The surprising source that helped save the Kentucky Wildcats football season
When the 2019 Kentucky Wildcats football season reached its moment of truth, the Kentucky offensive brain trust was scrambling.
After five games of this season, UK was 2-3, on a three-game losing skid and had lost its only two experienced quarterbacks to injury.
Given an off week before what felt like a make-or-break home game with SEC rival Arkansas, Eddie Gran, Darin Hinshaw and the Kentucky offensive coaching staff reached a bold decision.
They were going to shift wide receiver Lynn Bowden to quarterback and scrap their conventional offense in favor of a run-heavy, read-option attack.
Searching for inspiration on how to make their new plan work, Gran and Co. turned to an unexpected source: Video of of a shorthanded Baylor’s 49-38 upset of No. 10 North Carolina in the 2015 Russell Athletic Bowl.
“(Baylor) had a wide receiver (playing quarterback),” Gran said. “They came in and rushed for a whole lot of yards that night. I figured ‘They must have done something right.’”
Borrowing from Baylor
After the 2015 season, the Baylor program of former coach Art Briles collapsed amid an abhorrent sexual assault scandal. As a result, Briles is justifiably radioactive in NCAA sports.
No one, however, questions Briles’ acumen as a football strategist.
The No. 17 Bears entered their bowl matchup with North Carolina without their top two quarterbacks, their leading rusher and top wide receiver — who were all sidelined by injury.
Absent so much fire power, Baylor ran variations off its wildcat package for much of the game.
Third-string quarterback Chris Johnson, wide receiver/emergency QB Lynx Hawthorne and running backs Johnny Jefferson, Devin Chafin and Terence Williams all took snaps from center.
From myriad formations, Baylor relied on direct snaps to running backs, jet sweeps and quick, outside screen passes to accumulate 756 total yards, 645 of it rushing.
Four years later, Gran and Co. went to school on that game video.
How the UK offense works
You know how the story turned out.
With Bowden morphing into a dynamic option quarterback, Kentucky (7-5, 3-5 SEC) saved its season by going 5-2 down the stretch.
The Wildcats broke the school single-game rushing record in each of their final three games. Mark Stoops and troops gave Cats fans a very sweet season finale with a 45-13 beatdown on intrastate rival Louisville.
If you visit YouTube and watch video of Baylor from that 2015 bowl, you will see at least three plays that are staples of UK’s revamped offense.
As a public service, I asked Dusty Bonner, the former Kentucky quarterback and current UK Radio Network pregame analyst, to help explain why the concepts Gran and Co. gleaned from Baylor have proven so hard to defend.
“If you think about it, here’s (UK’s) offense: Either Lynn is going to run it, or he’s going to hand it off to somebody else,” Bonner said. “That’s the two options, that’s 95 percent of the successful plays.
“But they are adding new wrinkles, new twists, new looks and new formations every week to create complexity for the defense.”
Play one. Sending four wideouts to one side of the field, then attacking the defense with a run to the opposite flank.
“What that’s doing is taking numbers (of defenders) and putting them (to one side of the field),” Bonner said. “Then, you go attack where the numbers are not.”
Play two. Those fake pitch, counter plays where Bowden starts down the line one way, then plants his foot and cuts back hard against the grain.
Appearing to run an option to one area of the field, Bonner said, essentially freezes the defenders responsible for containment on that side.
Then, when Bowden cuts back, “now, all of a sudden, you’ve got five offensive linemen with a hat on a hat, blocking five defenders,” Bonner said. “And the two (defenders that Kentucky) couldn’t block were the two sliding down the line responsible for Lynn and (the running back).”
Play three. The quick outside screens that UK occasionally has Bowden throw.
Bonner said those screens serve a more important purpose than it might appear.
With Bowden and Kentucky throwing so infrequently and running so effectively, defenses are tempted not to account for every outside UK receiver in order to keep more players in the box.
“If (Kentucky) lines up four receivers out there and you only put two defenders over them, well, (let’s) just throw it out there,” Bonner said. “(UK then) has three guys blocking two — and a receiver out wide taking off.”
For what it’s worth, Gran said Baylor is not the only team that Kentucky borrowed from when it made its emergency transformation into an option team.
“We’ve grabbed ideas from a lot of teams,” Gran said. “But we started (with that Baylor video), way back when.”
