UK alum Tom Leach has been the play-by-play “Voice of the Wildcats” for the football Cats for 13 years and 10 years for men’s basketball. He is a four-time winner of the Kentucky Sportscaster of the Year award. Tom offers an entertaining and insightful perspective into UK athletics. Column entries will be posted twice per week through April. Read Tom’s full biography.

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In college football, with a week to work on problems between games, a lot can change in a short amount of time. That’s important to remember in the wake of a disappointing showing by the Wildcats at Florida.  The program is in much better shape now than it was in the middle of the 2006 campaign when the Cats were thumped 49-0 at LSU. I bring that up because two weeks after that performance, Kentucky was upsetting Georgia at Commonwealth Stadium on the way to launching a run of four straight bowl trips. But prior to that attention-grabbing upset, there was a defining moment in Mississippi, where the Wildcats gutted out a three-point win at Mississippi State to get back on track. This year’s team has a similar opportunity in that same state this Saturday at Ole Miss.Win that game and Kentucky comes back home to face a nationally ranked Auburn team.  Get those two in a row and suddenly the showing at Florida is off the table. But if you lose at Ole Miss this weekend, the pressure on these players is going to be very intense when they start that three-game home stretch. Saturday’s game in Oxford, Miss., is not the make-or-break for this season — there are too many games left to say that for sure — but to say a win would be huge would be an understatement the size of Shaquille O’Neal.

= = =Year in and year out, the best college football preview magazine, for my money, comes from Phil Steele. He analyzes the numbers better than anyone else and usually comes up with some surprising stats to offer either encouragement or apprehension for the upcoming season for one’s team.  When I talked with Steele prior to this season, he had some of those interesting numbers to discuss for Kentucky.”I think a couple that would be troubling for this year would be that with just 11 returning starters, the 27 lost lettermen is the most in the SEC,” Steele said. “And then last year, they were outgained by 90 yards in SEC play, which was No. 11 in the conference. Also, they are number 87 (nationally) in tackles returning. They only have 57 percent of the total tackles from last year back and that would be the tough side. “On the good side of the ledger, they have 34 starts lost to injury last year. They were in the top 10 of the NCAA (in that stat) and my findings show that teams that suffer a lot of injuries one year tend to play a lot better the next year. I will go back to 2007 for example. Utah finished 7-5 and lost a ton of players to injury. Then in 2008, they ran the table and went on to beat Alabama in the Sugar Bowl and even drew some votes for No. 1 at the end of the year. Since Kentucky was so beat up at the end of the year last year due to injury, it will actually help them this season. Players that didn’t expect to play (were pressed into service) and now enter this year with experience.”Overall, Steele is bullish on the Wildcats for this season but tempers that feeling with the reality of the league — and division — in which they play.”I think that the biggest challenge is the SEC itself,” Steele said. “The SEC is the toughest conference in college football and Kentucky is competing with the premier teams in the country on a year-by-year basis. With that said, I think that Kentucky can get there. I think Rich Brooks did a tremendous job getting this team to four straight bowl games and doing well in the bowls. They went 3-1 (in those bowls). They laid a great foundation that has brought a lot of success to Kentucky. We haven’t seen four straight bowl games in quite some time and I think Joker Phillips steps into a good situation.”