Kentucky football: Night of horrors for Wildcats who bleed mediocrity

Forget haunted houses just stepping foot in Starkville, Mississippi is frightening for the Kentucky football team, but on this Halloween eve, their performance was horrific enough that the ghosts of Old Kentucky football rose from their graves in a 31-17 loss.

It’s like that cemetery or old house where your confidence isn’t bad when you first enter, but suddenly realize what you are walking into. Such was the case for the Wildcats (6-2, 4-2) who were scary with the ball turning it over 4 times to Mississippi State and in essence, gave the game away.

Bulldog quarterback Will Rogers was quite the friendly ghost inside Davis Wade Stadium At Scott Field floating passes to 11 different receivers that led to four touchdowns and a field goal.

Kentucky football just walked into a house of horror in Starkville

Kentucky coach Mark Stoops has yet to walk away from the depths of cowbell hell with a win in five tries at the helm.

In the last four trips, his Kentucky offense has scored 16, 7, 13, and now 17 points.

I did feel all season this would be the second game the Wildcats would lose despite my change to a 3 point win and loss to Tennessee next week. Always stick with your early gut.

After suffering their first loss of the season two weeks ago to No. 1 ranked Georgia and still moving up to No. 12 in both the AP and Coaches Poll, quarterback Will Levis played probably his most complete game of the season then UK had last week off.

They should have been refreshed and refocused for the stretch run, but that suddenly is in doubt.

Social media completely roasted Levis and the team’s uninspired performance.

Except for the defense.

While allowing 31 points they were on the field for over 41 minutes and fought till the end. The offense fumbled, stumbled, and drug their feet around in zombies fashion for a mere 18 minutes.

While hard-pressed to find anything positive from this house of horrors let’s just point out the obvious

No. 1 The defense gave it their all against a phenomenal show by Rogers

This is one of the few bright spots of the 60 minutes we had to endure. You have to give props to both the MSU quarterback Rogers who completed 36 of 39 passes (92 percent) for 344 yards and the Kentucky defense for having to try and defend 74 plays run against them.

Rogers 92.3% completion percentage is the highest in a game in SEC history. Seems to always happen against us.

We knew the linebacking corp would get a workout and that was the case with Jacquez Jones recording 18 tackles, DeAndre Square and Trevin Wallace 12 each, and Yusuf Corker 11. Josh Paschal and JJ Weaver were credited with six each while Vito Tisdale and Tyrel Ajian had five apiece.

In all 22 different players had tackles in the 108 total they had to make.

It makes me exhausted typing that.

Rogers led his team on six drives that resulted in touchdown scores with three others ending as punts. They had the ball both times when the clock expired at the half and end of the game. In the end, he put balls into 12 different receivers’ hands.