The Kentucky Offense Dropped The Ball, Again

Kentucky is 1-3 in SEC play because they’ve only scored four touchdowns in four games. You don’t need a decade of experience covering an SEC football team to uncover that kind of revolutionary analysis.

Here is some more basic offensive analysis from Saturday night. On only seven offensive possessions against Vanderbilt, Kentucky got the ball inside the 30-yard line five times. Three of those possessions ended without any points. One touchdown or three field goals would’ve been enough to erase the 6-point final margin of defeat. The Wildcats dropped to 55.56% red zone touchdown-scoring percentage, ranking 98th in FBS football and 15th in the SEC.

“We just gotta be better on offense.”

I agree with Brock Vandagriff.

“We just gotta be consistent to finish drives and it hasn’t. It starts with me and (I) understand that.”

I also agree with Bush Hamdan.

“It comes down to discipline… I don’t know if I can point it to any one thing, just a lack of execution in the critical moments.”

Mark Stoops is right and that’s what makes this such a tough pill to swallow. It was a comedy of errors by multiple people, including Kentucky’s best offensive player.

Tough Night for Dane Key

The Kentucky offense has been letting down the Kentucky defense throughout the Mark Stoops era. The defense might have played its worst game of the year, but they held a team that scored 30+ in each contest this season to just 20 at Kroger Field. That should’ve been good enough to win.

When the offense floundered in previous years, there was typically at least one player providing a silver lining. Last year, it was Ray Davis who made the anemic offense explosive. This year it’s becoming Dane Key. He was only 17 yards shy from his third straight 100-yard receiving game, catching eight passes and a touchdown against the Commodores.

The problem was that Kentucky’s best player also made two of the biggest mistakes of the night. He made a great play to make it 3rd and 2 on the 29-yard line, then smacked a Vanderbilt player’s helmet to make it 3rd and 17, taking at least three points off the board. They lost at least three more points when he was stripped in the second quarter at the 29-yard line.

Key has been the only consistent bright spot for this offense. They need him to do it all, a la Wan’Dale Robinson in 2021, but that burden was too heavy to bear Saturday night.

Emotions Ran too High for the Kentucky Offense

The margin of error is thin for this struggling offense. They can overcome a mistake or two, not a dozen and that’s what happened against Vanderbilt.

“In critical situations, wherever the penalties happened, wherever the penalties were — 12 for 106 yards — it felt like every time we were about to get something going, we had self-inflicted wounds,” said the first-year offensive coordinator.

It’s not for a lack of effort or want-to. In fact, that’s part of the issue. Players made mistakes out of frustration and they snowballed.

“I think our squad is a bunch of dudes that are gonna go out there and fight, especially on offense. We had to settle some guys down,” said Vandagriff.

“We’re down 21-7 and dudes are juiced up on the sidelines, ready to go out there and play another snap. It’s kinda finding that happy medium between being juiced up and reckless, making sure that we’re not hurting the team and hurting the offense with our actions.”

The Kentucky offense took small steps forward for a month, then made a giant leap in the wrong direction against Vanderbilt. They couldn’t convert in scoring position, they couldn’t create explosives (zero plays of 25+ yards), and they couldn’t execute in critical situations.