Vanderbilt, believe it or not, has been like a rite of passage for the Kentucky football team.
Over the last four years, Kentucky has entered the Vanderbilt matchup twice needing a win to become bowl eligible. In the other two years, UK has desperately needed the victory to move up the bowl pecking order.
For what it’s worth, UK has taken care of business three out of the four trips, the lone loss coming in eerily similar Senior Day fashion.
“It’s always been like this since I’ve been here,” senior defensive tackle Ricky Lumpkin said. “If we handle (our) business it will be our sixth win, another step in the right direction for our program and another way to get the season going again in the right direction. They’re going to come in here and try to ruin our season.”
With a decimated running back corps and an almost impossibly unfair situation for first-year head coach Robbie Caldwell (former coach Bobby Johnson mysteriously retired not even two months before the start of the season), the Kentucky game for Vanderbilt, as Lumpkin said, is like the Commodores’ bowl game.
“To watch coach (Joker) Phillips in his first year trying to get bowl eligible, we hope we can make them squirm another week,” Caldwell said.
And that’s exactly what UK wants to avoid. Despite Tennessee’s struggles this season (the Volunteers are currently 3-6), the last thing the Cats want to do is have a 25-game losing streak to UT and bowl eligibility on the line for their trip to Knoxville, Tenn.
With UK’s bye week set on the schedule for next week, the agony of losing to Vanderbilt could become anxiously unbearable with an extra week to think about the stakes in Knoxville.
“You don’t want to go into a bye week with a loss,” Lumpkin said. “Then you’re saying, ‘Alright, we’ve got to win this game or else the season is over.’ You want to go into the bye week with a win.”
Lumpkin knows all too well the anguish of losing entering a bye week. In 2006, when UK’s current bowl run began, the Cats were thumped 49-0 in Baton Rouge, La., and it appeared Rich Brooks’ tenure at Kentucky was on the brink.
Fortunately for Brooks, UK and the current four-year bowl streak, Kentucky turned it around after the bye with a season-changing – and possibly program-changing – victory at Mississippi State.
“That wasn’t fun,” Lumpkin said. “The bye week wasn’t a bye week. We practiced every day and it was hard.”
Memories like that have started to resurface for Lumpkin and the 15 seniors that will play their final home game in Commonwealth Stadium on Saturday. Lumpkin said the reality of his collegiate career ticking down hit him in the team hotel last week before the Charleston Southern game.
With everything the senior class has gone through, especially for fifth-year seniors Lumpkin and quarterback Mike Hartline, Lumpkin wants to end it on a good note.
“You don’t want to be that team to end this tremendous bowl streak we have going,” Lumpkin said. “Even though we lost last year, just going four in a row is great, especially here at Kentucky and especially for the redshirt seniors that have been here from the beginning. You don’t want to start something and then go out ending it.”
Unlike many of his coaching colleagues who downplay the emotional significance of Senior Day, Phillips said he will try to play on those emotions in the days leading up to the Vanderbilt game.
“We’ll start talking about that tomorrow with getting each one of those guys explaining what it means to play their last game,” Phillips said. “I think it could be a positive. They’ll be playing in front of this crowd, the last time they’ll be playing in this stadium for their careers, so I think we’ll use those emotions because I think it always helps.”
