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An early look ahead to Kentucky’s 2024 football season opener:
The opponent
Kentucky (7-6 overall, 3-5 SEC in 2023) will open its 2024 season against Sun Belt Conference foe Southern Mississippi (3-9 overall, 2-6 SBC) on Aug. 31 at Kroger Field.
A program with a proud football history, Southern Miss has endured losing seasons in three of the past four years.
So Golden Eagles coach Will Hall will probably be bringing a hungry team to Lexington to face the presumptive UK starting quarterback, Georgia transfer Brock Vandagriff, in what would be his first career college start.
Series history
Kentucky leads the series 3-1.
The 2024 season opener will be the third time in the past nine seasons that UK and USM have met in the season’s first game. The two teams also played the first game of the year in 2016 and 2017, splitting the contests.
Most recent meetings
On Sept. 3, 2016, in the season opener, Southern Miss quarterback Nick Mullens threw for 258 yards and two touchdowns and star running back Ito Smith ran for 173 yards and a TD as the Golden Eagles rallied from a 35-17 halftime deficit to stun Kentucky 44-35 in Lexington.
The following year, on Sept. 2, 2017, UK opened its season with a hard-fought 24-17 win at Southern Mississippi.
Kentucky quarterback Stephen Johnson ran for a touchdown and threw for a TD and the Wildcats defense forced two crucial fumbles, including one that Denzil Ware returned 20 yards for a touchdown, to spark the Cats to a redemptive victory over the Golden Eagles.
Know your foe
1. Since beating Kentucky in the 2016 season opener, Southern Miss has subsequently lost its last 11 games against power-conference opponents, including losing eight straight to SEC teams.
This past season, the Golden Eagles were pulverized 66-13 at Florida State of the ACC and lost 41-20 at SEC foe Mississippi State.
2. A porous defense killed USM in 2023. The Golden Eagles gave up in excess of 30 points eight times in 12 games; in excess of 40 points six times; in excess of 50 points three times; and in excess of 60 points once.
As a result, Southern Miss head man Will Hall is making wholesale changes to the USM defensive coaching staff. According to various published reports, the Golden Eagles have parted ways with defensive coordinator Dan O’Brien, linebackers coach Mark Criner and defensive line coach Brandon Lacy since the end of the 2023 season.
To run the USM defense in 2024, Hall has tabbed Clay Bignell off the staff at Eastern Illinois.
At EIU, Bignell’s defense ranked 16th in the FCS in points allowed, 19.73, and forced a whopping 25 turnovers, recovering 11 fumbles and picking off 14 passes.
3. Southern Miss will have at least one coach on its staff in 2024 who should know Kentucky well.
New USM offensive coordinator Chip Long spent the past season as a quality control specialist on Jeff Brohm’s staff at Louisville in 2023. Long also spent the 2020 season as an offensive quality control analyst at Tennessee.
Prior to Southern Miss, Long has been an offensive coordinator at four schools: Memphis (2016), Notre Dame (2017-19), Tulane (2021) and Georgia Tech (2022).
This story was originally published December 29, 2023 at 3:36 PM.
