By: LARRY VAUGHT
Give Kentucky offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson credit being what I would call blunt honest after Kentucky’s overtime win over Eastern Kentucky Saturday night.
The Wildcats passes for 329 yards and three scores, but ran for just 55 yards on 36 carries. Sure, some of that was because quarterback Patrick Towles was sacked for losses of 33 yards. Still, leading rusher JoJo Kemp had just 46 yards on 14 carries, well below his average. Mikel Horton had managed just 13 yards on nine tries. Towles lost 4 yards on 13 carries. Kentucky’s longest run was NINE yards.
So why could a Southeastern Conference team not run the ball on Eastern Kentucky? Surely not having Boom Williams — who did not play and was not dressed in game gear even though coach Mark Stoops said after the game that he was not suspended despite missing two days of practice — could not have impacted the running/blocking that much.
“I don’t know. I’m going to have to go back and really study the film,” said Dawson about the lack of rushing yards. “I will say part of it was them and I will be honest with you and say part of it was their front.”
He’s right. Eastern’s defensive front was far more physical than Kentucky’s offensive line and at time it looked like UK’s running backs at times may not have stayed with the play long enough before trying to get outside.
But here’s the part I give Dawson credit for.
“Part of it is probably my fault. I might’ve abandoned it (the run) at times when we weren’t getting success out of it,” Dawson said. “Really want to watch it and see. I’ll probably look at it and it will probably be more me than them. So we’ve got to stick with running the ball at times, but when you’re not getting the success you want, it’s hard to. We had some things in the pass game we liked, too, so it goes back and forth every game.”
Quarterback Patrick Towles completed 29 of 42 passes, but he was intercepted twice in the first half before getting hot in the final seven minutes of the game and overtime.
“I have to do a better job of coaching Patrick up during the course of the week because there were some things we could have took advantage of and we didn’t,” Dawson said. “I will give them a lot of credit because the bottom line is this: they played harder than we did. That’s it.
“We ended up coming through at the end and showing some character and showing some toughness, but the bottom line is they played harder than we did. Anybody that watched the game can tell you they coached better and they played harder. There’s enough blame all around to go around, so you learn from it and you move on.”
Those should be alarming words for a Kentucky team despite its 4-1 record. When the opponent plays harder and is better coached, only superior talent can account for the win — and then just barely.
Linebacker Josh Forrest said Stoops told the team after the game how disappointed he was with their overall play — and should have been.
“They played harder than us, but we’ll take it. A win is a win no matter how you get it. I’m just glad we found a way to win,” Forrest said. “They had a lot of good skills. I can tell they like watching a lot of film, so they knew a lot of what we were doing.”
Ouch. Knew a lot of what Kentucky was doing? Obviously Dawson seems correct in his assessment that Kentucky might have been not just outplayed but also outcoached. That’s a combination in UK’s next seven games that would likely result in losses to all except Vanderbilt and for a team hoping again to become bowl eligible, that has to be a scary, scary thought.
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