This Kentucky LB is built like Captain America but is still working on his game
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Coaches praised Smith's size, speed and strength during spring practice.
- Smith reported weighing 225 pounds and has been clocked up to 23 mph.
- Coaches say Smith must improve tackling and on-field play to earn a starting role.
When Kentucky football’s new coaching staff was scouring the transfer portal for additions to the roster, defensive coordinator Jay Bateman hoped to find a veteran inside linebacker to add to an inexperienced group.
“I just didn’t think there were any that were good enough,” Bateman said. “I mean, ultimately, this isn’t Little League. This is the SEC, and there’s a certain height, weight, speed, physicality requirement a kid has to have.”
The staff signed former Arkansas linebacker Tavion Wallace and former Texas linebacker Elijah Barnes, both four-star recruits in the high school class of 2025 who played only sparingly in their first college seasons.
Junior Grant Godfrey, who started two of the final three games last season after an injury to Alex Afari, was penciled in as one starter. The assumption from many outside observers was Wallace and Barnes would compete for the other starting job.
But that assumption ignored the return of another linebacker from last season’s UK team.
Antwan Smith totaled just six tackles in 12 games as a sophomore, but he had long been considered one of the most athletic players on the roster. Will Stein and his staff emphasized throughout spring practice that the team was operating without a true depth chart, but in the spring game, it was Smith playing alongside Godfrey.
“Antwan Smith is a freak,” Brandon Roberts, UK’s director of football sports performance, told the Herald-Leader this week. “He is crazy fast and crazy strong. He would be one of those if you had a Captain America Project, I’d submit him. He’s got all the traits there.
“He would be my No. 1 freak (on the team) from size and speed and strength.”
This is not the first summer that hype began to build for Smith due to his unique athletic traits.
Last July at SEC Media Days, Kentucky veterans Afari and Jordan Lovett each pointed to Smith as a possible breakout candidate. Afari called him “one of the most God-gifted athletes I’ve ever been around.”
But when the 2025 season started, Smith struggled to translate his athletic gifts into actual football production.
“You do see on some film, it is a lot of critical mistakes that I made in just my tackling and my movement,” Smith acknowledged this spring.
Work with Roberts and the rest of UK’s new strength and conditioning staff has already paid off for Smith.
He reported weighing in at 225 pounds, up 10 pounds from his listed weight last season. Even with the added weight, Smith said he still has been clocked at up to 23 mph.
“I think Antwan and Grant have been awesome,” Bateman said early in spring practice. “They’re growing so fast.”
The challenge has not changed for Smith, though.
He might make The Athletic’s annual preseason ranking of college football’s biggest athletic freaks, but none of that athleticism matters if he doesn’t actually play better in games. Fixing his tackling issues is challenge No. 1, but the addition of former blue-chip recruits Barnes and Wallace means marginal improvement might still not be enough to lock down a starting job.
The good news is the days of the NCAA barring on-field coaches from working directly with football players during the summer are gone. That extra meeting time should help a player like Smith begin to translate athleticism into production in his third year on campus.
“From this year to last year, it slowed down a lot,” he said. “Just being able to look back at the mistakes I made last year and know that, OK, you can’t go about the process this way, and you got to be more intentional about what you do on and off the field.”
For now, Smith remains another question mark at a position full of them.
If Godfrey continues his progress from last season, the inside linebackers should have at least one veteran to rely on. If Barnes lives up to his hype as a top-five linebacker in his high school class, he could be a star. If Wallace follows in the footsteps of his brother and former UK star Trevin Wallace, he could develop into an NFL talent.
But Kentucky will almost certainly need more than two contributors at a position that will take a physical beating in the SEC. That means Smith answering questions about how he translates his athleticism into production might be the among the most important storylines this summer.
“Basically it’s a Ferrari,” Roberts said. “(The strength staff) is gonna put some shiny rims on it and polish that thing up and send it back to you, and you still got to be able to input all the data into it to get you where you need to go.”