After rough start, ‘Bossman Fat’ and the Kentucky secondary are silencing skeptics
Kelvin Joseph’s family started calling him “Fat” when he was a tyke. He self-christened the title “Bossman” in middle school. And thus, “Bossman Fat” was born.
It’s his rap moniker and his Twitter handle, and is so embedded into his identity that during preseason camp at least of couple of his Kentucky teammates couldn’t even recall his actual name when praising his play despite their best efforts to do so.
It also became an easy target for fans and media to belittle as Kentucky fell to 0-2 to open the 2020 season. Mistakes made by the LSU transfer and former four-star recruit in the first two weeks were magnified because of the hype surrounding his addition to the squad, but were emblematic of secondary-wide problems that contributed to two of the lesser defensive efforts by Kentucky in recent seasons.
Joseph practiced with the team all of last season but hadn’t played in a college football game since 2018. There’s no substitute for going full speed in the Southeastern Conference, it turns out.
“It took a toll on me, just by sitting, but I’m not using that as no excuse,” Joseph said this week during a video teleconference. “I made mistakes.”
He took the mocking to heart, but so did the rest of a secondary that entered the season with huge expectations after far exceeding the bar set by outsiders last year. With the midway point in sight, things have evened out: UK’s defense ranks second among all SEC teams at 20 points allowed per game (behind only Georgia) and third in total defense (341.3 yards per game). After giving up 533 yards through the air the first two weeks, it’s allowed only 387 the last two, including a season-low 112 yards at Tennessee last Saturday.
And then there’s the interceptions: Kentucky, after coming up with only eight picks last season, has nine through four games this year, all coming in the last two games. The secondary has accounted for only one-third of those — Joseph has two and safety Ty Ajian has one — but turnovers created elsewhere in the defense have only emboldened their own play-making abilities.
It’s also made for some friendly competition.
“As a total, we like to collect the interceptions, but the d-line can’t have more than the DBs,” Joseph said, grinning. “The linebackers can’t have more than the DBs. It’s just a challenge and we got to work. We motivate each other. We all gotta make money with each other. We ain’t selfish.”
Coaching
So, what changed between the overtime loss to Mississippi and the suffocating victory over Mississippi State?
“We just kept plugging along,” said cornerbacks coach Steve Clinkscale. “We kept coaching no different than we did before. No different than we did last year or the year before.”
Fundamental issues — leveraging the ball, tackling well, eye discipline — were pointed out frequently on film. Those things are frustrating but fixable, as long as guys are willing to pay mind to them and don’t get comfortable with past success.
“It always breeds some complacency,” Clinkscale said. “You go out there and you feel confident with what you’ve already put on the table previous years and it’s not gonna be the same result. You’ve still gotta go out there and work. People don’t care. In all actuality, we’re no longer a surprise. They’re gonna find the weakness in the defense or the weakness in the coverage and they’re going to attack it.”
The wisdom delivered by Clinkscale and Frank Buffano, who’s in his first year as UK’s safeties coach after several seasons working behind the scenes, isn’t too difficult to impart thanks to the depth of their rooms; the defensive back group as a whole is arguably the deepest on the Wildcats’ roster.
Joseph claimed the starting job over Cedrick Dort, who started every game at corner last year and continues to be a major part of the rotation opposite Brandin Echols. Yusuf Corker grew into a leader least year while stepping in for injured veteran Davonte Robinson, who’s back this season and has bolstered the safety spots along with Ajian. Then there are several underclassmen, like true freshman Vito Tisdale, who’ve impressed in the few snaps they’ve gotten.
“We’ve got a lot of guys behind those guys that are doing the same thing in practice,” Clinkscale said. “Whenever somebody is at practice and they may not be doing something that you want, it’s very easy to tell ‘em, ‘Get out, this, guy will play for you.’ We’ll put somebody else in and we don’t skip a beat.”
Buffano’s transition from being “a ghost in the background” to an on-field coach could have been smoother (thanks, COVID-19) but he and Clinkscale have developed chemistry as a duo that has trickled down to their position groups.
They’re not possessive of their players, either.
“It’s an open game out there,” Buffano said. “’You see a mistake out there, correct it. You see a positive, encourage it. That’s the way I approach it. I’m out there for the whole group to get better, I don’t care how it gets done.”
Clinkscale feels like the transition has actually been more challenging for him, in terms of bringing himself down a notch.
“I walk around and get on everybody about everything,” Clinkscale said. “Sometimes I get going and don’t realize that, hey, one of the best coaches on the field is already standing right here and he’s already correcting it. I don’t need to say anything else. I don’t go behind him and say, ‘Hey, what did he say?’ or anything like that. I trust him. That’s my brother, man.”
Opinions
Head coach Mark Stoops, a former defensive backs coach, thought Joseph’s lack of game reps over an extended amount of time made him come out and try to do too much in UK’s first two games.
“He really wanted to play well, for himself and for his team,” Stoops said. “Sometimes when you press too much and try to do things beyond what you are coached to do, bad things happen. That happens all the time.”
Even before the script flipped for UK’s defense, Stoops was quick to come to the defense of Joseph and other members of the secondary. He too doesn’t want to make excuses, but has acknowledged that UK might have been able to get away with some of the unclean play shown in the first two games if they’d been against out-of-conference foes rather than SEC teams ready to bring the heat.
Between that and the rust, it’s easy to sort out why Joseph sometimes looked lost in the first two games and by Week 4 he perfectly read a receiver’s route and beat him there for his second interception of the season, flying up the sideline for a 41-yard touchdown at Tennessee.
“We used all the negativity that everybody puts out there and the personal attacks on a 19-year-old kid, we put all that to the side, found some positive in it and used it as motivation,” Clinkscale said. “ ... He’s getting his feet under him but he’s still got a lot of improvement. We just want to continue to build off of it. It’s really just one of the things right now, as a coach, with the way the world is, the media and social media, it’s hard to protect those guys.”
“When I played and made a mistake, only the people in the bleachers saw it, then the opponents who watched it on film. Now everybody in America sees it and they’ve got an opinion.”
Next game
Kentucky at Missouri
When: 4 p.m. EDT Saturday
TV: SEC Network
Records: Kentucky 2-2, Missouri 1-2
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Series: Kentucky leads 7-3
Last meeting: Kentucky won 29-7 on Oct. 26, 2019, in Lexington.
This story was originally published October 22, 2020 at 4:05 PM.
