Big Blue Belief: Inside Will Stein’s Remarkable Kentucky Homecoming

LOUISVILLE — The cake shop is tiny, with one round table and one baking oven and a hunger-inducing aroma. It’s tucked in behind a Dutch Bros Coffee drive-thru on Fairfax Ave., sharing building space with a hearing aid center. Across the street is Trinity High School, which is integral to this tale.

SissyCakes, owned and operated in the St. Matthews neighborhood by sisters Debbie Nutt Stein and Blakey Nutt Martin, stops selling at 4 p.m. Monday to Thursday. But on this particular afternoon, the batter mixing and mold pouring and icing squeezing continue well past closing time. There is a big order to fill for the weekend. Another one.

The sisters are a bit overwhelmed by the spike in business. It’s a good problem to have, but something they did not fully foresee. Will Stein—Debbie’s son, Blakey’s nephew and godson—came home to Kentucky, and sales skyrocketed.

“Granted, we have unbelievable cakes,” Debbie says. “They’re delicious. We were already on a high upward trajectory. But once he became the coach, oh my gosh.”

“That’s when it just broke loose,” Blakey says. 

“Went crazy,” Debbie confirms.

Being the mother of the football coach of the Kentucky Wildcats was good for cake business. But Will’s bravado-laden, 6–1 start and No. 12 national ranking heading into a Saturday game against Vanderbilt has escalated the bakery to a full-blown phenomenon. SissyCakes expansion plans, and a Lexington branch, have been discussed. 

With various family members pitching in to help meet demand, the Nutt sisters are pushing out 450 to 500 cakes a week. Then there are the curiosity seekers, who aren’t even in the market for baked goods. They just stop by, dressed in Wildcat gear.

“They take pictures,” Debbie says, astounded. “They want my autograph. They bring gifts. I mean, it is a lot. They are so excited and it really is endearing. It’s really coming from their heart. Big Blue Nation is real.”

Seven games in, Stein is winning at a rate not seen by a first-year coach in Lexington since before World War I. Alpha Brumage, who coached both football and basketball at Kentucky, also started 6–1 in 1913. (Another first-year Kentucky coach of note, Bear Bryant, began his tenure 4–1 in 1946, on the way to 7–3.)

This is the realization of a dream that literally started in the crib, in this same neighborhood. It was nurtured on the ball fields of St. Matthews and across the street at Trinity, a longtime football power. It detoured to Kentucky’s arch rival, Louisville, then was exported to Texas and Oregon until the opportunity arose to come home.

At age 37, his first head coaching job is at the school he grew up rooting for, with his entire family just 70 miles down the road. “To be a head coach is a dream come true,” Stein says. “To do it at UK? I still pinch myself.”

Matt Stein has a picture of his two oldest boys, Matthew and William, when they were toddlers. They’re fast asleep in a recliner, both with pacifiers in their mouths, their heads resting on each other. Will, blond-haired and barefoot, has something in his very small right hand.

It’s a blue plastic football with the words “Kentucky Wildcats” on the side.

Such was the Big Blue birthright in the Stein home. Matt was a hard-edged defensive end for the Wildcats in the 1980s—“a natural hitter,” he says, who was held out of tackling drills as a youngster because he kept hurting his teammates. Matt became an attorney after his playing days at Kentucky, and the family has had season tickets ever since—section 128, row 13, in Commonwealth Stadium. The boys ran around the K-Club house adjacent to the stadium, where the lettermen would hang out before home games. The Steins were as intense as any members of a fan base renowned for its fervor.

While dreaming of one day being a Wildcat, Will immersed himself in sports. He was on a T-ball team at St. Matthews Little League by age 4, and on a third-and-fourth-grade flag football team as a kindergartener. He was never very big, but always athletic and relentless.

“He never played with action figures or cars,” says Matt. “It was always a ball.”

Will was part of a family of four boys immersed in the sprawling, ultra-competitive Louisville catholic sports world. This is known as a basketball city, but the Catholic football culture runs deep and strong—from parish middle school teams battling to win the Toy Bowl up to two massive, all-boys high schools that have combined to win 43 state championships, Trinity and St. Xavier. When those two rivals play in the regular season, the game is held at the University of Louisville’s stadium to accommodate crowds that traditionally run from 20,000 to 40,000.

Trinity, where Will’s father played, sits on busy Shelbyville Road. Just 1 ½ miles to the west, after the thoroughfare veers left and turns into tree-lined Lexington Road, is all-girls Sacred Heart Academy, Debbie’s alma mater. Smack between the two high schools is Holy Spirit Parish, with a congregation that ranges from middle class to affluent. This is where the Stein boys went to grade school and played for the Falcons.

Matt largely avoided coaching his own sons, wanting some separation between that role and parenting. “I never wanted to be accused of playing daddy ball,” he says.

