It’s officially time to be worried about the arc of Mark Stoops’ Kentucky football program
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Gameday: South Carolina 31, Kentucky 6
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s Kentucky-South Carolina football game at Kroger Field in Lexington.
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Let’s be real about one thing: Kentucky needs to stop making excuses for what is now a three-game losing streak against South Carolina.
The reality on full display before 61,343 sun-drenched fans at Kroger Field on Saturday was this: Shane Beamer’s program has passed UK’s.
What other conclusion is there to draw after Kentucky, in a game that had been talked about all offseason as pivotal to the fates of both the Wildcats’ and the Gamecocks’ seasons, was obliterated on its home field 31-6?
“Very disappointed,” UK coach Mark Stoops said afterward. “Not happy with us — our coaching, our response (to game adversity), the way we played.”
For the fourth straight meeting between the Cats and the Gamecocks, South Carolina defensive coordinator Clayton White’s defense completely flummoxed a Kentucky offense.
Against the dynamic South Carolina pass rush, Kentucky quarterbacks Brock Vandagriff and Gavin Wimsatt were live tackling dummies. The UK offensive line surrendered 11 tackles for loss, five quarterback sacks and four QB hurries.
That unrelenting pressure is the primary reason Kentucky was held to 183 total yards and completed only six passes for 44 yards.
Yet Stoops, correctly, diagnosed a greater problem. In a game in which it felt like the Wildcats were under near-constant duress, it also seemed like the Cats buckled.
“We talk about all the time, when we get punched, get hit, we swing back,” Stoops said. “We’ve been beaten really badly by some really good football teams. (But) I felt like our team always fought back. ... Today, we didn’t look like a team that wanted to respond. And that’s on me.”
One game from the second week of a season is a very small sample size, but what made Kentucky’s performance against South Carolina alarming is that many of the things that did in the Cats on Saturday are carryover problems that have plagued UK during the past two disappointing seasons, which each ended at 7-6 when better was possible.
Kentucky sabotaged itself against South Carolina by committing 11 penalties.
An especially costly one came early in the third quarter with South Carolina only ahead 10-6. On a fourth-and-1 play from the Kentucky 49-yard line, the Gamecocks came out in the pistol formation, then sent a tight end in motion to line up immediately behind center in “quarterback sneak position.”
What was a bid to draw Kentucky into committing a penalty that would give the Gamecocks a first down worked when veteran UK defensive lineman Octavious Oxendine jumped offside.
Four plays later, South Carolina scored the touchdown that broke open what had been a defensive struggle.
The 2023 Kentucky defense had a persistent problem with giving up first downs on third-and-long plays. As a result, preventing that was said to be a major point of UK emphasis in 2024.
Well, the Wildcats held South Carolina to 3 of 10 on third downs, but twice Kentucky got burned on third-and-long in what became Gamecocks’ touchdown drives.
On the possession that Oxendine’s penalty extended, a UK pass coverage bust allowed South Carolina quarterback LaNorris Sellers to convert a third-and-14 from the 48 with a 33-yard pass to a lonesome Mazeo Bennett.
The Kentucky deficit was still only 17-6 when Sellers hit Jared Brown for 13 yards on third-and-11 from the Cats’ 44. That conversion ignited the drive that allowed South Carolina to score the TD that put the game out of reach at 24-6 with 28 seconds left in the third quarter.
Untimely penalties, surrendering damaging third-and-long conversions and overall undisciplined performance has all too often characterized Kentucky’s play since 2022. That is a stark difference from the tough-minded, disciplined football that Kentucky’s two 10-win teams (2018 and 2021, the latter season subsequently vacated by the NCAA due to UK rules violations) in the Stoops era played.
Kentucky has now lost four out of six to South Carolina, a benchmark program for UK football.
The Wildcats have lost eight of their last 10 Southeastern Conference home games, a stretch that started with the 45-42 loss to Tennessee in the final league home contest of 2021.
Before Saturday, I would have ranked the two worst losses of the Stoops era as the 21-17 loss at Vanderbilt in 2015 in a game in which UK coaching decisions continually blew up on the Wildcats and the 24-21 loss to Vandy in 2022 that snapped a 26-game SEC losing streak for the Commodores.
However, given that Stoops is now in his 12th season and UK turned in such a lackluster performance Saturday in what was seen as such a critical game, the defeat to South Carolina is the worst of the Stoops era.
“There’s no way to sugar coat it,” Stoops said, “we got our butts beat.”
In the big picture, the Stoops coaching era has been the best sustained period of Kentucky football in my lifetime. Yet with what we watched Saturday vs. South Carolina coming on the heels what we’ve seen the past two seasons, I fear we have reached the point where we need to be worried about the arc of Stoops’ program.
