Kentucky Football – Filling the Holes: Receivers and Tight Ends

Look out there. The barren stillness broken only by the occasional breeze that kicks up the dust across the table flat landscape in front of you. Were you looking at the returning wide receiver production from last year? Yes. Out of 2738 yards produced by the top four pass catchers, 478 of them are coming back; that’s %17. With Cobb and Matthews moving on to more fertile grounds, a WR corp that was supposed to be in a rebuilding year suffered almost total attrition; at least the TE group is returning everyone, all 32 catches….yeah.

WR: Experience was supposed to be a strong point with the recruiting classes brought in the last few years, but the next five top receivers coming back have 83 catches (Randall Cobb had 84 this year); take out La’Rod King’s 36 catches and that number looks very grim. But the bright spot is that the 6’4″ junior-to-be emerged as a potential future threat this year with his five touchdown catches, equaling the rest of the WR/TE squad taking the field next year . Players are going to have to grow up, and grow up big. We have seen personally what can happen if you don’t have anyone to throw at (see also, 2008 Kentucky football) and it’s not pretty, no matter how good your RB stable. Brian Adams has been whispered of as the next man to take on the labors of the gods, but that’s a lot of faith on someone who caught a whopping 3 for 23 yards this season. I eventually have to give up on Aaron Boyd, which breaks my heart as I saw him play in high school while writing for another blog and really liked his physical tools but he’s just not getting something about the job otherwise we would have seen him by now. Gene McCaskill and Matt Roark will both be seniors next year, and one can only hope they can come out and make a splash in summer practices to give some hope to this depleted section of the depth chart. Kentucky product Josh Forrest comes in with some hype, as well as recruiting classmates Demarco Robinson, Nile Daniel, and Rashad Cunningham, all three stars by scout.com

TE: As I mentioned before, there wasn’t much activity coming from this area, but to their credit they have youth, with junior Nick Melilo being the only non-freshman in the group this year. Jordan Aumiller looks to be the starter coming in, as his 18 catches led the position but be on the lookout for Tyler Robinson, whose 11 catches almost caught up with Aumiller. Former four star recruit Alex Smith also looks to get some playing time this year. I wish there was more to type here but there was literally nothing, and that needs to change if the WR crew needs time to gel. Super-recruit Jon Davis has made some noise recently as whispers of his commitment wavering float around but he has said publicly that he is firm. Honestly if I was offered three free trips to anywhere to get treated like a king I would take all three trips also, but they might get suspicious when my college choices were Hawaii, Miami, and Scarlett Johansson’s house.

Friday I’ll be discussing the most important part of an offense: the line.

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