Have you ever been somewhere that you absolutely could not fart and you felt that tickle in your stomach and just knew that it was coming? You don’t want to hold it in, that would be uncomfortable and possibly painful; but nobody could know what was happening. So you excuse yourself from a conversation, lightly saunter over to some other area of the room, and attempt to leak it out very sneakily. But instead it comes out like the Deep Water Crisis: Explosions, lots of noise, and a result that is very dangerous for the surrounding environment. Everybody looks, there’s no one around you, and everybody knows you did it. Total failure. THAT is what happened on Saturday.
I felt like it was going to happen. Steve Spurrier is an egomaniac that gets his kicks from trashing UK and then talking about it, we’ve known about this for years. The man was bulletproof against us, until last year that is. If I could have been a fly on the wall in Spurrier’s hotel room after last year’s game, I’m betting I would have heard some very serious four-letter words, as well as a barrage oh “gee-golly’s” and “goshamighty’s”. I guarantee losing to UK was the low point of his year, and he still won the SEC East. If you’re telling me you didn’t see a four quarter score run-up coming when we were playing them in Columbia with an even better team than last year, then you’re even more short sighted than the average Bluegrass football fan. Spurrier was licking his chops to welcome us in, and you know he was looking at game tape from this year; smiling and adjusting that stupid visor every time he watched another breakdown in our offensive line.
But this? This was bad. Never possessing the ball in their half with the exception of an opening kickoff fumble that we couldn’t punch in the endzone? That’s bad. All the absolutely ridiculous stat lines that I’m not even going to put myself through the nausea of mentioning? Those are embarrassing.
I’m still on board, despite reports from other sites that there is no one left in the state of Kentucky still on board with Joker. Despite the misguided belief this still isn’t his team, entirely. He helped recruit these guys, yes, but when it came to a coach looking at tape and saying.”I want that guy on my team”, it was Papa Brooks. You want to talk about changing a philosophy, Brooks hitting gold with the Woodson/Tamme/Burton/Little looks like almost a lucky shot at this point. Every senior on the team has accepted a Werther’s original from Old Man Brooks, so talking like we are light years away from 2007 is a bit of a stretch. But talent takes time to cultivate, and there were down years before Joker took the reins.
Yes, we are in a bad way right now, but like my article on Wednesday pointed out, we’re still alive and still need to win four more games. That’s four out of the next six, and despite passing through the sharpest teeth of the SEC in our first three games, we’re now to the softer, more pliable tongue and upper throat area and we’re still alive. But something has to change. A serious offensive philosophy must be sought out or everyone will know our entire playbook by the end of the bye week. Returning to traditional playbooks or adding a crazy new formation, something has to happen in the 12 days that we have off. Because if we lose to Jacksonville St. I might really be the only person left on the Joker Phillips life raft.
By the way, Vegas has opened up with the Cats as a 17.5 pt underdog to the bye week, get your bets in early.
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