Mark Stoops explains what went wrong and his postgame message to the team

There was no finger-pointing or deflecting in Neyland Stadium’s visiting locker room after Kentucky Football’s embarrassing loss to Tennessee, only accountability throughout the team.

Mark Stoops said accountability was his message to Kentucky’s players following their 44-6 loss in the border rivalry.

“I told them that, just like always, that if we take a bad beating like this, that there’s gonna be no finger-pointing; you start by looking at yourself. And that’s not coach-speak or anything else. It’s the truth. Did you perform or coach or do the things, the best you can?”

On the UK Sports Network’s postgame show, Stoops told host Tom Leach, “Any competitor, nobody likes to get beat like that. It hurts. But you can’t compound it when you get beat like that–and I’m not saying any of our guys have done that–but you got to stay away from pointing fingers and putting your head down and being defeated because you’re going to compete. This is tough. This is tough. We played the No. 3 ranked team in the country. We gotta go on the road and play Missouri next week. Nobody in this league is gonna feel sorry for you, you know? So you better regroup in a hurry.

“Again, that’s not fun. Nobody enjoys that. But there’s no way around it except getting back to work and getting back, picking your head up. I’ll take it. The players need to get back to work and we got to be ready to punch the clock. I’ll talk to everybody and take the heat and get ready to move on.”

So what happened?

Before he and his team can move on, Stoops held a press conference from Neyland Stadium immediately after the game to address some of the many things that went wrong in the loss.

“We got beat by a better football team,” Stoops explained in his opening statement. “They beat us in virtually every area, out-coached us, outplayed us; a very good football team. You got to come in here and play as good as you can in every area to expect to compete with a team that’s in the top three in the country, and we didn’t do that tonight.”

There were missed opportunities early, Stoops recalled, before Tennessee blew the doors wide open with 37 unanswered points.

“You can’t do that with a team that is as explosive as they are offensively,” said Stoops. “If you don’t possess the ball and you don’t score points, it’s hard to hold on and eventually it unraveled on us and you saw the result.”

He named all of the areas where Kentucky failed to produce offensively, from play-action to pass protection and screens to effective running.

“We weren’t good in any area,” he added. “You have no chance to beat Tennessee if you have 200 yards of offense and not enough first downs.”

Watch the latest Mark Stoops press conference on the KSR YouTube Channel.