The University of Kentucky Football Wildcats head to Columbia, Missouri to take on the Tigers on Saturday. With the Cats sitting at 4-3 overall and resting in second place in the SEC East, there’s no better place for head coach Mark Stoops and his troops to, well, “show me.” In the Show Me state, Kentucky will have the opportunity to move one step closer to something that seemed out of reach after the team’s 0-2 start: bowl eligibility.
Yes, the Cats haven’t played elite football teams over the last month except for top ranked Alabama – Kentucky’s lone loss over that stretch. But when the season was on the verge of being lost after 6 painful quarters against Southern Miss and Florida, the Wildcats have responded in a way that we haven’t seen since Stoops’ arrival in Lexington. South Carolina, a team that is also trying to right its own ship, came into Commonwealth Stadium needing a win. And the Gamecocks lost. The same with Vanderbilt. And the same with Mississippi State. Lose any of those three games and the road to a bowl game gets that much harder. Now that the Cats have won all three, they’re squarely back in the bowl game hunt.
The Vanderbilt and Mississippi State games, in particular, were the type of games that the Cats have a history of losing: an evenly matched opponent; a game that both teams desperately need to win; and a game that Kentucky has really outplayed its opponent. How many times has the Big Blue Nation watched the other team snatch victory away from the Cats in heartbreaking fashion? With the game on the line, Vandy drove deep into Kentucky territory and the Cats shut the door. The Bulldogs went up late in the 4th quarter after looking completely dead and capitalizing on a Stephen Johnson turnover to regain momentum. The Cats got the ball back with a little over a minute and got themselves in a position for Austin MacGinnis to boot the gamewinner as time expired.
The bottom line is this: the Kentucky Wildcats made the plays down the stretch to win those games.
There cannot, however, be a let down for the Cats. Coach Stoops and his staff have got to get the players ready for Missouri, a team in desperate need of their own win to salvage what has been a disappointing season for the Tigers. Kentucky cannot overlook Mizzou. The Wildcats can’t look at the SEC East standings (seriously, the Cats are 2nd behind Florida). This game is a “Show Me” game. The Cats need to show themselves, the Big Blue Nation and the SEC that they have gotten over the hump. They have to prove it on the field. This is what we’ve all been waiting for. After all the recruiting hype and the new facilities and all the hope and optimism for the football program, can Mark Stoops get the Cats back to a bowl and continue to build momentum? We shall see.
