Kentucky football officially buries its past with Belk Bowl win. ‘It’s different now.’
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Game day: Kentucky defeats Virginia Tech in Belk Bowl
Click below to read all of the coverage from the Lexington Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com after the University of Kentucky’s 37-30 victory over Virginia Tech in the Belk Bowl at Charlotte, N.C., on Tuesday.
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I’ve been around long enough to know all about the ghosts of bad luck past that have haunted this Kentucky football program.
I’ve seen the bad teams, the bad breaks and the bad karma.
But Tuesday afternoon at Bank of America Stadium in the 17th annual Belk Bowl, I saw these Kentucky Wildcats drive a stake right though the heart of Kentucky football past.
They did it in eight minutes and 10 seconds. They did it over 85 yards in a grueling 18 plays. They did it with the clock ticking down toward the final horn, with Big Blue Nation’s jaws clenching and a bowl victory on the line.
And they ended it in the unlikeliest of fashions with their magnificent running quarterback, Lynn Bowden, throwing a 13-yard touchdown pass — yes, a pass — to an open Josh Ali with 15 seconds remaining.
Final: Kentucky 37, Virginia Tech 30.
I’ve been around long enough to know that those are the types of drives that happened to Kentucky football not for Kentucky football.
“It’s different now,” said UK center Drake Jackson afterward.
Indeed, it is different. Something has changed since Mark Stoops took over the program in 2013. It didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen with the wave of a magic wand. Instead, it took brick-by-brick and year-by-year for the tables to finally turn. The culture. The physicality. The talent, of course. But also the mindset. That expectation of winning.
“This game kind of personified our whole season,” said Stoops, after his team had finished the year at 8-5.
And what a year. It started with an inexperienced defense. Before the second game was through the Cats had lost their starting quarterback on offense. Three games later, they had lost their backup quarterback. After that, plenty had thought Stoops and offensive coordinator Eddie Gran had lost their minds, moving Bowden, the star wide receiver, to quarterback.
Seven games later, the Cats found themselves in their fourth straight bowl game, playing Virginia Tech, another team that had finished the season strong. The Hokies were also a team that found ways to get under the Cats’ skin during the week leading up to Tuesday, including a pregame skirmish in which Bowden was caught on video throwing a punch at a Hokie.
“I could have hurt my team,” Bowden admitted later. “I apologized to them for that before the game.”
“There was just a lot of trash talking,” said Jackson. “Just crazy stuff after every play.”
As if the game wasn’t crazy enough. Kentucky fell behind 17-7 before scoring a key touchdown 53 seconds before halftime to cut the deficit to three. The second half saw ties at 17 and 24 until a pair of Brian Johnson field goals put the Hokies up 30-24 with 12:47 to play.
A little over four minutes later, UK took over at its own 15 with 8:25 left — “I was thinking 8-minute drive, I really was,” Stoops said — down a touchdown. What followed was the reverse of everything you had sadly come to expect from a Kentucky football team pre-Stoops.
Eighteen plays the Cats ran without a deflating penalty, or a drive-killing fumble, or a game-losing interception among them. Instead, there was a third-and-1 conversion, a fourth-and-7 conversion and a fourth-and-1 conversion with 1:01 left. Only one of the 18 plays went for double-digit yardage, that being the final play, when Bowden called an audible at the line of scrimmage and checked into the pass to Ali, then made it happen.
“You guys said I couldn’t throw,” Bowden deadpanned later.
Over the years, given its history, plenty said Kentucky football couldn’t win a game like this, on a stage like this, in a scenario such as this. Stoops has made plenty happen since signing on seven years ago — a 10-win season, a winning SEC record, a string of four straight bowl games — but if that last eight minutes and 10 seconds at Bank of America Stadium was not the most dramatic, it might have been the most impressive.
“I’m just so proud of this football team,” said Stoops.
Ghosts be gone.
This story was originally published December 31, 2019 at 6:27 PM.
