Brock Vandagriff (Vicky Graff Photo)
Tim Couch will be honored Saturday night when Kentucky hosts Georgia for his upcoming induction into the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame.
Certainly the plan had to be that UK would be 2-0, coming off a win over South Carolina and probably have ESPN Game Day in Lexington to help hype Couch’s induction. Instead, UK was blasted 31-6 by South Carolina because it had no passing game.
Couch knows the pressure quarterback Brock Vandagriff faces after that performance because he’s been in similar situations at UK under former coach Bill Curry and then in the NFL with the Cleveland Browns after being the No. 1 pick in the 1999 NFL Draft.
“Certainly, I’ve been there. Being a part of an expansion team in the NFL my rookie year, you don’t have a lot of time to throw, you don’t have a lot of weapons. I didn’t have a lot of weapons around me in Cleveland at that point. It’s tough,” Couch said Monday on Kentucky coach Mark Stoops’ call-in radio show.
“In this game, you need all of your teammates making plays, you need the offensive line giving you time to throw. It all goes in, and obviously, the quarterback is gonna get a lot of the credit when the team wins and he’s going to get a lot of blame when they lose.”
Kentucky quarterbacks were pressured on 15 of 22 times they tried to drop and throw the ball against South Carolina. That’s why Couch said perhaps too much blame was being placed on Vandagriff.
“If you go back and you watch the film, it was a total team effort. It wasn’t just Brock’s fault. I think the offensive line struggled a little bit at times and we didn’t make a lot of plays around him, so Brock’s not going to have a really great opportunity to go out and play well. I’ve certainly been there,” Couch said.
What advice would Couch offer to Vandagriff?
“If I had to give him any advice, it would just be to never lose your self confidence. Because he knows he’s a good football player, he wouldn’t be in this position if he wasn’t,” Couch said.
“You’ve just got to go back to work. That’s the only thing you can do in this game. I played in this conference, and if you don’t play your best game, and another team comes and plays a great game, they’re going to beat you to death.
“That’s what happened to us. We walked into a buzzsaw there not playing our best game, but the season isn’t one game. It’s a long season ahead. I would just encourage him to continue to work hard and encourage the guys and be a team leader.”
2 Responses
Brock is the victim of the HC & his staff who are CLUELESS about mental prep for a game. Whatever has been the pre-game pep-talk the past decade should be 100% canned. No more sedatives, no more lullaby songs, no more confusion (which obviously is the system used all week because no one has a clue how to perform using basic positions, methods, etc.
Stoops did not lose the locker room in 2024z he sold it out when he fired he’s COMPLEX OC and either did not recognize the massive destruction that was being wrought into the entire team or was unwilling to admit a big mistake and correct it by firing the OC after a few games.
UK is at least 3 or 4 years away from fielding an 8-win regular season, and that’s only if Stoops & the majority of his “friends” (hired as staff) are sent packing.
Vandagriff is worried about losing his life behind this crepe paper offensive line.