorite Kentucky team did not win an SEC championship, nor seriously compete for one.  It did not participate in a major bowl, like the Peach Bowl was in 1976.  My favorite Kentucky team had only one all-SEC first team selection, and zero all-Americans (1976 had two all-SEC in Art Still and Warren Bryant, and Bryant was a first-team All-American).

My favorite team was not the greatest in Kentucky history, nor the most successful, nor the most talented.  Who were they?  I'll tell you after the jump.

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This post is sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

Those of you who have been here a while know that I write little about myself.  That's about to change a bit.

I was born in enemy territory, in Abingdon, Virgina, just across the state line from Tennessee Volunteer country.  My family moved to Richmond, Indiana at first, but we shortly wound up in the place I would spend all of my childhood -- Bristol, Tennessee.

Those of you who are familiar with Bristol know that it straddles the state line between Tennessee and Virgina right at the wingtip of Tennessee.  My mother's family was from Virginia just across the border on Lee Highway, and my father's family was from Kentucky.  Naturally, we settled first near my mother's family.

Becoming a football fan was easy in Tennessee -- everybody is a football fan there.  I grew up playing nothing but football in sandlots and middle school fields.  I was small and fast, and wound up where most small, fast people go -- in the backfield, and on the ends of the lines.  Never good enough to start, I played sparingly in games, but my fanhood was all about professional football -- the Oakland Raiders for me, and the Kansas City Chiefs for my little brother.  The rivalry, lived out every Sunday in our living room when either the Raiders or the Chiefs were on the tube.

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This post is sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

A Sea of Blue will be participating in a series of articles sponsored by EA Sports.  In these pieces, I will be talking a lot more about me than normal, and those of you who, for some perverse reason, wanted to know more about where I come from, both as a person and as a Kentucky fan, will have an opportunity to learn things, possibly even more than you really wanted to know.  Reality TV comes to A Sea of Blue.

Seriously, I think this series will be interesting and informative, and I encourage everyone to participate with stories about yourself and your fandom following the topics of each article.  I think each Big Blue fan has an interesting story or two about himself or herself that others can enjoy, and this is your opportunity to share, learn, and comment about your fellow members of the Big Blue Nation and A Sea of Blue.

These articles, of course, will be about football.  We all know that basketball is the bigger sport at Kentucky, and we have been talking mostly about basketball since last October.  However, football begins in earnest in only a month or so, so the time is nigh for us to begin talking about Kentucky football a bit in the run up to August.

So enjoy the series.  I guarantee it will be different from the standard fare we offer on the site.