Like a swinging door, Kentucky pushed open the door to the Southeastern Conference East title race last week with an upset over No. 10 South Carolina. But just as UK looked back to where it came from, it dropped the ball (literally), the door swung back, and pushed Kentucky right back to where it was two weeks ago – with plenty of questions and not a whole lot of answers with four games left. That’s usually life in the SEC, but the nation’s best conference isn’t the reason Kentucky finds itself near the bottom of the East and looking up again. No, as head coach Joker Phillips said during his halftime interview, Kentucky beat Kentucky in every way imaginable Saturday night in a 44-31 loss to Georgia in front of a season-high 70,884 fans at Commonwealth Stadium.UK turned it over four times in the defeat, two in its own territory and another one in the end zone.”You really can’t say you have a real good chance, if any, if you turn over the ball four times,” said senior quarterback Mike Hartline, who tossed for career-high 353 yards and four touchdowns but lost a fumble and threw an interception. “Field position was just huge. You turn over the ball, that’s one thing, but they were so deep in our territory most of the time. It’s tough to come off of that.”The proof is in the stats. Kentucky outgained Georgia 423-290 and tallied nine more first downs. But the Cats turned the ball over four times, turned the ball over on downs at the 38 and allowed a 100-yard kickoff return for a touchdown.(When was the last time a team outgained a team by more than 130 yards and lost by two scores? I don’t know, but I would beg to guess that it’s happened more recently than a team winning with a minus-four turnover ratio and a kickoff return for a touchdown.)UK’s average starting field position was the Cats’ 25-yard line. Georgia’s? Try the 50-yard line. That’s only half the field to go every time. That’s a Hail Mary pass, and a handful of possessions were inside that.”We need our defense to go out on the field with a long field with a lot of grass behind them,” Phillips said.Not the end zone behind it. “Once again we shot ourselves in the foot early,” Hartline said.A week after trying to figure out how to get the defense off to a faster start, that side of the ball came to play, giving up just 290 yards for the game, the third lowest of the season. But this time turnovers came into play and the Cats found themselves down 14-3 after the first quarter.”It almost seems like that’s our motto,” Hartline said. “We can’t do that. We’re making it harder on ourselves.”By the six-minute mark of the second quarter the Georgia lead was 28-3, and at halftime the UK deficit was 28-10.”You come in at halftime and it’s like we’ve been here before,” Phillips said.The Cats may have set the school record for the biggest comeback last week in storming back from 18 down to defeat the Gamecocks, but play with fire too many times and … well, you get the point.”That’s the No. 1 problem that’s been for our football team since I’ve been here is we always put ourselves in a hole,” senior defensive tackle Ricky Lumpkin said. “We have memorable comebacks, but we always have those ‘Man, why do we always shoot ourselves in the foot’ type games.”Phillips isn’t quite sure how to put a finger on the slow starts and his team’s inability to get all three units (offense, defense and special teams) on the same page.Either way, whether it was by Georgia’s hand or Kentucky’s own bullet, Kentucky finds itself out of the SEC East picture just as fast as it put itself in it. By the looks of things, Georgia has returned to being Georgia since the return of soon-to-be NFL receiver A.J. Green.”It hurts because we were in prime position again and we didn’t get the job done,” Lumpkin said.Now the team’s focus has to be back on the season-long goal of getting to a bigger, better bowl game (preferably, as the players have asked, out of the state of Tennessee). At 4-4 on the season, the Volunteer State still looks like a very good possibility, although the Cats have a very manageable schedule most of the way home.”The season’s almost over,” Hartline said. “The East is pretty much out of reach. Now we’re fighting for our best bowl game. Six is our number, so we’ve got to fight for that, and then from there take it to the best one from that.”Kentucky has been down this road before. Saturday was no doubt the biggest game of the year to this point because of the position the Cats put themselves in last week. It was a swing game, if you will.But victory or defeat, whatever way the Cats go from here doesn’t have to be dictated by Saturday’s result. Does UK bounce back like it did last week against South Carolina and make this a special season, or does the thud of a loss suddenly swing UK right back in the direction it was headed after the Auburn loss?”We’ve got a team of fighters, there’s no question about that,” Phillips said. “That’s not hard to determine. I’d like to see what type of football team we truly have.  We’ll only see that when we see this team play for four quarters and we have not done that yet.”