A Theory on Why Kentucky Football is Better on the Road than at Home

Another home loss. Losing to Vanderbilt tastes sour no matter which way you bite the lime, but it’s extra bitter at home. It’s become so common on Saturdays in Lexington that the stat can be recited off-hand by almost every Kentucky fan staring at this screen.

Kentucky is 2-10 in its last 12 SEC home games, including six straight losses.

That’s the kind of stat you see from bad programs, like when Stoops broke a 22-game SEC road game losing streak at South Carolina in 2015. What’s unusual is that through this trend — the Cats are going to bowl games and beating teams on the road, boasting a 6-5 record away from Kroger Field during this tumultuous stretch.

So, what gives?

Mark Story first posed the question to Mark Stoops the Monday prior to the Vanderbilt game. The head coach was just as perplexed as us. He brought it up to his team before the game. The warning sign was not enough to stop the bleeding at home.

“I’ve looked at it and thought about it and talked to the guys,” Stoops said just moments after the loss to Vanderbilt. “… I talked to (the UK players) openly. … ‘Do we have a lot of people coming in? Do you have ticket problems? Whatever it is, put it away and dial in and commit to doing the things necessary to win in this game.’ Obviously, I did not do a good enough job.”

Home Game Distractions

It may have sounded like a tongue-in-cheek comment at the time, but Stoops was genuinely curious when he mentioned the home-game ticket distribution. Home games inherently have more distractions than road trips.

“When you’re at home, you’ve got so many more family coming in. You’ve got friends from back home who are here. We’ve got an insane crowd, an insane home environment, and you don’t have the exhaustion of the travel,” said senior captain Eli Cox.

“You’re at home, you’re a little more comfortable and I think we’re letting that comfortability and that emotion get too far, get past where it needs to be, and (we’re) letting that emotion create negative energy outside the snaps, rather than funneling it towards the common goal.”

Mark Stoops’ best teams play with an edge. They have a chip on their shoulder with an “us against the world” mentality. That hasn’t been evident in Lexington.

The Message to the Kentucky Football Team

Searching for a solution to this issue, Stoops and the leadership team are stressing a five-letter mantra ahead of the road trip to Florida: Emotional control amongst the chaos.

“Every football snap is absolute chaos. There’s bullets flying in every which direction. I think a certain level of maturity is required from our guys in the game in understanding that you need to play with a healthy emotion between the snaps,” said Cox.

The theory is that players are getting caught up in the chaos and letting their emotions outweigh execution, which would explain why the least penalized team in the SEC was flagged a dozen times against Vanderbilt. Kentucky must show some maturity and composure when the crowd is injecting energy into the team.

“The fans have been fantastic for us for the home games. I can’t thank them enough for the environment they’ve created here,” said Cox. “We need to feed off that, but also, not let it take us past the whistle where it creates those penalties that are shooting ourselves in the foot on both sides of the ball and not let us finish drives on offense.”

It doesn’t matter this week. The Wildcats are going on the road to play a desperate Florida team. They must be laser-focused in The Swamp.

“Having all the odds against us, knowing the fans aren’t gonna like us, knowing that this team is going to think they’re at home so they’re going to have that advantage,” said Demie Sumo-Karngbaye. “We’re going in with that underdog mindset. It’s just a different aspect, which is what we need to bring here at all times.”

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