Rich Brooks didn’t even bother reading off the entire injury list Monday. After going through the injury list for nearly three minutes the day before, Brooks decided to skip the majority of the injuries on Monday and proceed with the remainder of the news conference.
“I just hadn’t seen as long a list as that on Sunday as we had,” Brooks said of all the injuries.
The long list of the bruised and battered on Sunday was enough the fill an emergency room at a hospital. On Sunday, Brooks read off at least 15 significant contributors who were unavailable with injuries, including wide receiver Randall Cobb and running back Derrick Locke.
The good news is most of those injuries won’t need a trip to the emergency room. Although Brooks didn’t bother reading through the entire injury report Monday, it appears most of the bumps and bruises are minor.
“Most of those guys will be practicing on Tuesday,” Brooks said. “Some of them will be limited, but they will be practicing.”
In other words, the Cats are rounding back into shape for yet another critical game against Vanderbilt. At 5-4 on the season, UK can become bowl eligible with a win over the Commodores.
Cobb and Locke, both of whom missed Saturday’s Eastern Kentucky win with injuries, are expected to play this week. Locke, who tore some scar tissue in his surgically repaired knee in the loss to Mississippi State, will practice on Tuesday.
“Locke, I don’t know exactly how well his knee is. I know the rest of his body is better than it has been in six weeks, seven weeks,” Brooks said. “He says today the knee is feeling really good. He runs in the training room really well and he runs in place, but that’s different than going out and going through a whole practice.”
Meanwhile, Cobb, who sat out the EKU game with a sprained left thumb, will practice with a cast on Tuesday. Brooks said the nagging shoulder and hamstring injuries that he’s played through the past few weeks are “light years” better than they have been.
“Randall’s body is night-and-day better,” Brook said. “He’s been hobbling through practice for three or four weeks and then he got the thumb. … He had more juice in his step yesterday than I’ve seen in him in a month.”
The question for Cobb is how limited he’ll be in catching passes, receiving punts and handling snaps. Because of the cast on his left arm, Cobb was held out of the EKU game. Cobb will wear the same cast in Tuesday’s practice, but Brooks is hopeful that Cobb will be able to play in a splint with tape over it, at the very worst. There is no structural damage and there is a chance he could play without the splint.
Injured quarterback Mike Hartline remains uncertain for Saturday’s game as he tries to recover from a torn medial collateral ligament and partially torn lateral collateral ligament suffered in the South Carolina contest.
Despite Morgan Newton’s 187-yard, two-touchdown performance, which earned the first-year gunslinger Southeastern Conference Freshman of the Week honors, Brooks hinted after Saturday’s game that Hartline would start again if and when he comes back from injury, evoking such words as “quarterback controversy!” from Brooks.
He has since backed off that statement just a bit, telling reporters at Monday’s luncheon that they would evaluate Hartline’s status later on in the week.
“I am certainly not going to put Mike Hartline out there if he can’t get out of his own way, let alone pull the ball down and run if he has to do those kind of things,” Brooks said. “Having said that, he’s looked pretty good last week. He ran around yesterday. It bothered him a little bit, but we feel like he’ll be ready to go through a full practice and we’ll have to see how it goes after that.”
Cornerback Trevard Lindley will try to practice Tuesday. The ankle sprain that held him out of the second half Saturday was unrelated to the high ankle sprain that kept him out of the previous four-plus games. Tight end T.C. Drake will be out 2-3 weeks with a pulled groin.
Among the other injuries Brooks discussed Sunday and Monday: tight end Ross Bogue (knee), wide receivers Gene McCaskill (turf toe) and Chris Matthews (foot), running back Moncell Allen (knee), offensive lineman Christian Johnson (toe), linebacker Danny Trevathan (quad bruise), safeties Matt Lentz (turf toe) and Winston Guy (ankle), defensive tackle Mark Crawford (foot), and defensive ends Taylor Wyndham (shoulder) and DeQuin Evans (ankle).
All of those players are expected to play Saturday.
With the injuries and last week’s bouts with the flu, Kentucky’s depth has been severely tested. In years past, UK would have crumbled with a couple of injuries, but they’ve been able to hold it together this year because of a deeper and more talented roster.
Yet even this latest bout with injuries forced UK to bring up several players from the scout team to fill in at practice.
“It’s rough, but it’s a part of football,” senior defensive tackle Corey Peters said. “You just kind of plug guys in and keep it moving. … It’s really difficult to have everybody on the same page, but it’s something we’re willing to work through.”
To become bowl eligible for the fourth straight season, the Cats will have to play through the bumps and bruises this week in Nashville, Tenn. Although Vandy enters the contest with a 2-8 record, Brooks said perception and reality are often two different things.
Brooks cited a historically close series, a battle UK has a 39-38-4 edge in.
“It’s been a very, very competitive series,” Brooks said. “This is a game that has been as close as it can be probably year in and year out with maybe a few streaks here and there where one team had an advantage. …”
“It’s been a dogfight every year.”
Injuries galore, this year expects to be no different.
UK-Georgia in primetime: The Kentucky-Georgia game on Nov. 21 has been picked up by either ESPN or ESPN2 for a 7:45 p.m. ET broadcast.
It will be the fifth game of the year for the Cats under the lights.
This week’s game at Vanderbilt will be at 12:21 p.m. ET on the SEC Network.