Besides, by the time they were old enough to play, he already was the coach at nearby Our Lady of Lourdes, where he won seven Toy Bowl titles. As a toddler, Will would go to practice and ride on his dad’s shoulders until he fell asleep. Matt would lie him in the grass under the goalpost and keep coaching. He made his practice plans at the dining room table with young Will observing everything.

The family’s weekend plans were set for every fall: Trinity games on Friday, Kentucky games on Saturday, grade-school games on Sunday. Will remembers as a little kid peering out beneath the Jansing Field bleachers at the Shamrocks, imagining himself in one of their green uniforms.

“My goal in life was to be the starting quarterback at Trinity,” Will says. “I idolized those guys over pro players.”

While chasing that goal, Will became an all-sports alpha male. He was a pitcher, catcher and center fielder in baseball, playing on a 2002 team that lost in the state playoffs to a Valley Sports outfit that went on to win the Little League World Series. He was a point guard in basketball. And, of course, a quarterback in football.

Even at that age, Will was sufficiently assertive and knowledgeable to occasionally correct his coaches in practice huddles. He won a lot, but he never won a Toy Bowl, a game that dates back to 1949. If you think that’s trivial, find a group of guys on a Friday night at Gerstles pub or Saints Pizza Pub in St. Matthews and inevitably the talk will come around to where you went to high school or grade school (not college) and whether you won a Toy Bowl. 

Will’s brothers and dad all won them; he did not. Mother of Good Counsel 14, Holy Spirit 8, in 2003, still stings. “That’s a sore spot for him,” Matt says, in a perfectly serious voice.

From there, it was on to The Show at Trinity. Undersized at 5'9" but undaunted, Stein first set his sights on becoming the starting quarterback on the freshman team, which regularly had more than 100 players. He was one of eight QBs, but none worked harder—Debbie remembers Will taking a binder to “quarterback school” in the summer with Shamrocks offensive coordinator Andrew Coverdale from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. 

“He got a master’s and a Ph.D. in offensive football from Coach Coverdale,” Matt says.

Stein won the freshman job. After playing on the junior varsity as a sophomore, he backed up Nick Petrino (son of then-Louisville head coach Bobby Petrino as a junior. He also moved himself to wide receiver just to get on the field.

“If you asked him to play offensive guard, he’d say, ‘Give me the lineman pads and let’s go,’” says former Trinity coach Bob Beatty. “He was so god-awful competitive—in a good way. Just a joy to coach.”

Finally, as a senior, the childhood goal was achieved—Stein was the starting quarterback for the powerhouse Shamrocks. He passed for 54 touchdowns, a school record that still stands, as Trinity beat St. Xavier in overtime for the state championship. It was the third title in Stein’s high school career, but the first one playing the position he always wanted.

“The difference between a good quarterback and a great quarterback is whether you can make chicken salad out of chicken poop,” Beatty says. “Will made tremendous chicken salad.”

Despite the stats and the team success, no FBS programs recruited him. The knock: too small, insufficient arm. Matt emailed coaches at Kentucky to ask about a walk-on position for a kid who would crawl to Lexington, and the emails were never answered.

Stein was looking at lower-division schools Dayton, Wittenberg, Wabash and Centre. After starring at a football powerhouse in high school, it was basically a drop down in terms of program wattage and playbook complexity. 

“I was thinking, ‘Am I going to have to go to school and be a normal student?’” Stein says. “I didn’t want to do that. I’d been on a team since I was 4 years old. But I wanted to go big.”

Finally, Matt tapped the Trinity connection at Louisville. Greg Brohm, oldest of the famed Brohm brothers, was director of operations for coach Steve Kragthorpe. They were receptive to Will as a preferred walk-on. Despite familial ties on the other side of a bitter rivalry, Will became a Cardinal.

Once there, the numbers were similarly daunting. Stein was the ninth-string quarterback upon arrival. Injuries, grades, transfers and poor play thinned the herd. Work ethic and intelligence took care of the rest.

“I just stuck to it,” he says. “Made a name on scout team as a redshirt, and kept competing.” 

Stein started two games his redshirt freshman season in 2009, and three more as a junior in ’11, after a coaching change to Charlie Strong. The last start was at Kentucky, where he threw a touchdown against the Wildcats before being injured. Next man up: Teddy Bridgewater, who went on to become a first-round pick and a 12-year NFL QB.

After backing up Bridgewater for the rest of his career, it was a natural transition to the next phase. Everything in his life prepared him for coaching.

Did you see Will Stein last Saturday? On the play when his Kentucky defense blew up an Oklahoma flea-flicker? What he did was certainly not out of the Tom Osborne playbook of sideline demeanor.

Stein celebrated his team’s sack of John Mateer, then gestured and yelled across the field directly at the Sooners sideline. The natural question: What was that about?

“[Oklahoma offensive coordinator] Ben Arbuckle is one of my really, really good friends in this business and he texted me after the game with this laughing emoji,” Stein said Tuesday, by way of an explanation. “I was like, ‘Dude, I just knew you were going to try to run the trick play in that moment.’ So it was just having fun. I think people thought I was trying to taunt them. I was not. It’s me and my buddy just kind of talking some noise back to each other from the sidelines. We had practiced that play so many times. I was just so excited that we stopped that.”

