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He was a preseason all-SEC choice despite not playing his first play at Kentucky yet and was extremely confident all preseason about how Kentucky’s secondary would handle opponents this year. For LSU transfer Kelvin Joseph, his first game at UK in the 29-13 loss to Auburn came with a big dose of humility. Not only did he get beat one-on-one for a touchdown catch by Auburn receiver Seth Williams, he also got called for a 15-yard unsportsmanlike penalty for a useless shove right in front of the official after Auburn had jumped offsides.
“The penalty is inexcusable,” Kentucky coach Mark Stoops said Monday.
Joseph figured to hear that and a lot more later Monday during UK’s team meeting.
“I show our players a football IQ film every Monday and silly, selfish penalties are on there every week and usually it is at the expense of another team, but it will be on there at the expense of our team this week and we cannot have that,” Stoops said. “We will not play that way.”
Let’s hope not. But also part of what makes a player like Joseph what he is can be part of that cockiness, arrogance or whatever you want to call it. One good thing about Stoops is that he has shown he can forgive and forget — say Jordan Jones — and continue to let a player grow.
“He is a competitive son of a gun. I can work with Kelvin, that’s for sure,” Stoops said. “I thought he did some really good things in the game (he had four tackles) and he is competitive and plays (hard).”
“He made some mistakes and is going to be rusty like a lot of guys. He hasn’t played in a long time with sitting out last year. So for his first competitive action in some time I thought he did some really good things.”
“There were a lot of good things to build on. We will get the other things corrected, that is correctable and fixable. We will get that straightened out.”