Kentucky football: Levis, Rodriguez, Square cementing their place in UK history
By Eric Thorne
The Kentucky football team wins and loses as a collective group, but there are a few studs on the field that fuel both sides of the ball Will Levis, Chris Rodriguez, and DeAndre Square and better yet while leading by example are leaving their marks on Wildcat legacy record books.
Some will say that numbers are meaningless, but to others numbers mean everything. Pick your side but here are a few nuggets for those in the latter category to chew on.
The face of the Kentucky football team would be quarterback Will Levis. The 6-foot-3, 232-pound senior from Madison, Conn transferred to Lexington from Penn State where he spent much of his three years as a backup.
Levis’s climb up the Kentucky football quarterback records list is remarkable in just two seasons including sitting out the South Carolina game with an injured toe. Good to help him heal, but unfortunately without him, the Wildcats had very little offense in a stunning and flat loss.
Through 19 games at Kentucky, the quarterback has completed 347 of 517 passes for 4,461 yards and 37 touchdowns. His total yards rank eighth in UK history and he needs 54 more to pass Rick Norton (1963-1965). Next in line would be Patrick Towles who totaled 5,099 yards from 2012-2015.
He needs one more touchdown pass to tie Mark Hartline with 38 touchdown passes for the fourth spot. Tim Couch looks pretty safe at 74 in third place.
Against Tennessee this weekend he better pass for far more than the 16 completions he needs to move past Randy Jenkins (363 from 1979-83) into seventh place all-time. With a potential 6 games still to play Patrick Towles (427) and Bill Randsdale (469) should be on alert.
The list of accomplishments he has had at UK is endless and far too many to name but here are a few:
He had two games last year (LSU and Tennessee) with three passing touchdowns and two rushing ones in the same game making him the only Wildcat ever to accomplish this.
Against this week’s opponent, No. 3 ranked Tennessee last year Levis was responsible for 419 yards total offense and five touchdowns. He ran15 times for a net 47 yards and two touchdowns and completed 31 of 49 passes for a career-high 372 yards and three touchdowns.
In the classroom, he graduated in May of 2021 from Penn State’s Smeal College of Business in three years with a degree in finance. Transferring to UK he is working on a master’s degree in finance from UK’s Gatton School of Business and on School of Business and Economics
Oh, and don’t forget he likes to eat bananas peel and all, put mayonnaise in his coffee and drink it and the craziest thing to top those he admits to was a swinging on a flying trapeze.