The least surprised person in the stadium after that outburst was Matt, who was looking on from the sideline. He’d seen this act before.

“He was a s--- talker since he was a kid,” Matt says with a laugh, before declining to offer specific stories. “He had ultimate confidence in himself.”

As it turns out, the audacity on display this season has always been there. The guy who coolly held up two fingers at the end of the game against South Carolina, calling for a win-or-lose two-point conversion … the guy who repeated that exact scenario the following week against LSU … yeah. Same guy he’s always been.

“That's his DNA trait,” Debbie says. “The confidence. It’s just always been inside him.” 

Normally when the Kentucky coach takes the podium at SEC football media days in July, reporter attention spans start to flicker and eyes divert to laptops or phones. A single sentence during Stein’s first appearance at the event refocused everyone’s attention.

Asked why he believed he could win big at a place that’s rarely won big, Stein’s answer was, “Because of me, to be honest.” 

That was all it took to launch comparisons to Curt Cignetti’s initial bravura at Indiana, a similarly moribund program before he took over in late 2023. While some of Cignetti’s statements were intentionally provocative in an effort to awaken an apathetic fan base, Stein was just being himself.

It took almost an irrational self-assuredness to make it as a player. It was there before he got to Trinity, and then it deepened there under Beatty—himself someone who had no use for false modesty.

“The Trinity years were transformative years for me,” Stein says. “The swagger, the confidence that we had, it wasn’t fake. We believed we could beat everyone’s ass.”

He’s believed it ever since. But that doesn’t mean Stein was a know-it-all as a young coach. He says he got a “master class in scheme” coaching under Petrino. He learned when he followed Strong to Texas and was on staff with Jeff Traylor, a former high school head coach. Traylor became the head coach at UTSA and hired Stein as his offensive coordinator. A stint at Texas powerhouse high school Lake Travis was informative as well.

Stein began making a national name for himself at UTSA, where some of his video presentations at clinics on offensive schemes drew rave reviews. In 2023 he got the call-up to Oregon to be Dan Lanning’s offensive coordinator, working with elite talent at a high-end program.

The Ducks went 38–5 in the three seasons Stein was on staff. Their first year without him has been a struggle. Coincidence? Perhaps not. 

Meanwhile, Kentucky is soaring with Notre Dame transfer quarterback Kenny Minchey, who has thrown 13 touchdown passes and just one interception. Minchey is surrounded by an interesting mix of holdover players (particularly on defense) and Power 4 conference transfers.

The coaching staff is a mix of talents in its own right, with Stein hiring several people from his Louisville past. Among them: general manager Pete Nochta, running backs coach Kolby Smith, tight ends coach Justin Burke and none other than Coverdale, his old OC at Trinity, as passing game coordinator. The confidence trickles down from the top.

“The players have ultimate belief in us because we’re just normal guys,” Stein says. “We’re not trying to act like someone we’re not.”

The story is apocryphal but instructive. In citing why he left Kentucky for Texas A&M, Bear Bryant used to say that legendary basketball coach Adolph Rupp was given a Cadillac by the school at a banquet, while Bryant got a cigarette lighter. (Rupp did get a Caddy from the school, but it was after Bryant was gone.) 

The point being: Kentucky is a basketball school, not a football school. That’s true, but Big Blue Nation will support football far beyond what it has historically gotten back in return. 

When successful blips appeared on the radar in the last 30 years—the Tim Couch days under Hal Mumme, a pair of 10-win seasons under Stein’s predecessor, Mark Stoops—the fans had corresponding enthusiasm. They care, especially if you give them something to care about.

With his fresh energy, lifetime Big Blue allegiance, offensive acumen and sheer fearlessness, the new coach has done that. The result is euphoria that is rapidly building into Stein Mania.

“There’s nothing better,” says Will’s younger brother, Nathan, “than when you have a good football team.”

The timing for a good football team is right, with Kentucky basketball on an extended dominance hiatus. So when the Wildcats upset Texas A&M in September for their first big win under Stein—and first of three road wins already—couches were set ablaze on State Street in celebration. When the Wildcats upset LSU at home, a field storm cost the school a $500,000 SEC fine.

Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse, which has locations in Cincinnati, Louisville and Lexington, debuted “Steak a’la Stein” Thursday night at the Lexington restaurant. (Naturally, everyone wanted to know if a meal named after Mr. Two-Point Conversion comes with two side items.) Stein said he will not be attending or eating the meal, citing his preexisting allegiance to rival steakhouse Malone’s. Such is life as the new hero in town—sides must be chosen in the steak wars.

And then there is the over-busy bakery back in St. Matthews, riding the wings of a family fairy tale, hoping its one oven can keep up with demand. Dusted with powdered sugar and drizzled in chocolate, it’s a sweet story. Will Stein is having his cake and eating it, too.

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