Only 5 SEC teams have winning records. Is Kentucky the league’s next-best program?
Kentucky’s offense is wearing cement shoes with no jackhammer in sight. Its defense hasn’t been without fault, but it’s held up its end of the bargain more often than not.
What’s that add up to? A team that is about as average as they come, according to Sports Reference’s Simple Rating System, a proprietary ranking that rates teams based on their average point differential and strength of schedule.
The scale uses positive and negative ratings, centered around a score of 0, representing an “average” team (20 FBS teams currently are listed with a score of 0, but only because they’re technically unranked because they’ve only played one game in 2020). The higher a team’s score is above zero, the better, and vice versa.
If you’re hunting for silver linings when it comes to UK football in 2020, consider its standing in the SRS: Kentucky’s rating heading into this weekend is -0.53, the highest ranking score of any team in the country with a rating below zero. It is a higher rating than eight other teams in the Southeastern Conference, ahead of Mississippi (-0.78), Arkansas (-0.98), Missouri (-5.72), Tennessee (-5.77), LSU (-6.63), South Carolina (-8.0), Mississippi State (-8.92) and Vanderbilt (-20.95), this week’s opponent.
Or you could look to ESPN’s Football Power Index, which ranks teams based on their expected margin of victory against an average opponent on a neutral field. UK ranks No. 32 among 127 FBS schools in that list, No. 7 overall among SEC schools (LSU is slightly in front of it). That formula currently projects Kentucky to win 3.8 games this season, effectively backing public opinion that it will handle Vanderbilt this weekend and fend off South Carolina at home to close the year. It gives the Cats a 0.4 percent chance of winning all four of its remaining games.
Another number that favored Kentucky this week: points in the coaches’ poll. Five SEC teams were ranked in the top 25 (the only ones with winning records: Alabama, Florida, Texas A&M, Georgia and Auburn) and three others received votes; Kentucky finished with 12 total points behind Arkansas (23) and Missouri (18). Efforts to pin down who or how many coaches liked the Cats were futile — the American Football Coaches Association and USA Today keep that information under wraps until the end of the season — but it’s more likely that a handful of the 62 voters had UK somewhere in the 21-25 range than a couple of voters putting them in inside the top 20.
Kentucky has performed well enough to curry favor with coaches and computer formulas but there’s only one set of numbers — 2-4 — that objectively spells out how Kentucky’s season is going, no matter how much direct comparisons against the SEC’s other also-rans tend to paint the Wildcats, as a whole, in a better light than not. Two of their four losses were against teams consistently rated below it (Ole Miss and Mizzou), so it’s hard to get too riled up about what rankings may or may not suggest; at the end of the day it’s just math without much meaning.
Still, as of today, that math suggests that Kentucky could be the sixth-best team in the SEC. It sure doesn’t feel like it, though.
Next game
Vanderbilt at Kentucky
When: Noon Saturday
TV: SEC Network
Records: Kentucky 2-4, Vanderbilt 0-5
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Series: Kentucky leads 46-42-4
Last meeting: Kentucky won 38-14 on Nov. 16, 2019, at Vanderbilt.
