Well, that’s the last of the easy games for a while. Most Kentucky fans are already looking forward to next week when the Wildcats travel to Gainesville to take on Florida and that talk is whether or not the Wildcats have a chance. One thing is for certain, the Wildcats have a better chance at that game than the Akron Zips had last night. It was an inevitable loss for them as the Wildcats rolled to a 47-10 victory to go 3-0 on the season.
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Overall I think the Cats played well last night. Mike Hartline continues to lead the team and play well. Defensively they seemed to step it up and play for the entire game. The first two games of the season appeared as if they lacked effort at times. And finally Special Forces got a kick start with McIntosh getting the start.
[quote=COACH PHILLIPS]First, our injury report, Moncell, the turtle had a hamstring (injury), I didn’t know turtles had hamstrings. Winston Guy had a laceration on his hand, got it fixed at half-time, and was back in the game. Stuart Hines got an ankle, Randall Cobb got an IV at half-time and then got heartburns and doctors just wanted to check him out. But by the time they had checked him out and cleared him, we had just scored and we just thought that we were going to just keep him out for the rest of the game.
Offensively, we had been talking about, you know, finishing and playing fast in the second half and doing those things, and we kind of neglected to tell them to start fast like we had been.
So it’s like get a hole, cover holes up, and you get one part of your game fixed and then another one, another hole appears, and another hole appears. We thought we had corrected starting fast, and we tried to work on finishing and now we went back to starting slow.
But a lot of that has to do with preparation, especially on offense, Thursday’s practice offensively, we didn’t — it was a lot of mental errors and we did not practice as fast as we had been, so a lot has to do with the way we prepared on Thursday.
Defensively we had been stressing all week to see if this defense could start slugging people and played outstanding, routed the defense, came out, played 60 minutes of great football. We gave up one at the end but in the defense, did an unbelievable job of making this team go backward. Didn’t create turnovers like we had been doing but we didn’t give up big plays, didn’t give up yardage.
Special teams, finally got the kick that is needed, that’s what we’ve been talking about, making sure we got great kicks. I think Mansour kicked all but one in the end zone and kicked one out-of-bounds, which cannot happen and late in the game we wanted to see our coverage team cover and we thought they did an outstanding job of covering, which has a lot to do with personnel. We have a lot better personnel in the game this week, was able to get some defensive guys in the coverage teams.
Winston Guy did an unbelievable job of covering the kicks, and that’s what your safeties should be able to do. They have to be able play defense but they also have to be special teams guys. Those guys are hyper-tech guys that should be physical enough and big enough to take on people, and they also need to be fast enough to play on your coverage team. Really proud of our special teams effort and also our defense.
Offensively, I’m proud of the way we finished.[/quote]
[URL=”http://www.ukathletics.com/sports/m-footbl/recaps/091810aaa.html”]Source[/URL].
The status of Moncell will be a bit to watch this week as the team could use him against Florida. I wouldn’t expect any big position changes as Joker seems pleased with the changes that have been made up to this point. It’s just about time to start forward thinking and believing, it’s time to think about going 4-0!
