Kentucky Wildcats 47, Akron Zips 10:  Postmortem

The offense is clearly good, albiet against weak opponents. If Hartline gets time in the pocket he is effective. The defense will hopefully not have lapses against FL because if they do, they won’t drop those passes. Hopefully the offense keeps it rolling next week and the defense makes plays. Halfway to bowl eligibility already.

I believe this first year will probably make or break Jokers time as head coach at UK. If he can get the team to win at least nine games and with one being a major win against either SC or UF, he can garner attention from the media and draw in better rated recruits. If he goes 6-6 or even 7-5 its basically over and the same ole – same ole will prevail. 8-4 maybe will turn a few heads but not enough to make a major impact.

good write up. you can bet UF will run some deep routes in its first possession.

and we better come out ready to play some football or we will be in a whole before we start.

I am not all in on Hartline but i do believe he is the best choice. it may not be fair, but i would like to see him win a game for us. i know that is not his role but at least i have figured out why i am hesitant to feel complete comfort with him at qb.

You’re so right, Tru, about the defensive secondary! Our DB corp is supposedly “faster” than they’ve ever been, but I counted 4 skinny posts that Akron ran that we were beat on… One was over-thrown, one was under-thrown, for sure, the other two were alot closer, and much scarier!!

I know we want to play tight man-to-man, but I’d much rather us give up 8-10 yards on an underneath route than get burned for 6 over the top! Those guys are going to have to step it up… And if they thought #82 was fast last night, wait until they see Dempsey!!

O-line looks better and better every game, think they are starting to gel. Hartline was “hurried” a couple of times last night, but never sacked! If he gets time in the pocket, he can run his reads effectively and I’ll think he’ll do OK…

Are we deep at RB, or what?? All those guys can play! :-)

I am ready for it.

D Locke had a great game. He had a career high game 166 yards and became the seventh running back in school history to top 2,000 career yards.

Hartline is surprising me, thankfully. I am converting to a Hartline backer but am going to have to see how he performs when we actually play somebody. I’m not looking for a 200-300 yard game like ABC but I’ll settle for “managing the game” against the Gators.

Running backs are incredible. Kentucky has never had this depth and quality. Russell runs incredibly strong, Sanders is as shifty and fast as Locke (and maybe a bit stronger at this point in his career) and Williams got to show his talents on that great effort getting the TD. I also am hoping for the best that T2’s injury is not too bad. We really need him knocking holes in the defense.

Special teams looking marginally better. Coverage was decent and no bad mistakes though I was surprised we didn’t have a better return average against the mighty Zips. I really thought Joker would give Priester a punt return try rather than just a kick off return after the Zips TD.

Receivers – wow, Joker is going to unleash some offense on Florida. Seeing Brian Adams lining up at tight end, a great move, leads me to believe we’ll see some serious spread against Florida. King, Matthews and Cobb as wideouts and Aumiller/Adams in double tight end with an empty backfield to challenge a suspect Florida secondary. Other than that Joker ran a pretty conservative offense and didn’t tip his hand for whats in store next week.

Defensively, that secondary needs to press the receivers much, much better. Everyone saw that our best player preventing the long pass was the Zip quarterbacks – not good. We can only hope they simply had an off game and its out of their system. The defensive line/LBs was solid but I wouldn’t consider it an SEC effort. Running was supposedly the strength of Akron but stopping it shouldn’t be considered a feather in the cap of the defense.

Considering the defensive effort I’d have to give the performance about a B-. B+ for offense, solid C for defense and C+ for special teams. Both the offense and defense could have come to play the first quarter and raised their grades.

I’m going to say this, not intending to be controversial, but our offensive line deserves a large portion of the credit and a big pat on the back, for both the running and passing game. As was expected in the preseason practices, they have performed, I believe, above expectations.

Go Big Blue O.L.

Well I think I’ll take UK and the 16 points for a $1,000. Yeah. Right. LOL

Mike Hartline is the #8 rated efficiency passer in the COUNTRY!!!!

Bama’s QB is #1

Hartline’s rating is 177.something

Anyone ever think we would be posting that around here?