An unsatisfying Kentucky football season comes to an unsatisfying ending
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Music City Bowl game day: Iowa 21, Kentucky 0
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader’s and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s Kentucky-Iowa football game in the Music City Bowl at Nashville, Tenn.
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A Kentucky football season that began with dreams of competing for the SEC East title or earning a berth to a New Year’s Six bowl ended in a far different place.
Its star players sitting out, it’s offense sputtering and its special teams outclassed — yet again — Kentucky fell to Iowa 21-0 Saturday before a smallish TransPerfect Music City Bowl crowd announced at 42,312.
After a rock fight of game that featured 20 first downs and 18 punts, Kentucky finished its season 7-6, while Iowa improved to 8-5.
“Both of us were down some players and a bit shorthanded,” UK Coach Mark Stoops said afterward. “(Iowa) did what they had to do to win the football game.”
With Wildcats starting quarterback Will Levis opting out of the bowl to prepare for the NFL Draft, UK true freshman Destin Wade drew the unenviable task of playing his first college downs against one of the top defenses in college football.
The results were predictable, as Iowa turned two Wade interceptions into pick sixes.
Wade “was put in a tough situation,” Stoops said. “I wanted to let Destin play. I wanted to see the future and what he looks like. He will learn from it, without a doubt.”
Seldom has a Kentucky football defeat come with greater symmetry.
A better Wildcats team beat a better Iowa team 20-17 in the Citrus Bowl on the first day of 2022. A lesser UK team — further depleted by bowl opt-outs and injuries — fell to a lesser Iowa team on the final day of 2022.
Kentucky saw its four-game bowl winning streak snapped. The Wildcats also had their 20-game non-league victory streak end.
Both of those defeats came at the site of what had been UK’s most recent defeat in a bowl and its most-recent loss to a non-SEC foe — a 24-23 setback to Northwestern in the 2017 Music City Bowl.
With no Levis and no Christopher Rodriguez, the star Kentucky running back who also opted out, the Cats’ sputtering offense never had a drive end deeper than the Iowa 36-yard line.
Without the physically punishing running style of Rodriguez, UK had Wade throw the ball 30 times. He completed 16 to UK receivers for 98 yards — but it was the two he threw that Iowa defenders turned into touchdowns that put the game out of reach for Kentucky.
“We felt like we had to spread it out a bit,” Stoops said. “We weren’t quite the same team we were a year ago. (Iowa was) still very physical and very tough up front. So getting in big sets and playing smash mouth football with them was, I think, going to be tough.”
So what was a frustrating Kentucky football season came to an appropriately frustrating end.
A UK year that saw the Wildcats win SEC road games at Florida and Missouri and whip archrival Louisville for the fourth-straight time also saw the Cats self-sabotage in road loss at Mississippi that should have been a win; get run out of the stadium by Tennessee; and take a horrid home-field loss to Vanderbilt that snapped a 26-game SEC losing skid for the Commodores.
In a big-picture sense, it is a sign of program growth that there is so much UK football unhappiness at the end of a year that saw the Cats finish with a winning record.
“There was something just a bit off this year from time to time,” Stoops said. “I just told the players this: That’s on me. I’ve got to get that fixed. We’ve got to get back to being who we are.”
Asked specifically what he felt was “off,” Stoops pointed out that he has fired two of three coordinators since the end of the regular season. Jay Boulware has been hired to replace John Settle as special teams coordinator (and running backs coach). It is widely expected that former UK and current Los Angeles Rams offensive coordinator Liam Coen will return to Lexington to replace the fired Rich Scangarello as the Wildcats’ OC.
“I have to own my part,” Stoops said. “There are things we needed to address. With bringing on the coordinator that I believe I am going to get on the offensive side of the ball, it will help hit the reset button.”
With Coen expected back to run the offense and North Carolina State transfer Devin Leary coming in to throw the football, the UK offense should take a significant step upward in 2023 — assuming Stoops and Co. can repair an offensive line that struggled all season.
Defensively, Stoops and coordinator Brad White have built an enduring culture of success that endured to the end of the very uneven Kentucky 2022 season.
In defeat Saturday, UK forced eight Iowa three-and-outs.
That the Cats not only couldn’t parlay that defensive excellence into a victory — UK was never in threatening position after the two Iowa interception returns for touchdowns — was only another way that a disappointing showing in the Music City Bowl encapsulated so much about the overall Kentucky season.
This story was originally published December 31, 2022 at 5:32 PM.
