Kentucky Offense Has Urgency to Play Faster

There are many phrases that come to mind when describing the pace of play of the Kentucky offense in recent years. “Slower than molasses in January,” is the first.

Nobody ran fewer plays in FBS football last year than the Kentucky Wildcats. The UK offense snapped the ball 714 times, an average just shy of 55 per game. That won’t cut it in modern college football.

During Monday’s Lexington Kickoff Luncheon, head coach Mark Stoops restated that point of emphasis for the program this offseason. He wants the Wildcats to play with some tempo.

“There’s an urgency to get plays off faster. That’s no secret,” he said. “Before we made the change with Liam, we were talking about that last year.”

Mark Stoops is willing to win by any means necessary, even if that means moving your wide receiver to quarterback and running it 90% of the time. Now that Kentucky has recruited better playmakers, he needs an offensive coordinator who will give them more opportunities to create game-changing plays.

“We have playmakers that we have to get the ball. You can get it to them in a variety of ways. We’re all a team. The defense needs to get some three-and-outs. We got to get field position with special teams. Offense has to get first downs,” he said.

“The more first downs you get, the more plays you get, the more guys that are gonna touch the ball. Then you’re not gonna sit there and worry about the running backs getting fed, the tight ends getting fed, the receivers making plays. We have playmakers on this team and that’s part of it.”

Playing fast does not mean Bush Hamdan will operate at Josh Heupel speeds. The new Kentucky offensive coordinator is bringing a playbook and a style that will make it easier for the Cats to go no-huddle, but if they need to slow it down and chew up some clock late in the game, they’ll do whatever it takes to win.

“We think about extremely sharp turns of a steering wheel, if you will. There’s gonna be times when we have the ability to play extremely fast, like our two-minute operation with one-word calls,” said Hamdan.

“There’s also in the fourth quarter with how we play defense here, we can run that clock out and do whatever it takes to win the game. We’re right there in the middle. We have the ability to do both. It just comes down to winning football games.”

Stoops added, “We’re not sitting here saying we’re going to try to snap the ball with 30 seconds on the clock, but I can tell you this, I get tired of snapping it with one second on the clock. I want to have some rhythm, some tempo in the offense.”

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