Yes, Kentucky will throw more to its tight ends this season
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Scouting the 2020 Wildcats
Josh Moore, the University of Kentucky football beat writer for the Lexington Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com, is examining the 2020 Wildcats position by position entering the season, which kicks off Sept. 26 at Auburn. Click below to read Josh’s stories published so far.
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In a pre-pandemic world, if Keaton Upshaw wasn’t on a football field or in class, there’s a good chance you’d have found him in a bowling alley.
The University of Kentucky sophomore counts bowling among his favorite hobbies. His team, as a whole, hasn’t played together since the Citrus Bowl trip following the 2018 season, but he’s as confident in his ability to hammer down pins as he is blocking would-be tacklers or sprinting downfield for a drive-extending catch — even though a perfect 300 score has eluded him, to this point.
“I remember playing with Lonnie Johnson and all them and I think that was the best competition I’ve had,” Upshaw said during a recent phone interview. “But now they’re gone, so I feel like I’m the best.”
Upshaw said bowling is akin to football in so far as building one’s patience and ability to focus. It was good to have that additional reinforcement in 2019, when his unit was more or less asked to do just one thing as part of Kentucky’s offense: block.
That commitment wasn’t as much of a sacrifice for his group as it was the receivers, but when you’re as athletic as a guy like Upshaw and your team spent a lot of the offseason working on sets that deployed additional tight ends with the aim of increased targets in mind, frustration could have moved in with ease.
“I learned a lot with my blocking,” Upshaw said. “It helped me work on my technique and with knowing how important the run game is to help the team. Altogether, all-around, I think it made me a better player. …
“In the moment we just wanted to do whatever we could to help the team win, so we didn’t really complain. We wanted to do our job, listen to what the coaches had to say to us, and just wait our turn.”
That wait, by the sounds of it, won’t be much longer. Gran hoped last year to involve the tight ends more in the passing game and has continued to develop that element after a brief intermission. Upshaw, in particular, has stood out as a downfield threat early in practice.
He caught seven receptions for 78 yards and a touchdown last season.
“We’re getting ‘em out in the passing game, we’re getting out in (run-pass options),” Gran said. “It’s the same stuff that we’ve done, we just didn’t do it last year. But they can be a weapon ‘cause they can body people up and create those matchups. I’m excited about where they are right now.”
Justin Rigg, the 1A to Upshaw’s 1B, is excited about to see what that duo, as well as the younger guys behind them on the depth chart, can accomplish this fall in a more typical offense.
“We all love blocking in the tight end room,” Rigg said. “We all love the physicality that we have to bring with it. But being able to catch the ball is always a great perk to have, and having Terry (Wilson) back, we’re obviously doing a lot more and it feels great.”
Whether honed on a football field or between gutters, patience is a virtue, one that’s taken root throughout the entire locker room and has confidence at its highest point of head coach Mark Stoops’ eight-year tenure.
It’s a quality that will continue serving the entire team well as it marches forward into what could be the most unpredictable season that has ever been played. An eight-plus win season — against a 10-game Southeastern Conference schedule, mind you — is very achievable, Upshaw believes.
“If the whole team’s healthy, everybody’s on the right track and focused, I feel like it’ll be a great season for us,” Upshaw said. “We can really shock the world.”
That’d be even better than a 300.
Scouting the Cats
This is the fifth of nine stories looking at the 2020 Kentucky football team position-by-position.
Outlook: Tight ends
Leading man: Justin Rigg started 12 of 13 games last season and accumulated 128 yards on 11 total catches which, given the state of last year’s passing game, was pretty solid in hindsight. Had Terry Wilson remained healthy it’s likely Rigg, as well as primary backup Keaton Upshaw, would have been targeted more. The senior last year scored his first career touchdown in hectic fashion: he recovered a fumble by running back Chris Rodriguez in the end zone to give Kentucky its first points of the 2019 season.
Supporting cast: Upshaw measures in at 6-foot-6 and 234 pounds which, coupled with his ability to burst upfield quickly, puts him among the Cats’ most attractive options as a receiving weapon. He got significant playing time as a redshirt freshman last season and made two starts (once alongside Rigg, once in place of him due to injury). Either redshirt sophomore Brenden Bates or redshirt freshman Nik Ognenovic (who had two catches last season), or both, are likely to see an uptick in their field time, if only for the sake of seeing where they are in their development with Rigg on the way out after this year. The most notable absence is Drew Schlegel, a walk-on who left the program in May as a grad transfer; he played in 24 of UK’s last 26 games and was a valuable special teams weapon.
Synopsis: The direction of last year’s offense took some pressure off the staff when it came to fans clamoring for them to “throw more to the tight ends,” but it remains to be seen how involved they’ll be once Saturdays start this year. They stand out as some of UK’s most physically-gifted “receivers,” but to this point it’s clear that they’re blockers first and foremost in the offense, and it’s tough to argue with their results the last couple of seasons. If you go in with low expectations about what this unit will achieve in terms of stat accumulation, you’ll probably leave 2020 with high impressions of them overall.
This story was originally published September 14, 2020 at 9:32 AM.
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