Bear Bryant always said he left Kentucky over a cigarette lighter. In 1950 his football team won the SEC for the first time in the history of the school. Adolph Rupp's basketball team won its league too. The way Bryant told it, Rupp got handed a Cadillac and he got handed a lighter. He decided right there he was never going to be the main thing in Lexington. He told that story for 25 years and put it in his 1975 book. He quit after the 1953 season and went to Texas A&M. Alabama did not come until four years after that. Now the part that nobody at Kentucky likes to hear. It almost certainly did not happen. Historians at Kentucky and at Alabama have both gone looking and neither can find a Cadillac in 1950 or a lighter for Bryant anywhere. Rupp did get a Cadillac, in the mid 1950s, from boosters, for 25 years of service, by which point Bryant had been gone for two seasons. Bryant's own book reads like a man remembering a joke he told, not a slight he survived. It did not matter. Kentucky believed it for 76 years. It was the reason. It was the curse. It was the thing you said at a bar in Lexington when somebody asked why the football never worked. Today Kentucky sits alone in first place in the SEC. First time since Bryant's team did it. The man who got them there is 37 years old and this is his first job running anything. Will Stein grew up in St. Matthews, on the Louisville side of the state, in a house with Kentucky season tickets. His father Matt played defensive end for the Wildcats in the 1980s. He is 5 foot 9. He threw 54 touchdown passes as a senior at Trinity High School and won a state championship in overtime, and not one FBS program offered him a scholarship. He sat there looking at Dayton, Wittenberg, Wabash and Centre. So he walked on at Louisville and showed up ninth on the quarterback list. He started five games in his entire college career and spent the rest of it holding a clipboard behind Teddy Bridgewater. Then he coached. High school in Texas, UTSA, and three years running the offense at Oregon, where they went 38 and 5. Kentucky called this winter and he took it in about a second. "To do it at UK? I still pinch myself." They are 6 and 1. They have beaten Texas A&M, LSU, South Carolina in overtime, and Oklahoma on Saturday. Be straight about the calendar. It is the fourth week of October and the SEC has not even started eating its own yet. A lot of this can still go wrong. But there is something to the fact that the man who left over a car he may never have been denied is the ghost in this building, and the man who finally moved it is 5 foot 9, had no offers at all, and never wanted to be anywhere else.