Stoops says Kentucky played with an edge in difficult road test at Missouri

Mark Stoops is proud of his football team and the way Kentucky took the fight to Missouri on Saturday. It wasn’t a perfect performance by any means, but the Wildcats escaped Columbia with a much-needed win to get back on track. In doing so, Kentucky secured bowl eligibility for a seventh consecutive season while staying ahead of Mizzou, Florida, and Vanderbilt in the SEC East standings.

After the game, Stoops spoke of how much it meant to earn a road victory against a team that doesn’t get enough credit for how well it’s played football lately. The Tigers won two straight and played both Georgia and Florida within a touchdown before Kentucky came to town for a game between similar SEC programs.

“Come on the road and you gotta play these guys who are playing their absolute butts off,” Stoops said after the game. “I mean they are playing so hard and I got a lot of respect for Missouri and Coach Drink. He’s got these guys playing.”

Missouri’s schemes, third-down packages, disruptive playmakers, physicality, and the way the Tigers play stood out on tape, Stoops noted.

“They are playing incredible. They really are.”

Kentucky brought the intensity

The last time Kentucky traveled to Mizzou, the team had just lost John Schlarman, its offensive line coach, to cancer and the Wildcats played poorly in a losing effort, the program’s only loss to the Tigers in the last eight meetings. With that 2020 loss in mind, Mark Stoops made a strong point to his players to turn up the intensity this week to avoid another deflating performance in Columbia. He even showed them the replay of Missouri’s players surrounding former Kentucky cornerback Kelvin Joseph while he was down on the Tigers’ sideline late in that game.

“That is not happening again,” Stoops said after Kentucky’s redemption win Saturday afternoon. “You saw our guys were a little jacked up but that’s good. We needed to. We had to get our intensity up. We made too many mistakes, but it wasn’t in our effort and it wasn’t in our attitude. We had an edge about us and we played hard and I thought we played for each other. We put everything aside and said by any means necessary, we’re going to get this done.”

Kentucky did get it done, 21-17, despite several miscues throughout the game, including a near nightmare ending the last time the special teams unit was on the field. It was not the specialists’ best day to say the least, but the Cats took Stoops’ message to heart and fought to the very end for victory.

“You know coming here, there’s a lot of teams fighting for position in this league and you just gotta regroup and come out here for another hard-fought game,” said Stoops. “We talk about it all week, man, you gotta go back and just empty the tank, like we’ve gotta put everything into this. And by god, we had to put everything into it.

“I was really proud. I felt like both sides stepped up when we had to. We made plenty of mistakes, but the guys really came through and did some big things and really played hard and played for each other.”

Mark Stoops’ Postgame Press Conference

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