UK has an open date before a season finale at Louisville next Saturday. (Chet White, UK Athletics)

Bud Dupree is one of the healthy ones.Unlike many of his teammates, Dupree doesn’t have an injury that’s forced him to miss any time. He made it through eight games in eight weeks without a sprained ankle, strained muscle or any other malady Mark Stoops has had to publicly address.He still felt like he got “hit by a truck” by the time the stretch was over.”Your body feels horrible after a while,” Dupree said. “You wake up in the morning, sometimes you don’t want to get out of bed because you feel like you want to sleep it off.”With an open date this weekend, Dupree, at long last, got that chance. Following a loss at Tennessee on Saturday, the Wildcats were given days off on both Sunday and Monday to rest and recover.”It felt good just to lay down, finally, for a long time and just don’t worry about anything for that day,” Dupree said.Not only had Dupree and the Cats played on eight straight Saturdays, they had also faced seven Southeastern Conference opponents over that same time period. To say a break was needed would probably be an understatement.”You get back in there, like I said, Saturday afternoon or Saturday night when you’re done, and Sunday certainly, and it’s on,” Mark Stoops said. “It’s on to the next opponent, and it’s a full grind. That gets taxing on everybody. The players, they have to come in here Monday and we have to address the issues from the previous game and then on to the next opponent immediately.”Instead, the Cats get to take a breath before they dive headlong into preparing a matchup with Louisville in both teams’ regular-season finale next Saturday. Don’t think, however, that they forgot about football altogether. Even though there were no official team activities on Monday, groups of players gathered independently to meet and review film with no coaches present.”It was some of the leaders on the team wanting to step up and make some changes,” senior wide receiver Javess Blue said.Neal Brown, meanwhile, had a film session of his own.”We do a lot of evaluation,” Brown said. “Like over the last couple of days I’ve watched every play that we’ve had. Kind of broke it down to every play by different formations and personnel groupings then kind of identifying some problems that have been consistent and going about fixing some things.”Some break, huh?”With a bye week, of course there’s just a little more time to sit (as a coaching staff) and take it in and look at things and see what we have done good and what we’ve done poorly and try to put them in a position to be successful,” Stoops said. “It’s our job to put them in a place that they can succeed.”When UK returned to the practice field on Tuesday, that effort continued.The first step was to focus on some of the little things that began to escape the Cats toward the end of their stretch of eight straight games and a five-game losing streak. With lots of work on blocking and shedding blocks, pass coverage and getting open and one-on-ones with first-teamers, Dupree feels like it’s fall camp all over again.”We are doing all fundamentals this week,” Dupree said. “It seems like we started over.”The results, according to Stoops, have been nothing but positive.”Guys seem to have a little more energy, a little more pop in their step,” Stoops said. “Got a chance to go back and do some things, just camp drills as far as competing and doing some things good against good and fundamentally getting better. So it’s been a great time for a bye week for us, and I think, like I said, it’s been helpful so far, both with rest, healing up some guys and fundamentally getting better.”Stoops said after the loss at Tennessee that “we didn’t have a lot in our tank,” but the bye week has given the chance for the Cats to refuel. He said he expects UK to be close to 100 percent for the Louisville game, though offensive tackle Kyle Meadows remains a question mark.More importantly, Stoops sees a team that continues to be coachable and willing to work. The frustration, of course, is there, which is only natural when you’ve been stuck a win shy of bowl eligibility for two months.But the Cats are eager for their final chance to break through.”We know our shortcomings,” Stoops said. “We know we all need to do better. But I see a team that’s fun to coach, that care, that want to win, that are putting a lot into it.”

Related Stories

View all