On another big stage, Kentucky football again comes up small
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Game day: No. 1 Georgia 51, No. 20 Kentucky 13
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader’s and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s Kentucky-Georgia football game at Athens, Georgia.
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For the second straight season, Kentucky football had a prime-time slot on ESPN against one of college football’s elite teams. The Wildcats were gifted with a chance to show the nation what they had.
For the second straight year, UK proved unworthy of such a large stage.
In a game in which the final score was every bit indicative of the competitive reality, No. 1 Georgia throttled No. 20 Kentucky 51-13 Saturday night before a crowd of 92,746 at Dooley Field at Sanford Stadium.
“I am not very proud of that effort,” a dejected-sounding Kentucky coach Mark Stoops said on his postgame radio show. “Definitely, we did not play very good. We did not play very smart. We did not play very tough. We did not handle this atmosphere.”
Last year, given a similar high-visibility opportunity to show the legitimacy of the Stoops era ascension in UK’s football fortunes, the Wildcats were dismantled 44-6 by No. 3 Tennessee in Knoxville.
This year in Athens, Kentucky was savaged in every phase of the game by a Georgia team that had seemingly grown weary of hearing that it was not at the same level as the Bulldogs’ national championship squads of 2021 and 2022.
Defensively, the Wildcats were gashed by Georgia for a whopping 608 yards of offense.
Bulldogs starting quarterback Carson Beck threw for a career-high 389 yards and four touchdowns while completing 28 of the 35 passes he attempted. Brock Bowers, the Dawgs’ all-universe tight end, had seven catches for 132 yards and a TD.
Other than a Maxwell Hairston interception of Beck that set UK up for a short-field touchdown in the third quarter, Georgia scored points — five touchdowns and three field goals — on all eight of the other possessions in which its starting quarterback was in the game.
Offensively, UK gained a puny 183 total yards. For the second straight game, UK QB Devin Leary threw more incompletions (16) than completions (10).
On special teams, Kentucky punter Wilson Berry had a busy night, kicking eight times. The Australian had a rough go, though, averaging only 31 yards a punt.
Even as UK has wrapped up the first half of its season with a 5-1 record — 2-1 in the SEC — some worrisome trends have emerged.
Georgia at last made the Wildcats pay for the sloppy play that Stoops so frequently bemoaned even as Kentucky was coasting to early-season wins against overmatched foes.
On Saturday night, UK’s first two offensive drives were sabotaged by major penalties. The one first-half Georgia drive in which Kentucky had forced a three-and-out and was set to receive a punt was instead extended by yet another major penalty on UK.
Given additional life, Kirby Smart’s Bulldogs drove for a touchdown.
Kentucky’s quarterback play is becoming a concern. We might have underestimated the degree of difficulty Leary would face in transitioning from the uptempo, spread offense he ran as a starter at North Carolina State to the pro-style attack that UK deploys.
In the Cats’ first three SEC games, Leary has completed only 45.9% of his passes (34 of 74).
Obviously, drops have been a part of that, but Leary has not, so far, looked much like the QB who threw for 35 touchdowns versus only five interceptions for N.C. State in 2021.
“I can’t make any excuses for him,” Stoops said on his postgame radio show. “There (are) open receivers. He’s got to step into it and make the throw. I told him that on the sideline. He went through a couple of stretches (where) we did have some good series. Overall, just not good enough right now.”
For all the improvements Stoops has overseen in Kentucky football, the top tier of the sport remains a level UK has been unable to pierce.
Against the two dominant SEC programs of this era — Georgia and Alabama — Stoops is now a combined 0-14.
Though Stoops has 12 wins against foes ranked in the AP Top 25 as UK’s head coach — 10 of them since 2018 — he is now 1-17 against top 10 teams and 0-9 against the top five.
When you have the spotty football past that Kentucky does, the nation’s default position is treating claims of Wildcats improvement as suspect.
What UK has demonstrated these past two seasons when given a shot by ESPN on prime-time stages against top-three competition supplies oxygen to Kentucky football skeptics.
The loss to Georgia almost certainly means UK will not win the SEC East in this final year of Southeastern Conference divisions. If so, that means the Wildcats will never win the East.
Still, there are positive accomplishments available to the 2023 Wildcats. In the drive to get to those, next week’s game against Missouri shapes up as pivotal.
Last year, after being embarrassed at Tennessee, Kentucky responded with a win over Mizzou.
(We have a) huge game coming up this week,” Stoops said on his postgame radio show, “and we can’t let one (loss) turn into two.”
This story was originally published October 8, 2023 at 12:33 AM.
