One thing UK football is teaching us in 2022: Good head coaches can have bad seasons
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Game day: Vanderbilt 24, Kentucky 21
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader’s and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s Kentucky-Vanderbilt football game at Kroger Field in Lexington.
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In the 10 seasons he has spent as Kentucky head football coach, one thing I have always appreciated about Mark Stoops is he tends to keep it real in his news conferences.
So after his team, which entered 2022 talking of challenging for the SEC East championship and playing in a New Year’s Six bowl, was beaten by a short-handed Vanderbilt team that had lost 26 Southeastern Conference games in a row, Stoops was frank.
“For whatever reason, I am not getting it done with this team,” the UK coach said.
On a gray, frigid day at Kroger Field, Vanderbilt defeated Kentucky 24-21 before an announced crowd of 57,474. Given the expectations UK brought into its 2022 season, the defeat deserves to be considered the worst of the Stoops era.
Playing with a backup quarterback and without two starting offensive linemen, Vanderbilt nevertheless rolled up 448 yards of total offense, 264 of it on the ground versus a Kentucky defense that had been the Wildcats’ season-long strength.
The team that deserved to win the game was the one that went home with the victory.
What is a breakthrough win for Vandy (4-6, 1-5 SEC) and second-year coach Clark Lea, however, is one that leaves a lot of questions about how Kentucky (6-4, 3-4 SEC) could have seen a season that began with so much hope go so far off the rails.
“Disappointed. You know, disappointed with the way things have gone. I think everybody is,” Stoops said. “Each year, each team, you have to go earn it, prove it. I know that. We talk about that all the time.”
My first-hand memory of UK football basically begins with the Commonwealth Stadium/Kroger Field era (from 1973 onward). In all that time, Stoops has done the best coaching job, elevating UK from SEC doormat to two 10-win seasons in the past four years.
That’s what makes what we are watching from Kentucky in 2022 so hard to process.
For the second time this season in a home game against an opponent that UK should have beaten, the Wildcats were not the team playing with the most fervor and energy.
That motivational deficit directly led to home losses to South Carolina last month and Vanderbilt on Saturday, two of the programs that Kentucky had surmounted in its Stoops-era rise.
Losing those kind of games on your home field is how your squander a lot of program progression.
“The intensity we played with a week ago (in a 21-17 road win over Missouri), I just thought (it) was average at best (against Vanderbilt),” Stoops said.
Continuing a season-long pattern of offensive inefficiency, Kentucky had the ball on the Vanderbilt side of the field seven times. Yet that yielded only two touchdowns, one of them on a 72-yard run by Christopher Rodriguez.
“The execution in playing clean, once again, just didn’t happen,” Stoops said. “We’re leaving points on the field.”
Vanderbilt sacked Kentucky quarterback Will Levis four times. That makes 39 times a UK quarterback has been sacked this season.
UK’s inability to protect the QB has made it hard to judge the job performances of new Kentucky offensive coordinator Rich Scangarello and offensive line coach Zach Yenser. What has been disappointing is that the Kentucky coaching brain trust has not been able to figure out anything to at least alleviate what has been an unrelenting issue.
Asked after the Vanderbilt loss if he had any in-season plans to make a change at offensive coordinator or offensive line coach, Stoops said “no.”
On Saturday, even the one unit that has carried Kentucky in 2022, the Cats’ defense, let down.
After Rodriguez’s 72-yard touchdown run put UK ahead 21-17 with 5:03 left in the game, it appeared that Tyrell Ajian had clinched victory for the Cats by intercepting a Mike Wright pass with 2:33 left.
Instead, the play was nullified when Kentucky defensive tackle Octavious Oxendine was called for a personal foul for illegal hands to the face.
UK had another shot to seal victory when Vandy faced fourth-and-9 from the UK 49 with 1:26 left, but Wright connected on a go ball down the right sideline to star wideout Quincy Skinner for 40 yards. That set up the game-winning TD, an 8-yard pass from Wright to Will Sheppard with 32 seconds left.
On the decisive throw to Skinner, Vanderbilt was able to isolate the wide receiver on inexperienced Kentucky cornerback Maxwell Hairston. The 6-foot-1, 185-pound redshirt freshman was on the field because of an injury to starting UK cornerback Carrington Valentine only plays before.
It was hard to understand why Kentucky’s defensive coaches did not have any safety help for an inexperienced corner thrust into action with the game hanging in the balance.
“I probably should have done a better job of protecting Max there,” UK defensive coordinator Brad White lamented afterward.
Not giving up late scores to lose games has been another staple of Kentucky football’s Stoops-era success.
What happened Saturday was another 2022 chapter that runs contrary to how Mark Stoops-coached UK teams have tended to play.
The moral of what has become a frustrating Wildcats season is that even good head coaches can have bad years.
This story was originally published November 12, 2022 at 6:33 PM.
