Cutter Boley has Drastically Improved the Kentucky 2-Minute Offense

There are a myriad of criticisms Mark Stoops has faced throughout his Kentucky tenure, ranging from clock management to quarterback play and decision-making. All of those issues come to light in the 2-minute drill.

I don’t need hard data to provide evidence that Kentucky has not been great in the Middle Eight (or at the end of games). That’s because every Kentucky fan’s anxiety cranks up a notch when the Cats get the ball with a chance to score and the time is ticking. We fear the worst because that’s what we’ve come to expect.

Obviously, there are tons of exceptions to this during the peak of the Stoops era. Jeff Badet quickly hit the turf to stop the clock and set up an Austin MacGinnis game-winning field goal over Mississippi State in 2016. The Kentucky offense did nothing against Missouri in 2018, until Terry Wilson connected with David Bouvier and Lynn Bowden a couple of times before connecting with CJ Conrad for a game-winning touchdown. When I asked Liam Coen why he was so elated after the win over Iowa in the Citrus Bowl, “We finally finished a 2-minute drive.”

Kentucky did just that against Texas. The Wildcats trailed by three points on their own 27-yard line with 51 seconds to play and no timeouts. Forty-two seconds later, Jacob Kauwe‘s kick sent the game into overtime. That was something Kentucky fans have not seen regularly since Bush Hamdan became the Wildcats’ play-caller.

Previous 2-Minute Miscues

To find a previous two-minute drive that resulted in points against a Power Conference foe, you have to go back to Hamdan’s first SEC game. Ty Bryant picked off LaNorris Sellers in Kentucky territory with less than two minutes before half. The Cats went three-and-out and were forced to settle for a field goal.

That’s not to say Kentucky never scored before half or the end of a game over the last two seasons. The Wildcats got the ball with about five minutes left in the first half at Ole Miss and Tennessee. Dane Key caught a touchdown in Oxford, while Kentucky settled for a red zone field goal in Knoxville. They also had a four-minute drive that ended with a field goal against Georgia.

The most painful lack of execution in the 2-minute happened last fall against Vanderbilt. Kentucky had 2:25 to score a touchdown and tie the game. The Wildcats got into Vandy territory, but the play was overturned by a Gerald Mincey holding penalty. Brock Vandagriff was sacked on the next play. They got into Vandy territory one more time, but another penalty moved them back. The calamity of errors culminated in an interception that ended the game.

Boley Gives the Cats a Chance

Those familiar errors resurfaced in this year’s SEC debut. Kentucky got into field goal range before penalties and alignment errors pushed them out of scoring territory. Things have changed since Cutter Boley took the reins of the offense.

Boley has had three 2-minute opportunities as Kentucky’s quarterback. They’ve ended each of those drives with a kick.

Unfortunately, two of those kicks were misses. His first attempt at Georgia featured an overturned reception and some questions about how Kentucky managed the clock, but they got a chip-shot field goal that Kauwe pulled.

At the end of the first half against Texas, Boley got the Cats into comfortable field goal range before his biggest mistake of the day. He was sacked, making it a 53-yard attempt that just went wide left. Despite the shortcomings, Boley was not deterred ahead of the “gotta have it” moment at the end of the Texas game.

“At the end of the game I was just (thinking), get completions, get the ball moving,” Boley said after Saturday’s loss. “Obviously, we didn’t have any timeouts, so I tried to get the ball on the edge. The defense was prepared for that not gonna let us get the ball on the edge when we didn’t have any timeouts. But I felt like we did a good job of getting first downs and going tempo, getting to the ball, and we were able to give Jacob an opportunity to bang a field goal.”

Those first downs came from an unexpected source, a Boley scramble and a check-down to Seth McGowan in the middle of the field. It worked because he wasn’t trying to make a hero play on every single throw

“He took what the defense gave him, made a quick decision, got us started there. He’s made good decisions,” Mark Stoops said on Monday. “I think offensively, we’ve had decent protection, good drive starters, and even though he was off-schedule there, he made a good play.”

Cutter Boley has all the ability to push the ball down the field, but what’s most impressive is that he hasn’t needed to do that to engineer a successful 2-minute offense. He’s developing at a rapid rate by making quick decisions and turning what was once the program’s greatest weakness into a positive.