‘It is a broken record.’ Why can’t UK football cut out the sloppy play?
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Game day: Kentucky 35, Akron 3
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader’s and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s Kentucky-Akron football game at Kroger Field in Lexington.
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After yet another offensive showing filled with missed blocks, missed catches and missed chances, Kentucky’s resulting frustration took the form of a desperate search to find the right cliché to sum up UK’s self-sabotaging tendencies.
“It is a broken record,” Mark Stoops said.
“We just shoot ourselves in the foot — a lot,” Devin Leary said.
We have some instances of losing our minds in certain situations,” Liam Coen added.
Exactly 50 years and one day after Kroger Field/Commonwealth Stadium opened on Sept. 15, 1973, Kentucky (3-0) dispatched overmatched Akron 35-3 Saturday night before an announced crowd of 59,456.
Afterward, even though the Wildcats offense compiled 450 yards on only 49 plays from scrimmage, frustration lifted off Coen, the UK offensive coordinator, like heat rises off of asphalt.
“We completely are self-inflicting wounds,” Coen lamented.
On a night when Devin Leary (315 passing yards) produced only the 15th 300-plus yards passing performance by a UK quarterback in the Mark Stoops era; when Ray Davis uncorked a pair of scintillating explosive touchdowns of 55 and 58 yards; and when Kentucky finally got its tight ends back involved in the passing game (six combined catches for 113 yards and a touchdown), the dominant theme of the Wildcats’ offensive performance was sloppy play.
Again.
Against the plucky Zips, let us count the Wildcats’ major offensive miscues:
▪ After making a hellacious catch over the middle for a 59-yard gain, UK tight end Jordan Dingle fumbled the ball into the Akron end zone for a touchback;
▪ A pair of shot-gun snaps that were either high, mishandled or both, cost Kentucky a combined 33 negative yards;
▪ Late in the second quarter, UK left tackle Marques Cox completely whiffed on a blocking assignment, allowing Akron’s CJ Nunnally to crush an unsuspecting Leary from his blind side for a sack and a loss of 9 yards;
▪ A holding penalty on Kentucky center Jager Burton early in the third quarter negated what would have been a 64-yard touchdown pass from Leary to true freshman slot receiver Anthony Brown-Stephens;
▪ Leary was picked off in the third quarter on a play when, it appeared, the route he was throwing was not the one intended receiver Dane Key was running.
The miscues and turnovers by UK — which also included a lost fumble by Tayvion Robinson on a punt return — helped combine to limit Kentucky to running only 49 plays from scrimmage.
“At the end of the day, if we don’t start executing, this stuff is going to bite us in the butt when we play better teams,” Coen said.
Said Stoops: “You cannot have (bad) snaps; holds; you can’t fumble going in (to the end zone). (Kentucky had) a chance to put up 42, 49 points pretty easy. And then really nobody would be as mad or as frustrated, I should say, on our end.”
What’s disturbing about Kentucky’s mistake-prone start to 2023 is that it feels like a continuation of what too often did in the Cats in 2022.
Last year, UK lost what might have been the game-winning touchdown in a three-point loss at Mississippi due to an offensive penalty. The Wildcats lost what would have been a game-clinching interception in what became a three-point defeat by Vanderbilt due to a defensive penalty; and the Cats did all they could to give away a late lead at Missouri when a long snap rifled over the head of the Kentucky punter.
Bill Parcells famously said, “You are what your record says you are.”
My derivative of “Parcells’ law” is “You are what your play says you are.”
For much of 2022 and for three games of 2023, Kentucky’s play has all but screamed “sloppy.”
“I think everybody is at the point, we want to stop making all these little mistakes,” said Tayvion Robinson, who caught five passes for 86 yards and a touchdown against Akron.
It feels like we’ve been listening to Kentucky football vow to “clean up” its mistakes and “pay attention” to the details for the past 18 months.
Now that the “exhibition season” with Group of Five and FCS competition is over for UK. All that is left on the Kentucky schedule for 2023-24 is Power Five foes — eight straight SEC games, starting with next Saturday’s trip to Vanderbilt, followed by the season-ending intrastate Armageddon with Louisville.
Can a team for whom “sloppy play” has seemed to become part of its DNA “flip a switch” and, forgive me, “clean things up” now that the level of competition is rising?
“I wish we could just flip the switch,” Leary said. “At the end of the day, it’s going to come down to practice. It’s going to come down to holding each other accountable. The biggest thing is getting in the film room, making sure we understand the mistakes that we have been making that can’t keep happening.”
This story was originally published September 17, 2023 at 4:10 AM.
