Mark Stoops admits he was 'unhappy' with Kentucky's play on Saturday

Kentucky Football recorded its first shutout since 2009 and head coach Mark Stoops bested his hometown team Youngstown State 31-0 last Saturday to advance the Wildcats to 3-0 and keep them in the AP Top-10. Yet, when Stoops addressed media on Monday, he was non-plussed with his team’s performance, particularly on offense.

“After reviewing the film, really kinda disappointed and a little unhappy with some of the undisciplined play that we had from this week,” Stoops recapped at his Monday press conference. “Not to take away from some of the players that did a great job. Defensively, it was a very good effort once again. Felt like we’re really dialed in, detailed, executed at a very high level.”

Hard to be unhappy with a shutout from your defense. So Stoops’ frustrations came primarily with the offensive side of the football.

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“Offensively, there’s some things we got to get ironed out. It just felt like it was a person here, a person there. Just undisciplined play. And anytime you have 10 penalties, three turnovers, four fumbles, and you do that at home, it’s shows you that that attention to detail was not there. We went down the week before and played in a hostile environment and stayed relatively clean. We play at home against Youngstown and we put that kind of play out there, it’s not very good.”

Sound logic from Mark Stoops. If the ‘Cats can go down and stay focused in the Swamp at night, they should have no problem doing so during a home game against an FCS opponent. That wasn’t the case though. However, Stoops did see an improvement in the pass protection.

“Protection was relatively solid. There was a couple of sacks in there. One or two on Will. One he just threw hot. One, we had a guy open, just got to throw the ball. And other than that, Will really did make some exceptional plays. And then there were some things we gotta get better at. The interceptions, they’re not all on him and they aren’t stellar plays by him. I mean, he had a lot of fantastic plays. But the interceptions are not completely on him.”

With Will Levis playing as good as he is, Mark Stoops just needs everyone else to play in complement.

“Have to play better. I feel like we need to play better around him, and that showed a bit on Saturday. So it’s a matter of getting everybody on the same page. Are we able to do it, or confident enough to do it? There’s no excuses,. We just need to play better. We’ve got to be more disciplined in attention to detail. The little things. It’s always a person here or a person there that’s throwing us off offensively.”