More on the running game with Kentucky –
We’ve had 4 common opponents with the Wildcats, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi State, and South Carolina. Kentucky lost all 4 of their games and we won 2 of ours.
In each of Kentucky’s games against our common opponents to date they gave up 3 rushing touchdowns, a total of 12. We gave up 6, none to Mississippi State and 2 each to the other 3.
Against our common opponents Kentucky has mostly performed marginally better running the ball on offense than we have. We have run the ball generally consistent with the average yards per attempt allowed by our opponents on defense across their entire schedule within about 10% +/-. Kentucky has mostly done the same with the exception of their game with Georgia. They actually ran above the average Georgia has been allowing by about 60%.
The big difference between our two teams versus our common opponents is on defense. Neither one of us did much to slow Georgia down with their rushing offense. They pretty much maintained their average against both of us. We took 15% off of Florida’s average, 38% off of Mississippi State’s average, and 51% off of South Carolina’s average. Georgia and South Carolina got essentially their averages against Kentucky. South Carolina actually got a bit above their average but Mississippi State and Florida significantly outperformed in their running game against the Cats.
When Wilson got hurt in the 2nd game of the season, Sawyer Smith was the backup. Their passing game held up pretty well until Smith got banged up. At that point their passing numbers dropped off a cliff and the running game made up the slack with Bowden turning in significant rushing performances against all comers, 195 against Arkansas, 99 against Georgia, and 204 against Missouri. Smith returned to action against Missouri and threw one pass, completing it for 9 yards. I’m guessing Smith will be available on Saturday and we may find out something more about that later today.
Smith completes 46% of his passes and has thrown 4 TDs and 5 interceptions. His passer rating is just below 100. They haven’t had much of a passing game of late, less than 100 yards per game for each of the last 4 games with a low of 17 passing yards against Georgia. Stoops will know that we know that and he may not care. Bowden has been pretty damn good on the ground and so they may just dare us to stop him.
There’s a lot that seems to go into stopping a guy like Bowden. We can use our defensive ends to prevent him from getting outside. The defensive tackles have to maintain their gaps. We can use one of our linebackers as a spy. We’re used to pressuring QBs (we’re 2nd in the conference for sacks) but most of those guys weren’t going to take off running that often. We can’t over pursue and run ourselves out of position to make a play. We have to hit him, over and over and over, we have to hit him. On offense we can try to control the ball/clock so as to keep him off the field.
Kentucky also has some decent running backs but all-in-all this reminds me of our game with Georgia Tech in 2017, though I don’t think Kentucky is running Paul Johnson’s scheme. It’s going to be very interesting to see what our staff schemes up on defense for Kentucky and whether or not our guys will have the discipline to execute within that scheme. Without Bowden their running game would probably not be that much of a challenge for us on defense. Bowden is not just their leading rusher on offense for the year, statistically he’s also still the leading receiver on the year, so we have to be wary of Smith coming into the game and Bowden lining up as a receiver.
They’ve had an extra week to prepare for us and to get some of their guys in a better health status. Lots of people often say that defense wins games. Fortunately, the best unit on our team, the one that has improved the most as the season has gone on, is our defense. Saturday night, we may have another example of why people often remind us of the value of defense. jmo.
I think we’ve got this. I’m optimistic. I’m just not sure what Pruitt is going to roll out there and I don’t expect him to tell us in advance. He’s much smarter than that. jmo.
