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Kentucky coach Mark Stoops made it clear after Saturday’s 44-14 win over Ball State that he was not totally happy with his team’s overall play. He emphasized that again Monday during a longer-than-normal opening statement at his press conference before the Cats host Eastern Kentucky this Saturday.
Here’s his complete opening statement before he even mentioned Eastern Kentucky:
“Much like a lot of times, you don’t really have a true indicator until you go watch the film and get a good feel for what was transpiring on Saturday afternoon. I will say that the biggest thing, the biggest compliment, that I can say for our team is they were definitely ready to play in the game emotionally. I thought physically we were ready to play the game. We tried to do a lot of things that we had talked about: impose our will, start fast, be physical. Our team, I give them credit, they did a lot of that. You can see [that] with the disruption, the tackles for loss, the sacks, up front on both sides, even offensively.
“Some of the issues were identifying and making calls and we need to clean some things up with protection, but there wasn’t a lot just flat getting beat, maybe a little bit of trying to do too much; once or twice sliding down, coming out late and misidentifying once. I thought our guys played physical on both sides of the ball. We played really mentally — they were ready to play.”
“What we did not play was very clean. I felt that Saturday, and that was true with watching the film. The little details in all the things that we talk about, it’s a fundamental game. We played hard, we played physical, we were not always fundamentally sound and that will bite us eventually. Those are things we have to work on. I tried like heck to preach that in Game One, because in Game One, they have been training for so long and putting in all that hard work, [so] they want everything to happen immediately, instead of doing their job and doing it fundamentally sound and doing all the things they have been coached to do.”
“We get out there and they mean well and want to do too much and want to do a lot and want to help and make an impact, but therefore fundamentally suffer sometimes. That was evident on both sides. Just like I felt Saturday, some of the third down conversions were a bit frustrating.”
“The way the game played out, offensively — we had 11 plays in the second half until that last three minutes and that’s why I just wanted to run a few plays to, if nothing else, get out guys in shape, practice and play, and get some game reps under our belt. That felt frustrating Saturday and it was frustrating. It’s twofold. It’s really good, I compliment our team on scoring on offense, defense, and special teams. That’s something that we’ll always take, but you put that in with long drives—we start the second half and get a beautiful drive, I believe we started with a stop, took a little time, get a long drive touchdown, then we’re giving up yardage and then we get the kickoff return [for a touchdown], then give up a long drive and that felt frustrating, and it was.”
“There were long stretches in this game where our offense did not touch the ball, with the defensive score and the kickoff return and with us not converting on third down. It felt frustrating. It was frustrating. And there are things in there that we have to get cleaned up.”
“Again, I think we were physical—I liked the offensive line play. There was improvement. You could see they were finishing blocks. They were playing physical. They were trying to run the ball downhill. I thought we did that. We didn’t have a lot of plays; therefore, you’re not getting a lot of touches. You have playmakers out there that are not getting a lot of touches, we didn’t have enough plays.”
“You can spread that around for whose fault that was. Offensively, we didn’t convert. We had some really good field position at the end of the first half. That felt frustrating because we did not convert on some of that. With the possession time and [Ball State] moving the ball and keeping the ball away from us for various reasons, that felt frustrating. It’s a reason that we didn’t get as many touches to as many people as we like to. We have to work on that.”
“Bottom line is that it comes down to the details, being more detailed, being more focused, and executing at a higher level. If we can keep the same intensity, keep working on the physicality, being more detailed, and execute better in critical moments, we can get some things fixed.”
