Kentucky Defense Aiming for Better Third Down Execution

The Kentucky defense held Ball State under 300 yards of total offense in the Cats’ season-opening 44-14 win Saturday. UK defensive coordinator Brad White knows that there’s a lot that his unit can improve on in week two.

“A lot of things to clean up,” White said. “Communication, we’ve got to clean up. Some technique things. Obviously, third down, we were not good enough, we’ve got to get better there. A lot to clean up. But I was impressed with their effort and their physicality.”

White wants to see his unit improve, especially when it comes to getting off the field on third down.

“There was a couple of third downs from a call standpoint that I would like to have back,” White said. “There were a couple of third downs that I think there was a lack of awareness, we understood what route was coming, we got those routes…if we got a route that we didn’t expect, that we didn’t rep, you can live with those, as a coach. It’s the ones that you’ve repped it, you’ve talked about it, you make a play call for that reason, those little things. And that’s when, if you’re smart and playing the game smart, you’re playing really good and you can get off the field.”

The Kentucky defense held Ball State to just 295 yards of total offense in Saturday’s win. While that’s an impressive number, White knows that there’s a more important stat, one that determines winning and losing.

“At the end of the day, it’s not about yards for us,” White said. “It’s all about points, points per game and giving the offense opportunities. That was the thing that was disappointing is that, in the second half, we may have kept points off the board with the goal line stand and the blocked field goal but what we didn’t do, we had these long, extended drives and we never let the offense get the ball. And that’s on us as a defense.”

White knows that football is a team game and the play of his defensive unit can provide the UK offense with more opportunities. That’s the goal for this week’s game against Eastern Kentucky.

“We’ve got to do a better job of that,” White said. “There was a lot of opportunities that we could’ve gotten off the field earlier and given the offense the ball and it would have been even better.”

Kentucky’s defense will be focusing on communicating, executing and, especially, getting off the field on third down this week against the Colonels.