Mike Leach reacts to Air Raid shutout at UK: ‘One self-inflicted wound after the next’
READ MORE
Game day: Kentucky 24, Mississippi State 2
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader’s and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s Kentucky-Mississippi State football game at Kroger Field in Lexington.
Expand All
Mississippi State head coach Mike Leach was, at one time, Kentucky’s offensive coordinator. The Wildcats did not make his homecoming pleasant on Saturday.
His “Air Raid” offense was held without a single point, the first time in his 232 career games as a head coach. The Bulldogs’ only two points in a 24-2 loss came via a safety.
Here are some of Leach’s postgame comments:
On Mississippi State’s offensive struggles...
“I have a lot of ideas. The biggest one is the University of Kentucky. The second biggest one is that we didn’t play together at all. You can really say all things. We’ve got to find a way to clean that up. Their three guys up front can beat our five. Our receivers did not consistently catch the ball. We were able to get open, but we didn’t consistently catch the ball. We turned the ball over, which was the byproduct of the quarterback not being in the right place. Long story short, offensively we aren’t coaching very well right now. I mean we have to coach better. If you look at this game, nearly every problem that we had was self-inflicted. With a lot of respect to Kentucky, one self-inflicted wound after the next. I’ve been to plenty of games where we never dropped any balls. I don’t know how many balls we dropped, but I lost count. The turnovers - some were byproducts of dumb turnovers. Others were byproducts of somebody not being in the right place, or our guy not moving as fast as their guy or getting pressure. A number of them, the problem was throwing the ball. We’ve got to become a better offense. We’ve got a new system, some youth and inexperience. We’ve just got to stick together and coach our way through it.”
On Mississippi State defensive performance…
“I thought our defense played extremely hard. I thought our defense played well enough for us to win the game. I think our defense has a ways to go. They got to get better. If they want to be the best defense in the conference, they got to keep improving. Special teams, I think we are in the middle. I think that we just got to hang in there and keep coaching. I think this is a deal that we have to swing and battle through. Internally, we have to look at the guys we are playing and what we are asking them to do.”
On the performance of starting quarterback K.J. Costello ...
“I think it is a series of over corrections. I think that you will see him do some things pretty well. Early in the game, we were getting ready to march down the field and we would drop several balls, we would jump offsides. Because we are not even a team that has been penalized much this year, up until this game. I think he would get frustrated and try to do too much. And then as he tried to do too much, I think it blew up on him several times. He never really got into a rhythm. We didn’t consistently protect him.”
This story was originally published October 11, 2020 at 1:24 AM.
