For a team that set its hopes on getting to a bowl game out of Tennessee, going to a bowl game in Nashville or Memphis suddenly looks like a pretty rosy destination for the Kentucky football team.”We’ve still got a good chance of getting a good bowl,” senior fullback Moncell Allen said. “If we win these three games, we’re going to put ourselves in a good position. With these bowl games, you never know what will happen when it comes down to people picking who they want. We’re a great team and everybody knows it. We’ve just got to get over this hump and make sure that we take care of business.”But at 4-5 on the season with three games to go, the best position UK (4-5, 1-5 Southeastern Conference) appears to be headed in is either a Music City Bowl or Liberty Bowl appearance, Kentucky’s two destinations during its current four-year bowl streak. The players expressed a strong desire to get out of the state of Tennessee this year for a bowl game, but the chances of upgrading to a bowl like the Chick-fil-A Bowl is very slim at this point. UK would need to end the season with three wins over Charleston Southern, Vanderbilt and Tennessee to even be in the discussion for that.”Now it’s more just getting to a bowl game, period,” senior defensive tackle Mark Crawford said. “With the bumpy season like we’ve had, we want to go out on a good note. Whether (the bowl game) is in Tennessee, no matter where it’s at – Idaho, for all I care – as long as we get to a bowl game, that’s the important thing right now.”As disappointing as the season outlook may be for a team that had a season-long goal of an SEC division title and a “bigger, better” bowl game, making a fifth straight postseason is still a significant measure of how far the program has come.”We don’t want to be known as the team that ends the bowl streak,” Hines said. “I’d say we’ve got one of the longest bowl streaks in the country. Not a lot of teams have been to four straight bowls. That’s something we want to keep going.”Coming into this season, only four teams in the SEC had a longer bowl streak than UK. Before the 2006 Music City Bowl, Kentucky had played in just 10 bowl games.”We want to go forward,” Crawford said. “We want to take steps up the ladder. Not getting to a bowl game would be taking a step backward and we don’t want to do that.”Just getting to a bowl game now will require at least two wins and maybe even three with the ever-changing state of the SEC picture.”There is definitely more pressure,” junior offensive tackle Stuart Hines said. “We’ve got three games to get at least two wins. And then if we get those two wins it’s still not a guaranteed bowl game. That depends on what other teams do in the league. Three wins would really be big for us.”Assistant head coach David Turner, who was filling in for head coach Joker Phillips on Monday due to a death in Phillips’ family, said Kentucky isn’t taking Saturday’s Football Subdivision Championship opponent, Charleston Southern, lightly.To make a bowl game, UK needs a win Saturday just as badly as it has at any other point during the season.”(Former coach) Gene Stallings used (to say when) somebody asked him in a press conference … ‘If you don’t think it’s a big game, lose it.’ So it is a big game for us,” Turner said.Not only does this group not want to be the one to end the bowl streak, Turner said, going to a bowl game also offers the added benefit of extra practices in December. “Obviously we feel it’s good to be able to get into the postseason because you get X amount of extra practices for those young guys, which can be beneficial and help you down the road,” Turner said. “So it’s a carrot out there, so to speak, that’s dangling. It’s a three one-game season (from this point forward). We can’t worry about team X or team Y. We’ve got to worry about Charleston Southern. We can’t worry about the bowl. “You do your business on the field, that bowl picture takes care of itself.”

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