UK’s Kash Daniel on his senior season: A lot of it was ‘my own fault’
You know Kash Daniel would love to go out in a blaze of glory.
That’s the way his senior season was supposed to go. He was the face of the Kentucky football program, after all — the spokesman who took the microphone to speak to the fans, the Kentucky kid from Paintsville who helped build a program that on Tuesday will play in its fourth consecutive bowl game.
“I had all this hype around me,” Daniel said Monday, sitting at a table in the Charlotte Convention Center during the Belk Bowl’s media day. “I’m not going to make any excuses, but all I’m saying is that personally I wish I’d had a better season. I wish I could have produced better for my team and my teammates.”
One of the few returning starters on a young Kentucky defense, the inside linebacker finished the regular season fourth on the team in total tackles with 50, down from 84 a year ago. He registered four tackles for loss, down from 7.5 in 2018. He made one interception but did not record a sack or force a fumble.
So what would Daniel do differently?
“In the summer, I put a lot of pressure on myself,” he said. “I had two offseason surgeries that nobody knew about this spring. I’m not going to get into them, but it took a long time to get back to regular health.”
That put him behind in his offseason work. He then put extra pressure on himself to catch up and help his inexperienced teammates on defense.
“It also put a mental strain on myself where I felt like I had to be the sole leading captain on this team,” he said. “I felt like every moving part had to come through me. And I think I put a little too much pressure on myself, and I put a little too big of expectations for myself.”
“That was very visible early,” head coach Mark Stoops said Monday. “You have to respect that because he was all-in and doing everything he could in every way. But that does put some pressure on him and we talked to him about some of that.”
During the season, he suffered two concussions in a span of three weeks. He missed two weeks of school. Then his grandfather passed away. The two were close. “A lot of things this fall didn’t go the way I planned it,” he said.
But he also said this: “A lot of mishaps and things that happened to me personally is my own fault.”
There was the Florida game controversy. Daniel was seen twisting the ankle of Gators quarterback Kyle Trask. Daniel first told the media his hand got caught under the pile, until video evidence showed otherwise. As punishment, he sat the first half of UK’s next game at Mississippi State.
“I’m going to have my YouTube channel and I’m going to talk about it (there),” he said Monday. “It’s going to be a little short documentary series about it, so I’ll get it into it more there.”
Drop date should be end of January, first of February, Daniel said. He hopes to show a different side to his personality than the UK football side and the WWE-like persona people saw during his college career.
“It’s not an image-repair thing, I couldn’t care less what people think,” he said. “I just don’t want people to get this wrong idea.”
“I’m very proud of Kash for his whole career,” Stoops said. “That passion and energy and his love for the state and for the university is second to none.”
And now, with the Belk Bowl against Virginia Tech, Daniel has one more chance to go out the way he wants to go out.
“For me, I lived the dream. I’ve lived this dream of being a Kentucky kid playing this game,” he said Monday. “And this being my last college game I want to go out with a victory, but more importantly I just want to see the smiles and the laughs on Coach Stoops’ and my teammates’ faces and the memories we make in this game.”
