Bud Dupree had seen the look too many times not to know exactly what was going on.Through the first three seasons of his Kentucky career, Dupree had never played on a winning team. When something went wrong, the Wildcats couldn’t weather the storm. Instead, they shut down.Seeing beginnings of the same reaction as ULM built an early lead on Saturday, Dupree wasn’t about to stand idly by.”Once you see guys start holding their heads down, you don’t play football,” Dupree said. “That’s not a team we are anymore, holding our head down when we get beat.”There Kentucky was, trailing to the visiting Warhawks. The energy in Commonwealth Stadium during an upset of South Carolina just a week prior was gone. After ULM scored to move ahead 14-3 on the final play of the first quarter, Dupree gathered his teammates and delivered an impassioned message,”If you get beat, so be it,” Dupree said. “You gotta go on to the next play. I was just emphasizing moving on to the next play and executing the calls. No matter what our coach calls, just execute it. If you think he’s wrong, just do it anyway. Just play with your head on fire and just play hard.”Taking a cue from their senior leader, the Cats responded in a big way. UK would pitch a shutout the rest of the way, scoring the final 45 points in a 48-14 victory to move to 5-1.”Once again, it wasn’t the prettiest thing early, but our guys hung in there,” Mark Stoops said. “Faced a little adversity, and came up with some big plays on both sides of the ball when we needed it.”Even before his speech in the huddle, Dupree was making more than his share of those big plays. Seemingly the only defender coming out with the intensity Stoops demands, Dupree had half a sack, another tackle and a blocked field goal even as ULM built that lead in the first quarter. If not for him, that early hole would likely have been deeper.”Bud is an amazing player and a great leader and takes the game very seriously,” defensive coordinator D.J. Eliot said. “It doesn’t surprise me that even though others may have been flat that he wasn’t. With his leadership, I think everybody else followed.”Dupree finished the game with five tackles, that blocked field goal, a quarterback hurry and 1.5 sacks, moving into a tie for second with Dennis Johnson on the UK career list and adding to his Southeastern Conference-leading total among active players. Clearly, he’s always been capable of dominant efforts like the one he turned in Saturday, but the kind leadership he displayed in shaking the Cats out of their post-field-rushing malaise is something he’s developed.”I take it upon myself,” Dupree said. “Being a leader of the team, if it’s not going well I have to make a play and I have to make sure all the guys are on the same page and worrying about the bad plays that’s happening and move on to the good. Once I told everybody to move on, keep on moving on, things started clicking.”No unit clicked better than the defensive line.To start, Stoops and Eliot dialed up the blitzes that have become UK’s signature, especially on third down. ULM, however, was ready to capitalize with slants and other quick-hitting plays, converting 4-of-6 third downs in the first quarter. Adjusting midgame, the coaching staff elected to drop the linebackers and defensive backs and let the linemen loose.”Once we started realizing kind of what some of their game plan was … we started playing some coverage, and that let d-linemen rush, and they had a hard time blocking them,” Stoops said.Using that approach, UK piled up six sacks — all by linemen or hybrid ends/linebackers, save for a sack Josh Forrest shared with Dupree in the first quarter — and 12 tackles for loss.”Well, we did put the d-ends in better positions to pass rush based on what we saw that they were doing,” Eliot said. “That happened pretty quick into the game. And after that is when I think we started to get a lot of good pressure.”The good pressure eventually flustered ULM quarterbacks Pete Thomas and Brayle Brown into mistakes, and UK’s back-end defenders were ready to capitalize. Josh Forrest and Marcus McWilson each had interception returns for touchdown, giving UK four defensive scores on the season and three in the last five games.”Obviously, they were big in both games, really at times when we needed them,” Stoops said. “For sure in the South Carolina game, but even in this game, it came at the right time. That’s nice to see us have the ability to make big plays on both sides of the ball and in special teams.”Forrest’s pick-six was particularly timely, coming barely a minute after Javess Blue scored an 83-yard touchdown on a pass from Patrick Towles. On the strength of those two touchdowns and another late in the second quarter from Towles to Blake Bone, the Cats turned that early 11-point deficit into a 24-14 lead in a span of less than five minutes.”I think it does show some maturity of hanging in there when things don’t go well,” Stoops said. “Keep on battling, believing in each other and believing in what we can do on both sides of the ball and special teams.”In spite of that belief, a complete game still eludes the Cats. Blue had his long touchdown and another one-handed 21-yard score sure to make the SportsCenter Top 10 and Stanley “Boom” Williams had 179 all-purpose yards, including a 58-yard touchdown burst, but UK had just 352 yards on 59 plays. Towles was mostly efficient, completing 16-of-28 passes for 216 yards and three touchdowns, but missed on some chances, while the ground game never got going outside of Williams.”We weren’t as consistent as we needed to be,” offensive coordinator Neal Brown said. “At the end of the day we got done what we needed to get done. We didn’t have a great week of practice. We didn’t handle prosperity overly well, but with all that said we’re 5-1 after six games.”That’s the first time a Kentucky team has been able to say that since 2007. And to take things a step further, the Cats now find themselves in a four-way tie for the SEC East lead in the loss column, to which Stoops said, “I love it. I love it. Let’s go.”In spite of all that, Dupree sees unrealized potential in his team heading into a trip to face LSU next Saturday.”I don’t even think we’re close,” Dupree said. “Last week we had a bad week defensively. This week we came out slow. It better be this week. It better be this week so we can go out and get a win.”Dupree, no doubt, will take an active role in pushing his teammates to make that happen.