Kentucky football’s run of offensive futility has multiple causes
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kentucky offense has failed to reach three offensive TDs in 11 SEC games.
- Yearly staff and quarterback turnover has undermined continuity in Kentucky’s offense.
- Pass protection and transfer QB mix forced Kentucky into sacks, injuries and youth.
Should you ever find yourself needing solitude, there is a place to go that, in recent years, all but guarantees privacy:
That is the end zone that the Kentucky Wildcats football team is seeking to pierce each Saturday.
UK’s 35-13 loss at South Carolina Saturday extended a disheartening Wildcats football trend. The Cats have now gone 11 straight games against power conference opposition without scoring more than two offensive touchdowns in any game.
The last time a Kentucky offense scored as many as three touchdowns in an SEC game was Nov. 11, 2023, in a 49-21 loss to Alabama at Kroger Field. UK has not scored four offensive TDs vs. a Southeastern Conference foe since Ray Davis scored all four himself in Kentucky’s 33-14 home victory over Florida on Sept. 30, 2023.
Simply put, it’s hard to win if you can’t score.
Asked about the UK offense Monday at his weekly news conference at Kroger Field, Kentucky coach Mark Stoops said “I think we just got to continue to get better in all areas.”
The reasons UK has had so much trouble in recent seasons putting numbers on the scoreboard are multiple.
Instability among the key personnel directing Stoops’ offenses has seemed a root cause of the problems.
Until this season, a different person had called the offense every year for Kentucky since 2020.
Prior to this season, UK had not had the same offensive coordinator and same offensive line coach in place for full seasons in back-to-back years since Eddie Gran and John Schlarman, respectively, in 2018 and 2019.
Partially due to injuries, Kentucky over the entire Stoops era (since 2013) has never had the same starting quarterback and the same offensive coordinator in place for the entirety of back-to-back seasons.
(Amazingly, the last time UK had that with a QB and OC goes back two head coaching tenures, to the Rich Brooks era, with Andre Woodson and Joker Phillips, respectively, in 2006 and 2007).
The hope this season was that with offensive coordinator Bush Hamdan and offensive line coach Eric Wolford both returning from 2024 that the Kentucky offensive attack might finally reap some benefit from continuity.
So far, in two SEC contests, that has not yet seemed the case.
Kentucky scored two offensive touchdowns and gained 354 total yards in losing 30-23 to Mississipppi.
The Wildcats had one offensive TD and 232 yards of total offense in the loss at South Carolina.
In the 10 SEC games in which Hamdan has so far called the Kentucky offense, the Cats have averaged 1.3 offensive touchdowns, 14.9 points and 287.6 yards a game.
By way of comparison, in 2021, with then-former NFL assistant Liam Coen calling plays for the Wildcats, the Kentucky offense averaged 3.1 touchdowns, 27.4 points and 385.8 total yards a contest versus SEC opposition.
In 2022, in the much-maligned Rich Scangarello‘s lone season running the UK attack, the Wildcats averaged 2.1 touchdowns, 17.5 points and 306.4 yards a game against Southeastern Conference foes.
For 2023, when Coen came back to Lexington for “Liam 2.0,” Kentucky averaged 2.9 TDs, 24.8 points and 313.5 yards in SEC contests.
One thing that has sabotaged Hamdan’s offenses the past two seasons is the difficulty Kentucky has had protecting its quarterbacks.
Last season, Kentucky gave up a whopping 35 sacks to finish No. 114 out of the 133 FBS teams in that category. After UK invested heavily in offensive linemen in the transfer portal for 2025, the hope was that Wildcat QBs would have more time to throw this season.
That is why the six sacks and four quarterback hurries Kentucky surrendered at South Carolina were dispiriting. In its two SEC games to date, UK has given up nine sacks and seven hurries.
Another thing that has hampered Kentucky offensively is UK has not “hit” on a transfer portal quarterback since Coen brought in Penn State backup QB Will Levis prior to the 2021 season.
Levis went 17-7 as a UK starter and played his way into the second round of the 2023 NFL draft.
Former North Carolina State star Devin Leary was productive at Kentucky but never seemed fully comfortable in Coen’s pro-style offense in 2023.
In 2024, ex-Georgia backup Brock Vandagriff had a memorable fourth-down throw to Barion Brown in UK’s road upset of No. 6 Mississippi, but otherwise mostly struggled while taking a physical pounding behind a shaky offensive front (see above).
This season, Zach Calzada, former quarterback at Texas A&M, Auburn and Incarnate Word, completed only 25 of 53 passes in the two games he started for Kentucky before suffering a shoulder injury.
That means that, in a season when UK desperately needs to win games, the Cats are forced to go with redshirt freshman Cutter Boley at QB.
That may pay off in the long run for the Kentucky football program, but it is asking a lot of a quarterback with all of three career starts to supply the “fix” for an offense that, at this point, has been in a multi-season rut.
