Fourth-and-short was easy money for UK until last week. What went wrong and can it be fixed?

Kentucky’s odds had been excellent while going for it on fourth downs in recent years.

Going into the Missouri game, UK had connected on five of its six tries on fourth down this season (83.3 percent) and the Cats have gotten the first down on 68.3 percent of their fourth-down attempts with Eddie Gran and Darin Hinshaw as their offensive coordinators.

So what happened last week when the Cats went 0-for-3 on fourth-and-short?

“It’s literally one person here, one person there, somebody doing their own thing, not doing their job,” Hinshaw explained of the misses at Missouri. “When you have that kind of critical down, one guy messes up and it can create a mess. And that’s what happened.”

Each time, that mess-up meant that either running back Benny Snell or A.J. Rose had not one — as is the goal — but two defenders on him and was stopped short.

“Benny’s been unbelievable at doing that, so has A.J. and, unfortunately, we had some missed assignments, some things we can’t do in those situations,” said Hinshaw of Snell’s two misses and Rose’s one.

Part of the credit needs to go to Missouri’s defense, Mark Stoops said Monday.

“They did a really good job and they made some (plays),” the head coach said. “They were very, very physical. There’s things we can do better.”

Kentucky has been “extremely efficient” on fourth downs in the past few seasons, finishing third in the Southeastern Conference last season (landing six of 10 attempts) and good enough for first place in 2016 when UK was 12-for-16, Stoops said, adding: “There are things we can get better and we will. We addressed it and looked at it and we’ll do better as we move forward.”

The Cats spent some extra time working on short-yardage situations on third and fourth downs this week in preparation for Georgia, which is eighth in the conference on stopping fourth-down conversions (7-of-16).

“The third-and-ones and the fourth-and-ones have been disheartening because that’s where we’ve made our hay,” Gran said of the UK offense. “We’ve been a really good third-and-short team and a good fourth-and-1 team.

“We got whipped and it wasn’t just up front. It wasn’t just up front. It’s everybody; it’s always the whole offense. We’ll get those corrected. I don’t think there’s any doubt in my mind that we’ve got to come with a different edge.”