Rich Scangarello lays out what comes next for Kentucky’s offense
An early-morning April snow squall fleetingly created “the frozen tundra of Kroger Field” on Saturday before Kentucky’s Blue-White spring football scrimmage.
Yet of all the hardy souls who braved the frigid elements for a first glance at the 2022 edition of Mark Stoops’ troops, new UK offensive coordinator Rich Scangarello might have been the best prepared for a winter wonderland masquerading as a “spring” game.
“University of Idaho. Early 2000s. I was a (graduate assistant) out there,” Scangarello recalled. “I remember my hand, just freezing off out there, scripting (plays at their spring game).”
In the first public Kentucky spring football scrimmage since 2019, Scangarello’s first-team offense was the most efficient unit of the contest.
Incumbent starting quarterback Will Levis and star running back Christopher Rodriguez were only on the field with the Kentucky offensive starters for two drives.
Both ended with touchdowns.
“We look a lot better than we did when we started spring ball — and that’s how it should be,” Levis said after completing 7 of 8 passes for 92 yards and two touchdowns.
While a spring game doesn’t really tell you anything lasting, the fact that the Kentucky offense was the most proficient unit in the game — scoring was not kept in what was a 1s-on-1s and 2s-on-2s type of scrimmage — indicates that Scangarello has successfully completed his first major task as UK offensive coordinator.
During a tightly compressed window of six weeks since he was hired off the San Francisco 49ers coaching staff as UK OC once the Los Angeles Rams rehired Liam Coen away from Kentucky, Scangarello appears to have presided over a smooth installation of his system.
In the spring game, Levis looked sharp. Backup running backs Mike Drennen and Kavosiey Smoke ran hard. At receiver, Virginia Tech transfer Tayvion Robinson and true freshman Dane Key of Lexington’s Frederick Douglass High School flashed promise. New starting tackles Jeremy Flax (right) and Deondre Buford (left) held up.
“(There’s) a lot of work still to be done, but I like the foundation we have laid,” Scangarello said.
As Kentucky has navigated an unexpected OC transition relatively late in the football calendar, it obviously helps that Scangarello (Kyle Shananhan) and Coen (Sean McVay) come from different branches of the same philosophical coaching tree.
Learning the new system “wasn’t really challenging at all,” said Rodriguez after carrying the ball twice for 11 yards and catching two passes for 21 yards and touchdown. “When (Scangarello) came in, it was easy. We learned it just like it was regular stuff.”
As promised, Scangarello appeared to keep his play calling in the spring scrimmage vanilla.
“He didn’t want to give anything away,” Levis said of Scangarello. “There was one drive where we ran the same play in the red zone three times in a row because (Scangarello) didn’t want to show (future Kentucky opponents) any other concepts.”
This time last season, Levis was finishing academic work on his undergraduate degree at Penn State. Even though the QB had announced plans to transfer to UK, he did not get to go through a spring practice with Kentucky.
Nevertheless, the strong-armed Connecticut product ended up winning the UK starting job and directing the Wildcats to a 10-3 mark that ended with a VRBO Citrus Bowl upset of Iowa.
Once you’ve done that, navigating through a late and unexpected offensive coordinator change seems pretty manageable.
“Last year was more challenging, just because of time,” Levis said. “Time is money. And the amount of (practice repetitions) and the amount of time you are able to spend on an offense is just going to help prepare yourself even more. Even though this is a new OC, not all the stuff we are doing is new.”
Stoops and UK still have a week of spring practice left. Once that is done, however, it will give Scangarello a chance to push ahead.
Before UK’s offensive players exit the 2021-22 school year, Scangarello will assign each Cat a group of tasks designed to hone areas of needed improvement.
For an offensive lineman, that could involve working on improved footwork or seeking to develop more explosion off the line of scrimmage. At quarterback, that could mean spending the summer working on one’s footwork or honing the ability to make a particular throw.
“I’m a big, big believer with each individual player, giving them two or three things … that they truly can take into the summer and attack,” Scangarello said.
Once the the Miami RedHawks visit Kroger Field on Sept. 3 to launch the 2022 Kentucky season, Levis vows UK backers will get a fuller picture that they will like of what a Rich Scangarello-designed offensive attack can do.
“There is a lot of fun stuff we didn’t show (in the Blue-White scrimmage),” Levis said, “that we will keep in our back pocket.”
This story was originally published April 9, 2022 at 7:45 PM.
