CRAWFORD | Will Stein may be right: Move the Governor's Cup back to opening weekend

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — In Kentucky, we divide the state less by county lines than by shades of blue and red.

One side hangs a Louisville flag from the porch and spends winter explaining why Kentucky fans are intolerable. The other side wears UK quarter-zips to church and considers Louisville fans a public nuisance somewhere between raccoons and political attack ads.

And once a year, they gather at a football stadium to settle it for 60 minutes.

Or lately, about 28.

Which is why it was refreshing Tuesday to hear Kentucky coach Will Stein talk about the Governor’s Cup rivalry not like an athletic director balancing spreadsheets, but like somebody who actually grew up around the thing.

"I love the game, why would you not?" Stein told Michael Bennett during an appearance on his Just the Cats radio program.

Louisville | Kentucky | Indiana | Eric Crawford

Exactly.

College football spends half its life trying to invent rivalries with sponsored trophies and corporate logos and names that sound like mid-level accounting firms. Meanwhile, Kentucky and Louisville have one naturally sitting in their backyard, simmering like a July sidewalk.

And Stein — the Louisville kid who once quarterbacked the Cardinals and now coaches the Wildcats after two straight public beatings by U of L — thinks maybe the game belongs where it used to live:

Right at the beginning.

Not buried at the end of the season like Thanksgiving leftovers, after everybody’s already bruised, exhausted and calculating bowl projections like tax accountants.

No. Throw the match into the gasoline immediately.

"I used to love it when we played it first," Stein said. "That’s what I would do, I would move it up to the opening weekend or early in the season."

The old Governor’s Cup opener had all the subtlety of a bar fight at the state fair. Nobody had losses yet. Nobody had perspective yet. Summer optimism was still alive and irrational. Fans had spent three months marinating in message boards and cookouts and cousin arguments.

Then came Louisville and Kentucky to settle family business before Labor Day.

That’s a rivalry.

The modern version sometimes feels more like an obligation. Rivalry Week. Television inventory. Another branded event slotted neatly between playoff debates, coaching rumors and other rivalries with higher profiles, and stakes.

But an opener?

Now there’s something dangerous again.

I’m remembering entire Kentucky summers building toward Louisville-Kentucky in Week 1. Every radio show. Every gas station argument. Every Kroger aisle debate. Every uncle at every lake house insisting this is "the year."

And maybe it would sharpen the teams, too.

Louisville’s recent soft openers against schools that sound like directional exits off Interstate 65 haven’t exactly prepared the Cardinals for heavyweight fights. Kentucky, meanwhile, gets Alabama in Week 2 this season, which means the Wildcats will spend August hearing footsteps anyway.

Why not hear each other’s first?

It would take cooperation. The SEC likes its rivalry week choreography. Television executives enjoy their neat little holiday package.

But Stein stumbled onto something true Tuesday morning.

Some games aren’t meant to be bookkeeping entries on a schedule.

Some games are supposed to start arguments in June. And this one has never failed to deliver.