Give offensive coordinator Eddie Gran credit for not mincing words after Tuesday’s practice about UK’s dismal offensive play at Missouri Saturday in the 20-10 loss when the Cats ran only 36 offensive plays.
“If you can’t throw and catch and you don’t have our meat and potatoes, it’s not good. It’ll be a long day,” said Gran.
Long day indeed as UK bottomed off from the start of the game.
“It starts with me. We’ve been here before. We’ve had this conversation and you want to have a perfect game every game. I wasn’t very good. I didn’t have them ready to go,” the UK offensive coordinator said.
“The responsibility lies on my head as always when it comes down to it. Our guys are going to play better. They know. What we did, we came in, we got our mistakes corrected and today we had a lot of juice, a lot of energy and I was really excited about how they came out and approached this practice.”
Lot of juice? I hope so because the Cats had no offensive juice against Missouri and now starting quarterback Terry Wilson has missed the last two days of practice with an undisclosed injury. However, Gran correctly said it was about more than the quarterback when UK plays that poorly.
“It’s about getting guys ready to play. This is an NFL schedule. This is what it is. It’s 10 games. You’ve got to buckle your chinstrap. You got to grind as a coach. You got to frickin’ make the adjustments quick,” Gran said.
“You have to have a mindset. We had a mindset a week ago in that second half (at Tennessee). It was really close in the first half and we started to see something.”
So what happened at Missouri?
“We just didn’t have the juice and the big men lead the way. It starts up there. It was everybody, okay? It’s not just one thing, but I can promise you as I talk to the O-line, they know and they want it on their shoulders, they do. They want it. We’ve got to be better,” Gran said.
“We’ve got to be better at a lot of places but we get better there, we’re going to be just fine. I’m excited about the challenge and so are they.”
The offensive line did not open holes on early downs. The quarterback and pass-catchers could not connect. It was an all systems failure. This week the Wildcats cannot afford to get better, especially on early downs, or it’ll be another ugly Saturday in the BBN.
“We’re not making first downs. We’ve gotta start faster and we’ve gotta be better all around, everybody in the unit, coaching, everything.”
