Kentucky head coach Mark Stoops was asked to give his thoughts on UK’s special teams problems Saturday night at LSU. Stoops was shown talking to special teams coach Craig Naivar several times during the SEC Network broadcast of the game.
Stoops admitted that the coaching staff would do some things differently and said the opening kickoff trickery (or lack thereof) was an instance of trying to be “too cute.”
Here are his comments:
Q. What does the film show about special teams? Was there any common theme?
COACH STOOPS: Well, there’s mistakes. There’s mistakes that can and will be corrected. We’ve all made our mistakes this year, offensively, defensively, special teams. Again, they’re magnified against a very talented team on the road, and when you open the game that way, it doesn’t set the tone. That’s not what you want. So they’re magnified but they’re things that can and will be fixed. The punt return, same thing. A little unfortunate that we hit it so good ‑‑ he kicked it so well, outkicked his coverage a little bit. We had guys down there, we had, honestly, five or six guys clean and we’ve got to do a better job of closing that gap, spreading the net and getting him down. Once you get a talented guy started and give him some space, bad things are going to happen to us.
So those are things that we can get fixed and will. We all take responsibility for that, and we’ll make the corrections and we’ll move on.
Q. What happened on that opening kick‑off? Were you meaning to kick it short?
COACH STOOPS: That’s something that in hindsight we would do differently. (Laughter.) So, you know, I told you that at one of my news conferences, anybody that tells you they wouldn’t do it differently in hindsight is lying. (Laughter.)
It was poor execution and poor call and we didn’t kick it where we were supposed to, either. So what we were supposed to do on the kick wasn’t there. Therefore, it magnified it. So, sure, we would do it differently. That’s one instance where we were too cute there. Again, I take that responsibility. We take that and we move on. The rest of it is just fundamental things.
Here’s some video footage LSU recovering a squib kick:
