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Three Things We Know and Don't Know About Kentucky | SEC 2013

2013-06-19T13:00:04Z

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

1. The offense will look different.
There are various kinds of "Air Raid" offenses just like there are various kinds of any offensive scheme or philosophy. But we know one thing: Whatever Neal Brown is doing at Kentucky, it ain't going to resemble whatever Joker Phillips was doing at Kentucky. (One could argue that Joker Phillips didn't really know what he was doing at Kentucky, and that would be an argument I would probably grant you.) There's a hint of that in the numbers alone: About 49 percent of Kentucky's 790 offensive snaps in 2012 were passing plays, compared to about 59.8 percent of Texas Tech's offensive snaps under Brown. (And that was when he had to deal with Tommy Tuberville as head coach.) One way or the other, it's going to be fun to watch a game when Kentucky is on offense.

2. The last half of the season will decide whether the Wildcats go bowling.
Assume for a moment that Kentucky beats Western Kentucky (no sure thing), Miami (OH) (probably) and Alabama State (yes). The Louisville-Florida-at South Carolina-Alabama stretch of the slate that spans from mid-September to late October is probably not going to be kind to the Wildcats. But there are some long-shot winnable games after that. Mississippi State is an uphill climb, but after that and the Alabama State game, the Wildcats get Missouri at home before going to Vanderbilt and Georgia and then playing Tennessee. If Kentucky can steal an upset in the first half of the season or knock off Mississippi State, it "only" needs to beat Missouri and Tennessee to get to a bowl game. That's a tall order on all counts, but that's how it would need to go for the Wildcats to reach the postseason.

3. The front seven has a chance to be pretty good.
The Wildcats return four of their top five tacklers, and the top three are all in the front seven. That includes Avery Williamson, who had 135 tackles and three sacks as a linebacker; Alvin Dupree, a defensive end / linebacker who led the team with 12.5 tackles for loss, including a team-leading 6.5 sacks; and linebacker Miles Simpson. In all, Kentucky basically has five of last year's regular starters on the front seven back, though some of them might have moved around or migrated toward one position after playing a variety.

THREE THINGS WE DON'T KNOW

1. Whether the offense will work.
As we said before, it will be fun to watch a game when Kentucky is on offense -- "one way or the other." The other could include a record-setting pace for interceptions, and balls bouncing on the turf with regularity. It's simply too early to say whether the players will be able to adapt to the Air Raid soon enough for Kentucky to resemble a functioning offense for the first year or two. Joker Phillips wasn't running a bombs-away passing attack, which means he also wasn't recruiting for a bombs-away passing attack. If it clicks, the Air Raid could be a thing of beauty and turn Kentucky into a surprise team. If it doesn't, then the Wildcats could bottom out until the recruits needed to make the system work are ready to take the reins.

2. Whether the SEC losing streak will end.
Kentucky enters the season on an eight-game SEC losing streak, and the prospects for a win in the first three games on the conference schedule are particularly bleak. Unless Mississippi State absolutely craters this year, the Bulldogs will probably be favored when that game comes along. Given the lines that have been released so far, it's not impossible to envision a scenario where Kentucky isn't favored in a single SEC game all year. Just like the ceiling for this team could put it in position for a bowl, the floor could be yet another winless season in conference play.

3. How good a coach Mark Stoops will be.
Of all the SEC coaches that were hired this offseason, Stoops is the only one without head coaching experience. And hiring offensive or defensive coordinators who haven't held the top job has a mixed record in the SEC. Sometimes you get Mark Richt, sometimes you get Dan Mullen and sometimes you get Ron Zook. There is really no way to tell. Sometimes the best coordinators make the worst head coaches and vice versa. Steve Addazio was 13-11 and led Temple to a bowl game. I will repeat: Steve Addazio. Temple. Bowl game. He's now at Boston College.

College World Series: North Carolina 4, LSU 2 -- The Tigers Get Sent Home

2013-06-18T23:28:17Z

When Vanderbilt got toppled and North Carolina was pushed to three games by South Carolina, it looked like we had a clear favorite going into Omaha. LSU was firing on all cylinders, had swept a hot Oklahoma team out of the tournament and was one of the more balanced teams headed into the College World Series.

And just like that, the Tigers are gone. The LSU offense never really got going in Omaha, or at least not in a way that made a dent in the scoreboard; the Bayou Bengals managed an anemic three runs on 15 hits over the two games. The pitching was largely still there, holding UCLA to just two runs and UNC to a reasonable four, but the hitting never could match it.

In one way, this is just the continuation of a trend we've noted here over the last week or so. Only three of the eight national seeds made it to Omaha, a relatively low number, and only two remain. Both of those teams are in the losers' bracket and will have to win three straight games just to make it to the championship series. The odds are good that at least one of them will fail, and both might.

Part of that's because there really weren't eight national seeds this year, and part of that's because virtually all of the regional hosts made it through, leading to a strong field. And part of it is because there is a lot more parity in college baseball than there was even five or ten years ago. Indiana is in Omaha. That right there is a sign that this might not be the year for traditional powers and favorites. And LSU was both.

But the seniors who returned this year in order to make sure that their class was not the first one to never go to Omaha since the 1980s at least accomplished that much. There were a lot of teams almost as good as LSU's who didn't even manage to clear that bar. If the Tigers fell short of expectations, it was only because those expectations were so high to begin with.

College World Series: Mississippi State 5, Indiana 4 -- The Bulldogs and the Bullpen Do It Again

2013-06-18T04:21:52Z

Someday, someone is going to come up with an easy way to describe what Mississippi State's bullpen has done this year. Because it has been nothing short of amazing. The Bulldogs and head coach John Cohen decided long ago that the bulk of the work would end up falling on the relievers -- and it has so far worked almost to perfection.

And it worked to perfection again Monday night, as Chad Girodo threw 6.1 innings of solid baseball, striking out 10 and allowing two earned runs. That's a quality start if he starts. But like most of Mississippi State's games, the critical innings that allowed the Bulldogs to claw their way back into this one were pitched by a reliever.

The offense came in a three-run eighth inning that gave Mississippi State its 5-4 lead. And with the come-from-behind nature of the win, and the last-minute dramatic flourish -- a final out that was barely picked by first baseman Wes Rea -- the Bulldogs have started to draw a favorable comparison.

State sure does remind me of South Carolina's resiliency and flare for the dramatic the last few years in Omaha
— Chuck Dunlap (@SEC_Chuck) June 18, 2013

That's a tall order, but it's starting to seem like one that's not too far off the mark. The bullpen has until Friday to rest, and one more win gets Mississippi State to the championship series. You have to like their chances.

Auburn's Roster Makes the Tigers an Interesting Team This Season | SEC 2013

2013-06-17T17:29:03Z

Here's why Auburn is one of the more interesting teams around right now: This is set to be the junior year for the recruiting class that came in after the 2010 national championship. That would be the national championship that was one in large part thanks to then-offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn, who is now the head man at Auburn. If there's a team not based in Oxford that has a chance to wildly exceed expectations, it could be Auburn. That doesn't meant the Tigers would end up in the BCS, mind you, but a Peach Bowl berth at this point would be reason for giddiness in the Auburn-Opelika metropolitan area.

BIGGEST RETURN | RB Tre Mason
If, like most SEC fans, you stopped paying attention to Auburn some time in late October -- okay, mid-October -- you might have missed the fact that Auburn had a 1,000-yard rusher. But Auburn did, in fact, have a 1,000 yard rusher in Tre Mason. In fairness, Mason did just make it (1,002 yards) and only after huge games against New Mexico State and Alabama A&M (a combined 333 yards in those two games) -- but a 1,000-yard rusher is a 1,000-yard rusher, and it's not like you've got a horde of All-Americans returning to the Plains this year. If nothing else, Mason gives Gus Malzahn something to build on, or at least someone to go to as he tries to make the Auburn offense a functioning offense once more. Look for Mason to get more than 171 carries this year as long as he's healthy enough to stay on the field.

BIGGEST LOSS | WR Emory Blake
It's also not like Auburn lost a ton of All-Americans off last year's team. But they did lose a pretty good receiver in Emory Blake, who was the only Auburn player to catch more than 15 passes and the only one to break 150 yards. Really. Blake had 789 yards and three touchdowns on 50 catches last years, numbers that (as just suggested) blew away everyone else on the team. In fact, the Tigers lose three of their top four receivers and have just one player returning (Quan Bray) with more than 10 receptions last year; Bray had 14. The top returning receiver in terms of yardage is C.J. Uzomah -- so Auburn has a lot of work to do when it comes to receivers (and quarterbacks), and it would have been far easier to do that work if the Tigers weren't losing a guy like Blake.

