Vanderbilt Commodores 40, Kentucky Wildcats Bupkis: Postmortem

Let's be honest, this is officially rock bottom. In fact, I'm not sure that we haven't broken out the jackhammers. The white flag has been flown, and this Kentucky Wildcats team has officially packed it in.

Congratulations to the Vanderbilt Commodores. They beat the ever-living tarnation out of us in every possible way. Vandy is a well-coached, motivated team that demonstrated that it is possible to improve your position at a school that doesn't even have an athletic department anymore. It's tempting to go down the road of "We can't even beat Vanderbilt," but the reality is, they are a much better football team than Kentucky. They played very well, and the score reflects that.

You can't ever play like this at home, and Kentucky just did, which tells me they have reached the point that internal motivation is no longer possible. That's what happens to football teams that are 1-9 and getting blown out by everybody on a weekly basis.

I don't think it's productive to go into a lot of recriminations here. Anyone who saw this football game saw a coaching staff that is not going to be here next year, and that is a mercy in my opinion. You can fret about that if you want, or you can trust me when I tell you that Joker Phillips & Co. are coaching their last football games at Kentucky. Hating on them is no longer productive, and Mitch Barnhart is not going to fire them until after the season. That much is clear, I expect, to most people by now.

When you give up like UK did, we just have to acknowledge it and move on. I can't blame these guys too much, they have just suffered too much adversity, and when you strip away all the hope that remains, you have to understand that human nature is going to take over. Pride is no longer a functioning motivation for the Wildcats, I'm afraid.

For those of you tempted to feel sorry for the fans, stop it. Fans, for the most part, are big boys and girls who knows that sometimes teams fail. Failure is something that is not strange to long-time Kentucky football watchers, and anyone who thought that we'd seen the last of sub-5 win seasons had to feel, in the back of their minds, they were kidding themselves. I am not going to go into why this is, but any UK fan honest with him or herself knows why.

The bottom line is, don't feel sorry for anyone. This kind of thing happens all the time in college football somewhere. It's our turn, I guess, and almost everything that could have gone wrong this season has gone wrong. Since most of our best players are injured already, I suppose the best we can hope for is that we make it through the next two weeks without further damage to our personnel.

Next week is a bye, and I am really glad, too. Writing these takes a toll, and I have at least two more of them, and both could be laments. Laments are taxing on the soul, at least mine.