Kentucky lost its third straight game. Can this still be a ‘special’ season?
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Game day: Tennessee 45, No. 18 Kentucky 42
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader’s and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday night’s Kentucky-Tennessee football game at Kroger Field in Lexington, Ky.
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The Kentucky football team dropped its third straight game on Saturday, falling 45-42 to Tennessee in front of a sold-out crowd at Kroger Field. It was UK’s first loss at home this season.
Let’s break down what the result means for UK looking ahead.
Season outlook
Even if Kentucky finishes 9-3 this year — which is more likely than not, given the strength of schedule before it over the remaining three weeks — it’s going to be difficult for some fans to get over a stretch of the season that’s turned a possibly historic campaign into just another “really good” one. A nine-win regular season would be just the fifth time UK’s ended with nine or more wins before the postseason, so this year’s still got the chance to be exceptional in the greater context of Kentucky football, but after a 6-0 start, 9-3 is somewhat tough to stomach.
Kentucky has had two other teams finish with nine regular-season victories: the 1949 edition and Mark Stoops’ 2018 squad. Both of those groups, like this one, lost to Tennessee. The 1949 Wildcats were coming off a 35-0 win over Florida in Tampa before suffering a 6-0 loss to an unranked UT team as the No. 11 team in the country.The 2018 team followed up a loss to Georgia with another as the No. 12 team in Knoxville, 24-7, again to an unranked UT team.
The 1949 Cats rebounded with a 21-6 win at Miami to improve to 9-2 in the regular season before falling to Santa Clara, 21-13, in the Orange Bowl. UK in 2018 finished the regular season with victories over Middle Tennessee State (34-23) and at Louisville (56-10) before beating Penn State, 27-24, in the Citrus Bowl to finish 10-3 overall.
If UK wins out the remainder of its schedule and gets its fourth straight bowl win, it’d finish 10-3, becoming just the fourth team — and second under Stoops — to finish with double-digit wins in the entirety of Kentucky football history. Saturday was disappointing, but there’s still history to be had.
Recruiting impact
Losing to Tennessee is never good for recruiting, but especially not when UK’s trying to make more inroads in the Volunteer State.
Nashville receiver Barion Brown is soon expected to announce his commitment, and most analysts favor Kentucky to land the four-star prospect over Alabama, Ole Miss and others. UT offered but does not appear to be a major player for him.
“The state of Tennessee in the last 10 years has been far better at producing football recruits than at any time in the 36 years I’ve been covering Tennessee,” Knoxville-based radio host Jiimmy Hyams said this week on The John Clay Podcast. “It’s far better. There are a ton of players in Nashville, there are a ton of players in Memphis, there are more players in east Tennessee. But the problem is Heupel got here so late, a lot of those kids had already committed elsewhere or Tennessee’s having to make up a lot of ground.”
Saturday’s result isn’t likely to make much of an impression on a recruit like Brown, but it should pay dividends for Josh Heupel’s staff in 2023 and beyond.
Notes
▪ A third loss all but assures that Kentucky won’t play in a New Year’s Six bowl. Finishing 10-2 would not have guaranteed such an appearance, given that there are only two at-large bids available outside of the Sugar Bowl this season, but it would have put UK in as good a shape as possible to finish high enough in the College Football Rankings to earn a berth.
▪ Stoops is now 55-53 overall and 2-7 against the Volunteers, the same mark he has against Florida. UK’s head coach is 0-9 against Georgia, giving him losing records against three of UK’s Eastern Division rivals. Stoops is 7-2 against South Carolina, 6-3 against Missouri and 6-2 against Vanderbilt, to which UK will travel next week.
This story was originally published November 6, 2021 at 10:45 PM.