BREAKTHROUGH POSSIBILITY | The quarterback
Even if we don't know who he is yet. The smart money is on junior college transfer Nick Marshall after Auburn's current options underwhelmed in the spring, but whoever gets the job will almost certainly do better than they did last year. Kiehl Frazier is intriguing because he was recruited for Malzahn's system, then placed into a pro-style system by Gene Chizik in one of the many dumb decisions Gene Chizik made in 2012. (For an optimistic take on Frazier's chances now that Malzahn's back, go here.) If Marshall gets the job, it will likely be because his interception problems were fixed and he picked up the offense well enough to pass Frazier. If Frazier gets the job, it could be more of a mixed bag or status quo decision -- but it also could mean he finally feels at home in the offense he should have been in for his entire career.

College World Series: UCLA 2, LSU 1: Being a National Seed Catches Up to LSU

2013-06-17T05:09:34Z

So far, LSU was the only national seed to avoid having a loss in what has turned out to be a very bad tournament for the teams ranked as the top eight in the nation. The Tigers swept through the Baton Rouge Regional -- the stage of the tournament that eliminated Oregon -- and took two straight against Oklahoma in the super regional round, which took out Vanderbilt, Cal State Fullerton, Virginia and Florida State. UNC and Oregon State emerged only after seeing their super regionals go all three games.

So when the Tar Heels and the Beavers lost their initial College World Series games as well, there was no reason to necessarily think things would change for LSU, which was emerging as perhaps the favorite in Omaha. That was before Sunday night, when UCLA defeated LSU and officially put on the national seeds on notice that this might not be their year.

There is some talk about the two errors in the game, which did help UCLA, but one of the biggest problems for LSU was a nearly complete lack of offense. When your starting pitcher just gives up two unearned runs, you have to be able to win the game. But LSU managed just five hits all night, and the only one that plated a run was Mason Katz's fourth-inning home run (the first by anyone so far in Omaha). When you score just one run and strand seven, you're pretty much going to get what you ask for.

The Bengals now have a day to get ready for their next game: An elimination game against UNC, which lost earlier Sunday to N.C. State. Whoever wins that game will face a long uphill climb to the championship game, but they'll at least have a chance to salvage their season.

The loser will be yet another national seed that sees its season come to a surprising end. What's new?

College World Series: Mississippi State 5, Oregon State 4 -- The Bulldogs Take Care of the Most Important Thing

2013-06-16T02:46:23Z

This is going to seem more obvious than it perhaps is, but it's something we've stressed on this site before and is worth reiterating now that the NCAA baseball tournament has moved to Omaha: The easiest way to win the College World Series is to never end up in the losers' bracket.

Again, that sounds preposterously self-evident: If you never get into the losers' bracket, you never lose a game, and therefore win the series. But it's more complicated than that. In a double elimination tournament, any team that gets into the losers' bracket is intentionally put into a situation where it has to battle back through multiple games and burn through pitching at such a rate that when it does face the team that has cruised through the winners' bracket, it's very difficult to knock that team off. Not impossible, but very difficult.

So Wes Rea's two-run double in the top of the eighth against Oregon State on Saturday, which finally gave Mississippi State a lead that would stick in what had been a seesaw game, was an incredibly important hit in the scheme of the Bulldogs' season. It took them from facing the most difficult way to win the tournament to now facing a relatively easy one. If they can keep winning.

And if Mississippi State continues to win, it can help the Bulldogs as much or perhaps more than most other teams in the tournament. Because State leans so heavily on its bullpen to get wins -- Ross Mitchell picked up another one Saturday with 2.2 scoreless innings and is now 13-0 without having started a game this season -- the Bulldogs can use an extra couple of days of rest. Their side of the bracket takes Sunday off, then gets back on the field Monday, If State wins then, they don't have to play again until Friday.

Winning for Mississippi State will indeed breed more winning. And with each win, the road gets that much easier.

SEC 2013: Kentucky's Roster Doesn't Change Much; Is That a Good Thing or a Bad One

2013-06-14T13:00:08Z

There's a question you kind of get tired of asking when you do football team previews for a few years: Is it better for a lackluster team to get back players from the previous year with more experience, or better to have those players move on in the hopes that the next group will be better. In some ways, it's an impossible question to answer; some players will figure things out in a dreadful season, and some will simply have another dreadful season if they get another year. And yet that's the situation Kentucky finds itself in. The Wildcats bring back seven starters on offense and seven starters on defense (per Phil Steele, of course) from a team that went 2-10 last year.

