Stoops, Cats Working to Fix Issues Ahead of Florida Game

Kentucky’s loss to Vanderbilt on Saturday night easily could have gone in a different direction. The Cats committed a season-high 12 penalties in the game and seemed to continually struggle in crucial situations.

UK head coach Mark Stoops held his weekly press conference on Monday and continued to emphasize just how important those penalties were against the Commodores.

“Frustrating on a lot of levels,” Stoops said. “We hurt ourselves plenty.”

Stoops knows that his team has a very small margin for error, especially in a game with a team like Vanderbilt.

“As far as we go, there’s a very thin line between success and failure,” Stoops said. “We are definitely shooting ourselves in the foot. You look at that thin line and you think offensively, we’re coming up short, and we are. But you look at the seven possessions and we had every opportunity to score on five.”

It was the penalties, many of which were totally unnecessary, that had Stoops the most frustrated.

“We went into that game the least penalized team (in the conference) going into that game, then we have the most we’ve had all year,” Stoops said. “Very frustrating, no excuse for it, things we have to get corrected.”

What can Stoops, the coaching staff and the players do to get this corrected before the Cats play at Florida on Saturday?

“We’ve got to take a good, hard look at ourselves and why we are doing that,” Stoops said. “Not so much blaming the individuals, but why are we doing these things. And why do we do them in critical moments in certain games. That’s what we’ve got to get figured out.”

Stoops is holding out hope that his team will respond. He has seen the Cats do that already this year and he expects that they will be able to do that again.

“Our team has responded before and I anticipate we will do the same thing,” Stoops said. “We’ve got to regroup in a hurry and get right back at it. Get back to work and find some solutions.”

This week, the Cats go to Gainesville to face a 3-3 Florida team. However, the Gators have been playing some of their best football of the year, evidenced by the fact that Florida took No. 8 Tennessee to overtime on Saturday in Knoxville. Stoops knows that playing Florida is always a tough task.

“We have a big challenge, going on the road, playing in the Swamp and playing a Florida team that is getting better and better,” Stoops said. “(They are) playing extremely hard and is always very loaded with very great players.”

The Cats will look to correct their mistakes from Saturday’s loss and hopefully turn things around against Florida this weekend.