Do you buy it?
The offense this season has been brutal for the Kentucky Wildcats, bordering on historically bad for SEC standards while averaging just a hair over 20 ppg on the season and even less in conference play with 14.2 ppg.
A lot of flack will fall on offensive coordinator Bush Hamdan, which is fair. Hamdan wasn’t at his best last Saturday. However, with five different offensive coordinators since 2020, only one worked out: Liam Coen in his stint in 2021 and, to some extent, in 2023.
Mark Stoops said during his Monday press conference that he avoids getting involved in offensive play-calling unless he’s asked otherwise.
“Criticism is fair. I don’t get involved in play-calling, but they did ask me on the 3 (yard line) when we had a 1st-and-Goal on the 3, and I absolutely said pound it. Pound the rock, and we did, and we scored. Let’s not be cute now. We can be physical. We can run it in here. I told them they had four downs because it was 1st-and-goal. So I said ‘let’s not out-think this’.”
“On the others, I didn’t say a word. Call what you want to call. I thought he (Hamdan) made a great call on the 4th-and-2. When we were discussing it, I told him to go for it, and I said, ‘What are you going to do?’. He said, ‘I’m going to throw it’. I said ‘do it’.”
Stoops also touched on Hamdan’s offense not being able to capitalize in the red zone, a clear weak point for the Kentucky offense after two straight weeks of knocking on the opponents’ door at the 1-yard line, only to have the door slammed in their face and walk away with zero points.
“We have to finish plays, finish drives. I think once again, as I mentioned, it’s not quite as magnified with the opportunities that we’ve had if we get them in the end zone. There’s no excuse for not getting in on 3rd-and-short and 4th-and-short. We gotta get the ball in the end zone.”
Kentucky will have the chance to finish those drives at home against Huge Freeze and Auburn on Saturday night.