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Mark Stoops recalls Kentucky players pelting him with air-soft pellets ‘to make bowl season fun’
By Cody McClure
Published:
Kentucky head coach Mark Stoops had a goal of making his team’s bowl practices more fun, thus he set up an air-soft combat game for the Wildcats last week.
He immediately regretted that decision once his players pelted him with air-soft pellets, a story from Jen Smith of the Lexington Herald Leader pointed out.
“It definitely hurts,” Stoops reportedly said. “You can imagine 105 of these football players, too, there’s no mercy. It’s not like you got shot one time and you put your hands up. You’re still getting tattooed. I have welts all over me.”
The Wildcats’ players and coaches were divided into teams for the competition. Apparently Stoops liked leaning up against trees too much, as one of his players pointed out in the article.
And that was a bad idea.
“I couldn’t move off the tree because they were blasting me and then he had me from the side, so I was in bad shape,” Stoops said, laughingly. “I don’t think they felt bad for me one bit either. They let me have it.”
The ‘Cats head coach apparently asked in a team meeting after the outing who the person was that blasted him next to the tree so much.
“And very meekly (redshirt freshman defensive back) Michael Nesbitt was like, ‘That was me,’” Stoops recalled. “So I owe him a little something. Someday I’ll get him back.”
It certainly appears Stoops achieved his goal of making the bowl season fun for his players — though he obviously paid dearly for the gesture.
Cody McClure is an SEC Football Writer for Saturday Down South. He lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he also co-hosts a midday sports radio show for FOX Sports. Cody previously worked for Athlon Sports.
