Bye-week blues strike UK again. Can it regain its mojo after two straight losses?
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Game day: Mississippi State 31, No. 12 Kentucky 17
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader’s and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday night’s Kentucky-Mississippi State football game at Davis Wade Stadium in Starkville, Miss.
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For the fifth time under Mark Stoops, the University of Kentucky football team fell at Mississippi State. The Wildcats’ 31-17 loss was their second in a row this season after starting 6-0 on the year.
Let’s make sense of what UK’s latest loss means for the remainder of the season.
Bye blues
UK’s history of poor performances coming off an open week continued.
The Wildcats lost for the seventh time in 11 such opportunities under Stoops, and for the third time in four such occasions when Mississippi State was the opponent. Its only win of the four came at home, and on a 51-yard field goal, to boot.
Saturday’s effort was particularly distressing, though, given the stakes and the effort shown by the Wildcats up to this point. Although they lost at Georgia, UK looked like it belonged on the same field as those Bulldogs; Mississippi State eviscerated the Cats almost from the jump. If not for an early punt-return touchdown by Josh Ali — UK’s first since Lynn Bowden had one in the Citrus Bowl victory — it would have been without a touchdown until the fourth quarter.
UK turned in its biggest head-scratcher of the season. That it lost wasn’t all that surprising — Mississippi State was actually the favorite, by a slim margin — but UK’s execution on both sides of the ball was lackluster for the better part of 60 minutes. A program attempting to ascend into the SEC’s upper echelon can’t turn in performances like that under any circumstances and expect to get where it wants to go. Doing so with two weeks to prepare is even worse, perception-wise, especially when it’s a trend going back almost a decade.
The good news: Kentucky comes back to Kroger Field next week, where it will host Tennessee. UK clobbered the Volunteers in Knoxville last season. The bad news: Tennessee has a rejuvenated offense under first-year skipper Josh Heupel and will be highly motivated after last year’s beating, akin to the motivation MSU had on Saturday.
Kentucky’s gotta get its swagger back on defense and get into a rhythm offensively, or it’ll be staring down a three-game losing streak next Saturday night.
Playoff shot
Any faint hopes UK had of qualifying for the College Football Playoff were eulogized by cowbells.
To be clear, Kentucky’s chances of making the four-team field were scant to begin with — it likely needed a lot of help from a crowded field of presumed contenders in addition to finishing the season 11-1. But they weren’t non-existent, like they are now, after a convincing loss to an unranked team.
At best, the Wildcats can finish 10-2. With that, they’ll likely still be in the hunt for a spot in one of the three CFP bowl games that aren’t designated for the semifinals — the Sugar Bowl, Peach Bowl and Fiesta Bowl. The Sugar Bowl gets the best-finishing team in the CFP rankings outside of the actual playoff, while the others are at-large selections. A berth to any of those games would be UK’s first in either the BCS or CFP era.
If UK ends up 10-2 but isn’t selected for any of those games, it most likely would end up in the Citrus Bowl or Outback Bowl. The former is technically the more prestigious of the two — that game, which features a Big Ten foe, gets first dibs among any remaining SEC teams — but both are played on New Year’s Day.
Kentucky played in the Citrus Bowl following its 2018 regular season, its only New Year’s Day game under Stoops.
Milestone watch
So much for a shake-up in routine making for a different result — staying in Starkville didn’t change UK’s fortunes this year, and with the loss went away some opportunities for UK to make new history.
Now 3-6 against the Bulldogs overall in his tenure, Stoops’ overall record fell to 55-52 at UK. If the Wildcats win out during the regular season and win their bowl game, he would match Paul “Bear” Bryant for the school’s record of 60 victories, but passing that total in 2021 is off the table.
Kentucky is still likely to finish with its second winning record in SEC play under Stoops, but its chances of setting a new school mark for conference wins ended on Saturday. At best, it can still match the six wins put up by the 1977 Wildcats, who went 6-0 in the league.
This story was originally published October 30, 2021 at 10:27 PM.
