Well that was a HUGE letdown. After a week of friendly rivalry smack talking, the yearly governor's cup UK-UL football battle did not live up to the little bit of hype people were trying to make of it.
Coming into last night's game one thing was clear. Neither UK nor UL were playing well. UL was coming off a loss to FIU at home and UK, although coming in 2-0, hadn't played very well the first two games and wasn't far from losing one or either for much of each of those games. From my standpoint, outside Kentucky the rivalry this year didn't seem to get much national attention and even after the game, here at past 1 in the morning when I write this, ESPN.com's NCAA football homepage still doesn't even mention the results of our game. I'm not talking about the ESPN homepage but the ESPN NCAA football homepage! Not one single mention at all. That's how unimportant and boring this game was outside of Kentucky. The results weren't even worth putting up on the football homepage.
After our first game fans hoped that maybe it was just an off game. After the second game, it started looking like we might have a problem although everyone was looking to last night's game to tell us if this team was heading in as bad of a direction as it seemed. Turns out, it is. Unfortunately our football team this year is plagued by numerous issues:
The offensive line which we heard so much about over the summer and was supposed to be an offensive strong point kept crumbling to pieces last night and allowed Newton to get sacked about 7 times. Now Newton does take longer than he should many times to make a play but he should not have been sacked that many times. A lot of that blame goes on his defenders.
The running game took a step back. Our freshman tailback Clemons who seemed to keep getting better the longer he played had trouble doing much tonight and thus our running game was near no existent tonight. Maybe he was a bit nervous knowing it all fell on him with Sanders out for now but it wasn't a good game for our rising star runner.
Newton played a LOT better tonight than in our first 2 games but had a trouble finding success because either his line didn't protect him or his receivers kept dropping balls on plays.
The defense has taken a step back. In our first game of the season it looked like our defense had improved a lot over last season and was going to help us win games. Last night, it struggled and had trouble containing their running game just like we have had trouble doing the past few years.
I think more than anything tonight we learned were in a lot of trouble and the season has to get worse before it has any shot of getting better. With Florida, LSU, and South Carolina left, it'll probably be awhile before we have a shot of getting another win because this team is not playing or acting like they have any shot of pulling off an upset.
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