Kentucky is 2-3 midway through the season. How many more wins should fans expect?
READ MORE
Game day: Missouri 20, Kentucky 10
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader’s and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s Kentucky-Missouri football game at Faurot Field at Memorial Stadium in Columbia, Mo.
Expand All
Kentucky fell 20-10 at Missouri on Saturday, putting the Wildcats back below .500 after they reached that mark last week at Tennessee.
Here’s a look at what else the outcome means beyond the scoreboard.
Missing history
A win would have been Kentucky’s sixth straight over Missouri. It fell to 7-4 all-time over the Tigers, losing to them for the first time since 2014. The first three losses came in the first three years Missouri was a member of the Southeastern Conference.
Six straight wins isn’t as gaudy as some of the streaks other opponents piled up against Kentucky through the last several decades, but it would have been significant. UK in its entire history has won six straight games against a single SEC opponent only once: the Wildcats defeated Vanderbilt each year from 1976 to 1981.
Fran Curci was head coach for all six of those wins over Vanderbilt, the longest win streak over any SEC opponent by a UK head coach. Current skipper Mark Stoops is the only coach in UK history to have had streaks of at least five wins against multiple SEC opponents (his teams had won five games against South Carolina before a 24-7 loss on the road last season), and he could add another to that list later this season; UK will seek its fifth straight win over Vanderbilt on Nov. 14.
Five SEC wins?
Barring drastic misfortune, Kentucky should beat Vanderbilt next month. That would give it at least three SEC wins.
Winning four SEC games is something UK has done only 15 times in school history (the last three came under Stoops, four wins each in 2016 and 2017 and five in 2018). If you go ahead and count Vandy, it would have four opportunities to become the 16th squad, which shouldn’t be discounted.
But what about five? Since the SEC was formed in 1933, Kentucky has won five or more games against its conference schedule just four times: 1950, 1954, 1977 and 2018. The 2020 edition would have had better odds to do so with a win over Missouri in the bag, but it’s not impossible.
Assuming, again, the Cats take care of business at home against Vanderbilt following a Georgia loss, they’d still have three games — at Alabama, at Florida and versus South Carolina at home — to get to five wins. Alabama is probably not going to happen, but Florida has shown itself to be porous defensively and South Carolina appears no better or worse than Kentucky; I’d feel good about a split between those two, and a sweep is certainly doable.
Finishing 5-5 doesn’t sound great, out of context, but if you keep in mind that at least three “guarantee” victories were erased from the schedule, it stands out quite a bit better. Losses to Ole Miss and Mizzou will sting in hindsight maybe even more than they did in the moment, but going 3-2 in the season’s latter half — which would include a win over Alabama or Florida — would be good ice on those bruises.
UK has won only six games in the SEC one time, in 1977, when it went 6-0 against the conference.
SEC dreams
The loss to Missouri effectively ends UK’s shot at qualifying for the SEC championship game.
Sure, if the Wildcats win out, they’d have a chance to be in. But that would be an incredible and historic run featuring wins over Alabama, Georgia and Florida. Never say never, but, well.
Even if they were to win out, any East Division team that finishes with two losses would supersede the Wildcats; for 2020, the East and West teams with the best win percentages against all conference opponents, not just those in the division, will be the ones who play for a title. It’d be so 2020 if Kentucky were to were to finish the year on a five-game win streak and not find itself playing in Atlanta.
This story was originally published October 24, 2020 at 7:12 PM.