BIGGEST RETURN | DE Alvin Dupree, LB Avery Williamson
If you can't score much -- and, let's be honest, this was a department where the Wildcats struggled mightily last year -- then you best be able to keep the other team from scoring. Williamson has to get some credit for leading the team in tackles by more than 40 (Williamson had 135 tackles to Dupree's 91), but Dupree might have been the biggest threat to blow up the play in the backfield, logging 12.5 tackles for loss, including 6.5 sacks. Williamson also had more passes broken up than Dupree, as you might expect based on their respective positions. They're part of a team that returns four of its top five tacklers. With Bobby Petrino's Western Kentucky (that still looks odd) coming to town in the first game of the season, the defense best be up to the task.

BIGGEST LOSS | WR La'Rod King
We don't really keep track of these things, so it's impossible to do know if this has happened before or not -- odds are it has or would have if we'd been doing this for ten years -- but King was tabbed our biggest return for the Wildcats last year and will be our biggest loss this season. King led the wide receiving corps with 488 yards on 48 catches. That was close to twice as many catches as the next leading receiver and was about 65 percent more yards than the No.2 (Demarco Robinson, 297). It would be nice to have that kind of experience returning for the first year of the new Air Raid offense in Lexington, but King also makes this spot at least in part because there are so few players who left. Kentucky can probably weather King's absence -- to the extent the Wildcats will weather anything this year -- with a little bit of difficulty.

BREAKTHROUGH POSSIBILITY | QB Jalen Whitlow
I walk into this one knowing that I'm going to get some criticism thrown my way, but here me out: If he wins the starting quarterback position out of camp -- something that looks more likely than ever in the aftermath of the Blue-White Game --this could end up being a huge year for the sophomore. Not to compare the two, but if you want to see what a young starter with wheels can do in the first year of an Air Raid offense, see: Manziel, Johnny. Whitlow's not a lock because of one good spring game, and it's important to keep in mind that his passer efficiency rating last year was more than 35 points below Maxwell Smith's. But if he can throw well and improve on his 3.0 yards per carry rushing average, Whitlow might have a chance for a great year.

SEC 2013: Kentucky's Schedule Has Grown Up

2013-06-13T15:00:07Z

This is an overview. Predictions come later.

8.31.13 | vs. WESTERN KENTUCKY (Nashville)
9.7.13 | MIAMI (OH)
9.14.13 | LOUISVILLE
9.28.13 | FLORIDA

Yes, Kentucky and Western Kentucky are playing their football game in Tennessee. No, I don't understand it either. Must be a lot of WKU fans in Nashville? In any case, this is a far different game than it would have been three years ago, before the "They s'posed to be SEC" game of 2011 and the WKU win in 2012. Oh, and Western Kentucky has a new head coach. Perhaps you've heard of him. The whole month, though, reveals how Kentucky's "bank shot for two SEC wins and get into a bowl game" strategy is starting to fray. Western Kentucky is improving, and Louisville is coming off a season in which it won a BCS game against Florida. The Wildcats are likely to finish the month no better than 2-2, and 1-3 is by no means out of the realm of possibility.

10.5.13 | at SOUTH CAROLINA
10.12.13 | ALABAMA
10.24.13 | at MISSISSIPPI STATE

The first two weeks of October finish off a brutal stretch for the Wildcats that goes Florida-at South Carolina-Alabama, otherwise known as three of the better teams in the SEC. They do get a bye before traveling to Starkville, but even that trip is going to be a tricky Thursday game. Again, don't be stunned if Kentucky has just a single win at the end of October -- and anything more than two wins should be considered wildly successful.

Alabama State is a more traditional kind of Kentucky nonconference game: A sugary-sweet cupcake that can easily be flattened. But the seemingly inevitable win could be the first victory for the Wildcats in almost two months. You do have to wonder how the team's confidence would fare under that rough ride, particularly with two more winnable games against Missouri and Tennessee on the docket. The other two games don't look particularly promising: Vanderbilt is probably a better team that Kentucky straight up, and the game's in Nashville; and there's little hope for the Wildcats to keep up with Georgia regardless of the venue.

All of which leads to the conclusion that it's going to be another long season in Lexington. The scheduling philosophies haven't changed that much for Mark Stoops' first year, but the schedule sure looks a lot different than it used to.