TAMPA, Fla. -- Kentucky coach Will Stein took the podium Monday at his first SEC media days and was asked why he thought he could win big at the school.
"I think because of me, to be honest," Stein began.
That is all it took to go viral.
Stein, in his first year as a head coach after spending the last three seasons as offensive coordinator and quarterback coach at Oregon, has infused the entire program with that same shot of confidence. Kentucky players raved about the energy and belief he has brought to the program since his arrival.
"Every day when we have a team meeting, he's just like, 'Let's go!'" safety Ty Bryant said. "He's getting everybody hype, everybody ready. You see it in practice. Just the competitive nature that he has. I mean, if you give him a ball, a helmet, and some shoulder pads, he'll run out there right now and try to play himself. So just being a guy who's played the game, you just see that he's just overflowing with confidence."
Indeed, Stein gave a detailed, elaborate answer beyond why he felt he would be the one to help Kentucky win.
"I know what it takes," Stein said. "I have seen it at the highest levels. I know what it takes to recruit at this level. You just got to believe. Is it going to happen overnight? I don't know.
"I know the players that we can get here. I know we can recruit north, south and east. People come to Lexington and love it. The longer I live there, the more I am like, 'Wow, this place is incredible.' It's got everything that you want. You have to go attack. You can't sit back and wait. That's one thing I refuse to do at Kentucky is to wait."
Indeed, Stein built a roster to try and win now despite a daunting schedule with games against Alabama, Texas A&M, LSU, Oklahoma, Vanderbilt and Tennessee.
He convinced quarterback Kenny Minchey to transfer to Kentucky from Notre Dame, after initially committing to Nebraska, and signed and top-10 transfer portal class that includes running backs CJ Baxter (Texas) and Jovantae Barnes (Oklahoma), three all-conference offensive linemen at their previous schools and 13 transfers on defense.
"The confidence has poured out into the rest of the team, into the rest of the coaching staff, and it's evident whenever you walk in the facility," Minchey said. "Guys are high energy -- staff and players included. You can feel that we all have high aspirations this year, and we know the time is now, and we have the team to do it."
Stein, who played at Louisville, added he would not have taken the Kentucky job without his belief in being able to win there. He said he has taken a lot of the blueprint he learned working under Oregon coach Dan Lanning the last three years and tried to implement it at Kentucky.
That not only includes an aggressive recruiting strategy, but practicing more aggressively, too -- maximizing the number of reps that players take during practice.
"I felt like I had a really good blueprint of what it's supposed to look like at the highest level working for Dan in Oregon," Stein told ESPN later in a sit-down interview. "We've taken a lot of that model and brought it here to Kentucky with hiring, with recruiting, with practice schedules, what you do every single day. So it's made the transition flow better for me.
"It's like, all right, what did I just do for three years that we won 30-something games and let's not try to reinvent everything in year one. Let's take that blueprint and try to maximize it with the coaching staff and the players that we have."
Returning players such as Bryant bought, in, too. What would be especially meaningful for Bryant, who is from Lexington, Kentucky, is to make history this season. Bryant had thought about possibly entering the transfer portal when the previous staff was let go, but once he met with Stein, he was sold on staying.
"I want to go to the College Football Playoffs," Bryant said. "I could have left, but I feel like it would be no greater feeling than to bring it back to the city that I I'm born in, I grew up at, and I just think it would just be a great honor to say we did that under Coach Stein his first year."