Senior defensive tackle Ricky Lumpkin is a mild-mannered guy, but at Tuesday’s practice he lost his cool after seeing mistakes he saw last week being repeated.
So Lumpkin let his teammates know about it.
“We miss tackles in games because we miss tackles in practice,” Lumpkin said. “They catch deep balls in games because we don’t knock them down in practice. They run up the middle because we don’t do our job as a defensive line. It’s just getting old. If not, we’re going back to Tennessee (for a bowl game) or we’re not going to go to a bowl at all. I want to go somewhere else. This team can do better. There were plays that happened in the Florida game that happened because we didn’t do the right things out here on the practice field.”
Junior safety Winston Guy hopes to see the Cats apply more pressure on Ole Miss than they did against Florida.
“I felt like we could have put more pressure on and run more blitzes,” Guy said, “but I’m not the play caller. I’ve just got to do my job and do what I have to do to help this defense.”
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Kentucky’s Matt Roark notched his sixth career blocked kick in the loss at Florida when he got a piece of an extra-point attempt. At 6-foot-5, he obviously has the build to be good at blocking kicks, but Roark said special teams coach Greg Nord game plans for it, too.
“We’ll put two or three defensive tackles on the offensive linemen (in the middle) and it gives me a big hole,” Roark said. “We look for a kicker that kicks low or a weak offensive lineman.”
As a high school star in Acworth, Ga., Roark also played basketball and he said some of those skills (rebounding and shot blocking) transfer to the gridiron.
“When the ball’s in the air, it’s never in the same spot,” Roark said. “People try to avoid getting their shot blocked so you’ve got to find it.”
Roark was asked if the blocks hurt sometimes.
“Most of the time it does,” Roark said. “In the game, you don’t really feel the pain (but you do later).”
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“I sense more confidence.”
So says Kyle Veazey, the Ole Miss beat writer for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, after watching Rebel players go through their regular Monday interviews after a 55-28 win over Fresno State.
“For the first time in a while, it was not shrugged shoulders and shaking heads,” Veazey said on “The Leach Report” on WKJK-AM 1080 in Louisville. “I don’t want to say they’ve got it all figured out but (I think) they think they’ve got pointed in the right direction, and last week I wasn’t sure (they felt that way).”
Ole Miss racked up 425 rushing yards in the win over Fresno State. Veazey said the key was a revamped offensive line, the fourth in four weeks, which featured a pair of true freshmen.
“They were just able to open up some holes,” Veazey said. “The long runs were just handoffs straight up the middle untouched.”
But defensively, Ole Miss still has issues to address, primarily in guarding the pass (the Rebels are the only team in the league without an interception).
“They haven’t been able to get a pass rush, at least like they have the past couple of years,” Veazey said. “This is a program that has hung its hat on great defensive linemen.”
= = = Friday marks the 33rd anniversary of a legendary UK football victory.
It was the day the Wildcats rallied from 10 down to hand Penn State its only loss of the season, in State College, Pa., by a 24-20 margin. Defensive back Dallas Owens sparked the rally by returning an interception for a touchdown.
