Kentucky football makes it to opener, but that might have been the easy part
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Game day: Kentucky at Auburn
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader’s and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s Kentucky-Auburn football game at Jordan-Hare Stadium in Auburn, Ala.
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Just getting to the first football game was difficult enough.
And then, wham, bam, right out of the chute in this coronavirus pandemic, Kentucky football ran straight into SEC football, the most unforgiving college football of all.
“There’s no warm-up,” lamented UK coach Mark Stoops after his team lost 29-13 at Auburn on Saturday. “You’re getting right into it, on the road, at Auburn.”
Right into the deep end of the pool, where the Cats were pulled under by a string of mistakes — a glaring one not of their own making, but plenty more they were responsible for in falling to the eighth-ranked Tigers in the season opener at Jordan-Hare Stadium.
First, the mistake the Cats couldn’t control. Somehow the referees on the field and the league’s official review team in Birmingham, Ala., failed to see UK running back Chris Rodriguez crossing the goal line for a 1-yard touchdown run late in the first half that would have given Kentucky a 14-8 lead and plenty of momentum going into halftime.
Now the ones the Cats could have controlled. Two plays after the missed TD, UK quarterback Terry Wilson threw an end-zone interception, the first of three costly UK turnovers, compared to zero for the home team. A failed fake punt deep in UK territory in the fourth quarter didn’t help either on an afternoon in which the Wildcats beat the hosts in nearly every statistical category but the one that counts most.
“We did a lot of good things,” said Stoops, whose team outgunned Auburn 384-324 in total yards. “We just made too many mistakes.”
Down just 15-13 early in the fourth quarter, a pair of Kentucky errors all but gifted Auburn the win. Quarterback Terry Wilson, playing in his first game since September 2019, lost a fumble at UK’s 23-yard line. Five plays later Auburn scored. Next possession, punter Max Duffy lost 3 yards trying to run for a first down and Auburn took over at Kentucky’s 27-yard line. The Tigers scored two plays later.
“That’s not on Max,” said Stoops afterward, adding that the UK coaches had a possible fake punt called the possession before, if Auburn’s defense had lined up a certain way, but neglected to call it off the next possession. “That’s on us.”
Those are the sort of mistakes you can get away with against a Toledo (2019’s opening foe) or an Eastern Michigan (2020’s originally scheduled opening foe), but not against a traditional power in its own stadium, even if attendance in that stadium was limited to 17,490.
Auburn’s two touchdowns in two minutes and four seconds put the game away. The first score came when Auburn wide receiver Seth Williams — “A monster,” Stoops called him — made the second of his two TD catches, this one reaching over the back of UK defender Kelvin Joseph. The second came when Auburn quarterback Patrick Nix hit Eli Stove with a 21-yard scoring pass.
“It’s tough to win a game when you have turnovers like that,” said Wilson, who completed 24 of a career-high 37 passes for 239 yards and a score. “Myself I have to do a better job of holding on to the football.”
Job One was just getting to Saturday. Like every other team in the conference, Kentucky had to keep COVID-19 infections to a reasonable level before making it to Sept. 26, the delayed start of the season, and a season that will consist exclusively of SEC opponents, 10 of them over an 11-week period.
“It felt good to finally be out there,” said UK linebacker DeAndre Square afterward. “I thought we played well, but we made a lot of mistakes. We just have to clean those up.”
ASAP. Ole Miss comes to Kroger Field for UK’s home opener on Oct. 3. The Rebels lost to visiting Florida 51-35 on Saturday, but scored 35 points on what was thought to be a formidable Gators defense.
Then again, this is the SEC. Week after week. Game after game. One down, nine to go. Beating coronavirus could be the easy part.
Next game
Ole Miss at Kentucky
When: 4 p.m. Saturday
Where: Kroger Field (limited spectators)
TV: SEC Network
Records: Ole Miss 0-1, Kentucky 0-1
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Series: Ole Miss leads 28-14-1
Last meeting: Ole Miss won 37-34 on Nov. 4, 2017, in Lexington.
This story was originally published September 26, 2020 at 5:40 PM.
