Three takeaways from Kentucky football’s win over Louisville
Three takeaways from Kentucky football’s 45-13 win over Louisville on Saturday at Kroger Field:
1. Lynn Bowden is amazing, but you already knew that
Key sequence in the game: On a fourth-and-1 at U of L’s 43-yard-line with under a minute to go in the second quarter, UK Coach Mark Stoops elects to go for it. Bowden is stopped for a 1-yard loss and the Cats turn the ball over on downs. Two plays later, Louisville’s Javian Hawkins sprints 56 yards for a touchdown and suddenly Kentucky’s lead is cut to 17-13 at halftime.
“That was a gut punch,” said Stoops.
“I got ya,” Bowden told Stoops.
And he did. Second play of the second half, the UK wide receiver-turned-quarterback rushed 60 yards for a touchdown to extend the lead out to 24-13 and swing the momentum back the Wildcats’ way.
But then that could have been a metaphor of Kentucky’s entire football season. Just when the Cats took the gut punch of losing two quarterbacks, first returning starter Terry Wilson and then backup Sawyer Smith, Bowden turned the season back UK’s way when Eddie Gran made the decision to put the junior behind center.
Bowden rushed for 284 yards on 22 carries Saturday, his second 200-yard game since taking over at QB. In the seven games that Bowden has been the Kentucky quarterback, he’s rushed for an average of 162.3 yards. The Wildcats have won five of those seven games and are going to their fourth consecutive bowl game.
2. Let’s not forget the defense
Louisville hit two big plays. The Cardinals scored on a 33-yard pass on the game’s first possession. They hit the 54-yard Hawkins run at the end of the second quarter. That’s it. They did not score a point in the second half. They did gain 318 yards, the first UK opponent in the last five games to put up more than 300 yards on the Cats. But Kentucky still won by 32.
Remember, this is the same defense that lost Josh Allen, Lonnie Johnson, Mike Edwards, Darius West, Jordan Jones, Derrick Baity, Chris Westry and others off last year’s 10-3 team. UK had to totally rebuild a secondary that lost veteran Davonte Robinson to a torn quad right before training camp.
As the year went along, however, the unit got better and better. It finished the final five games without allowing more than 17 points in a game. It won four of those games. It has a good core of young players who played important roles this year and should be even better next year.
And it has a defensive coordinator in Brad White, who excelled in his first year calling the defensive signals. After the learning experience, White should be ready to guide what could be an impressive unit in 2020.
3. All in all, a satisfying regular season
After all the personnel losses from a year ago, you knew that Kentucky would not duplicate its 10-win 2018 Citrus Bowl campaign. Getting back to a bowl game would be a reasonable objective. I predicted an 8-4 record. But a 7-5 regular season finish, considering what happened during that season, has to be judged as a significant accomplishment.
No one could have predicted that the Cats would lose their returning starting quarterback, Terry Wilson, for the season in just the second game. No one could have predicted that backup Sawyer Smith would be too beat-up to be effective. And certainly no one thought that the Cats would move Bowden to quarterback and ride with that for seven games.
It’s more than that, however. It’s the fact that young players have played key roles on this team, from running backs Chris Rodriguez and Kavosiey Smoke to linebackers Chris Oats, DeAndre Square and Jamin Davis to defensive backs Yusuf Corker and Brandin Echols. That’s just to name a few.
Saturday was Senior Day for the Cats, but it’s a small senior class. That means there are plenty of returnees on both sides of the ball for next year. Returnees that now get the extra set of bowl practices, and the confidence of producing a winning season and another victory over Louisville.
This story was originally published November 30, 2019 at 7:18 PM.
