You've had 75+ years of participation in the SEC. You'd think in all of that time, UK would have figured out how to move from whipping boy to one of the the mid range teams in their division at least.
The problem is that they're SEC in name only. They're not in SEC country so they don't get any of the SEC regional recruits. Tennessee is pretty much the Mason-Dixon Line for SEC country and you have seen how the Tennessee and Vandy have been mostly down since 2000.