Kentucky will conduct real practice-style scrimmage for Spring Game

You want the good news or the bad news first? We’ll start with the bad news. Kentucky’s annual Blue-White scrimmage will not be a traditional spring game with scores and teams split up evenly from top to bottom. There won’t be a real “winner” to celebrate.

The good — very good, even — news? Fans will be getting real football, just like you’d see on a typical Saturday morning at the Joe Craft Football Training Facility. The focus will be on development, not putting on a show, something Mark Stoops believes fans will appreciate.

“I want to put that out there. You know, to be honest with you, we were looking at a lot of options,” Stoops said on KSR this morning. “Bottom line is we came down to — and it’s going to probably be the best for the fans, even though you can’t keep score. We’re just going to go out there and practice, we’re going to scrimmage. You’re gonna see the best football we could put on in the spring.”

The health risk is a clear factor, as well.

“When you split teams up in football and draft and totally split them up, it puts us in a bad situation,” Stoops told KSR. “Number one, you might be making a star player play all the reps. You might be getting extremely thin at certain positions. Maybe somebody gets dinged up or hurt, and you can’t put a sub in because you don’t have anybody, you know? We’re thin in the spring, so bottom line is we’re gonna have a scrimmage.”

There won’t be scoring gimmicks with turnovers or defensive stops like you see across the country and even in the past with Kentucky. Just head-to-head battles against the first, second and third teams on both sides of the ball.

“I told the players this after a light practice we had this morning that I guess I’ll determine who the winner is, you know what I mean?” Stoops told KSR. “I’m not gonna have any point system or anything like that. We tried to do that before where if the defense gets a stop, you get X amount of points and so on. But that just gets confusing for everybody. Everybody that comes to the spring game, you’re gonna see good football. You’re gonna see ones versus ones, you’re gonna see twos versus twos and you’ll see threes versus threes.”

Having fans in the stands adds an element to the scrimmage that’s been missing throughout the spring. The competition has been there, but the pressure element of thousands of eyes watching hasn’t.

“The other thing that does for us is it gives us a great opportunity in front of fans and with as much pressure on the players as we can get to have a really good practice,” Stoops said. “Because when we split it up, it just gets watered down. Maybe it’s a fun show for the fans sometimes, but as coaches, we really don’t get anything out of it.”

Kentucky’s annual Blue-White Spring Game is scheduled for 1 p.m. ET on Saturday at Kroger Field.