Win over Chattanooga felt like sucking on a lemon

Kentucky needs to get back to being a physical football team. (UK Athletics Photo)

Here’s something that I have been thinking about since Kentucky barely defeated a physical Chattanooga 28-23. Mark Stoops doesn’t like to be shown up. In fact, Stoops hates it when his team is shown up and physically manhandled by his opponent. After that happens he always looks like he’s been sucking on a lemon and after the game, with the way UK played, it looked like the entire fan base had sucked on a lemon.

But honestly, these thoughts about physicality and being shown up first struck me when I heard Stoops pre-game press conference before the Missouri game.

He said, “They (Missouri) played more physical than us a year ago. That is uncharacteristic and I don’t particularly like that. We need to be much more physical this year. I sense that they were much more prepared to play last year than we were. That’s on me. I can promise you that’s not going to happen again.”

And it didn’t. Stoops made sure they prepared and played the correct way. His way. The physical way, winning the game at the line of scrimmage.

In the Missouri game, his offense ran the ball 52 times out of 70 overall offensive plays. That’s 75 percent of the time the Kentucky offense ran the ball. Right before halftime, the UK offense had a drive that consisted of 12 straight running plays and it would have ended in a touchdown if Chris Rodriguez hadn’t fumbled the ball into the end zone on the last play of the drive.

Now I know some of you are saying, “So what. What does this have to do with UK’s close win against Chattanooga and the nine other games left on the schedule?”

Well, here’s the point.

Last year UK ran through several rough patches during the season and lost several games they should have won, including the Missouri game — and Stoops seems to have a long memory. It eats at him when his teams look unprepared and get physically dominated in a game — especially by an FCS opponent.

So what does that mean for South Carolina Saturday? If history is any indicator the Cats should play well against the Gamecocks. Historically UK has performed well in the next week after they have had a “clunker” game like they did against Chattanooga. They have also historically played well against South Carolina — both on the road and at home. That bodes well for the Cats.

So that made me think. What about Florida? What about Georgia? Both of those teams have been manhandling the Cats on an annual basis. Both of those teams are the doorway that Kentucky has to go through if they want to be more than a middle-of-the-pack SEC team.

For those teams, I think the question might be has Kentucky learned anything from the Missouri game where they prepared and played well versus the Chattanooga game where they did not prepare well and looked overmatched at times against an FCS opponent?

Mark Stoops always says his approach to football is not very exciting. It is getting out there every day in practice, evaluating what needs to be “cleaned up” and then day by day working in those areas.

That approach will hopefully be enough to help his team overcome the physical manhandling they have taken in the past from the likes of teams like Florida, Georgia, and LSU.

The good news is the mistakes that occurred against Chattanooga are all correctable. When your offensive coordinator says he “took the opponent for granted” and got “greedy” by throwing the ball too much and your head coach says your quarterback tried to do too much during the game and just needs to relax and be patient and your best receiver says that he knows the team did not play up to expectations then at least the problems are identified and acknowledged. That’s half the battle.

But that brings me back to my point about preparation and physicality. Make no mistake Georgia is a physical team. Florida, I believe, showed Alabama that it is a physical team. Even South Carolina, a team that was dominated by Georgia last Saturday, showed it can be physical on offense and defense at times but lacked consistency.

Kentucky’s offense needs to be physical to win. Against Missouri, the Wildcats offense ran the ball 52 times for 340 yards. Those physical running plays are what opened up the passing game. In contrast, UK ran the ball 27 times for 102 yards against Chattanooga (and threw it 35 times) and the passing game never consistently got on track.

The bottom line is that this new Kentucky offense still lives and dies with the ability to run the ball. There is not a single defense in the country that will bite on a play-action pass play if the opponent can’t run the ball successfully and that means the offensive line must be physical and execute at the line of scrimmage.

So for the next 10 weeks, every Kentucky player had better burn the memory of the Chattanooga game into his mind as the Cats prepare for SEC opponents each week.

Based on Mark Stoops’s comments prior to the Missouri game I know he already has. After all, when you get dominated by an FCS defense, win or not, it leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth for a long time.

And anyone who has ever sucked on a lemon can tell you, they don’t ever want to suck on a lemon again.