Fleeting Thoughts: Kentucky Edition

You'll excuse me if I miss a few points here. With as much abject failure as occurred in a 30-minute span, it's hard to fully grasp it in totality. Anyway, here goes...

-- I want to start by saying something on behalf of some of the seniors that you no doubt are not particularly thrilled with right now. Bryan Evans and Joe Cox both made some plays that significantly impacted the outcome of this game. But they're going to now live with those memories for the rest of their lives. Their last performance in front of the home crowd was probably the worst one of their careers, and they'll never live that down.

So I'm not saying you shouldn't be upset about the outcome, but keep in mind how much baggage these guys will already take with them after last night. They've been punished enough.

-- If you're making a list of people to blame for this loss, Willie Martinez's name is probably on the list, but it's nowhere near the top. The D was lights out in the first half (with the exception of the TD, which was as much about a nice screen by the ref as anything else). In the second half, only one of those scoring drives was for more than 50 yards and when the Dawgs absolutely needed a stop with two minutes to play, they got it.

-- And speaking of that defense, this play won't show up in the highlights because it ended up not mattering, but Rennie Curran's tackle of Randall Cobb at the 1-yard line on second down in the fourth quarter was perhaps the best defensive play made by Georgia all season. If anyone can find video of it I can link to, let me know.

-- Now, the Derrick Locke touchdown run, on the other hand, does not bode well for next week.

-- Kentucky's starting field position following kickoffs: Own 36, own 37, own 49, own 31, own 25, UGA49. Awful.

-- Here's what Richt had to say about the decision to squib kick following Georgia's lone second-half touchdown: "We actually kicked the ball extremely well last week -- high, where we wanted it placed -- and we still struggled. So we have a lot of respect for Auburn, but Kentucky's kick return team is the best in the SEC. They just do a superb job. So we were trying to create a little doubt, trying to get the ball where we could pop it up and maybe get it somewhere around the 30, 35. That's not anything to brag about, but we feel it's better than kicking it deep to this guy."

Allow me to address several points:

Kentucky is actually seventh in the SEC in kick returns, averaging just .36 yards per return more than Auburn.

If you can't cover a directional kick, what makes you assume you can cover a squib kick?

If you're happy with the potential of a drive starting at the 35, why not just purposefully kick it out of bounds and KNOW they'll be starting at the 40?

Or better yet, since you have the SEC's leader in touchbacks, why don't you roll the dice on that before you roll the dice on an absolutely horrendous move like squib kicking?

And how is it that a slow-footed tight end can field a kick and return it 20 yards before Georgia's apparently athletic coverage team can bring him down? This wasn't simply a matter of him breaking tackles either. Georgia's tacklers simply weren't anywhere near him.

So let me get this straight: You think you have to squib kick to avoid Derrick Locke and Alfonso Smith with a 14-point lead midway through the second half against Kentucky, but you didn't think that was a good idea when you were kicking to Trindon Holiday with the game on the line after getting a penalty that backed you up against LSU?

-- I think the Senator says it best: "It’s not just that they’re so bad (on special teams). It’s that they’re so bad with Walsh, Butler, Boykin and Miller. You really have to work at it."

Every coach that manages special teams for Georgia should have to take a short bus to Butts-Mehre this week.

-- The bottom line is this: Georgia's kick coverage team is the difference between the Dawgs being 6-5 and headed to Shreveport and 8-3 and headed to Orlando. A change MUST be made.

-- Funny side note about Saturday's games: LSU and Les Miles are being crucified for spiking it with 1 second left. Um, that's old hat for Georgia, folks. Been there, done that.

-- Wow, lots of bad stuff so far. How about a little touch of good news? Orson Charles, Rantavious Wooten, Caleb King, Branden Smith and Justin Houston all had very good games. There is going to be a ton of talent on this team next year. A ton.

-- OK, let's just get into it. The toss sweep.

My first thought was, Cox must have audibled into that play because there's no way the coaches called that.

But I was wrong.

Here's the story from each side:

Washaun: "I just put the ball on the ground. It hit my hands, I should have caught it. I’ve got to keep my head up. I was just trying to get in the end zone fast. Joe didn’t know I was that close to him when he pitched. I’m just trying to keep my head up."

Cox: "I couldn't tell if he thought it wasn't a pitch play, but he said he did. He was just real tight and normally isn't that close, and it just got on him quick. I really don't know what happened, and I don't think he really knew what happened either. I think he might have had his eyes up looking at the hole. I'm not real sure. To be that close and have that happen, it's not good. We had our opportunities and we blew it. It's something we run all the time. It's not a hard ball to catch, it's just the way that he ran it, it made it tougher. It was like he saw a hole and tried to cut up while I was pitching the ball to him and it got on him quick. I don't know. But it's definitely not something that was too tough for him to comprehend or to handle. We run that play all the time."

Bobo: "That's our bread-and-butter play, the toss sweep. Earlier we were on the goalline and they had kind of crammed everybody inside on a third-and-1 when we had to settle for the field goal, and we talked about next time in that situation we were going to run the toss sweep outside. It looked like he was a little tight."

Richt: "It's part of our offense. Toss sweep all year long. … I'd have to look at the film but the back certainly looked too close to the quarterback on the pitch. I don't know if it was by alignment or the track he took. It looked like he was downhill more than he should have. But the toss sweep is a pretty fundamental play. We've run it many times, so I'm not going to sit here and try to second guess that."

I think UGA needs to hire a coach who doesn't have a position, but simply has common sense. So every decision made has to be run through him first. It would have made a big difference on this play in particular.

My problems?

Well, one, you learned a lesson at the 1-yard line early that made you want to run the toss sweep, so why didn't you learn the lesson when the UK D lineman disrupted the toss earlier in the second half and caused Cox to fumble?

You get ideas throughout the game, but those ideas must also be dictated by the situation. With the game on the line and two plays to score from the 1, you have to play it safer than that. You have to.

Even if you're going to run the toss sweep, you have to have Caleb King in on that play. Washaun is a good runner and a good kid, but he's a true freshman. The odds of him making a mistake on that play have to be significantly higher than the odds of Caleb doing it. And now the coaches will blame Ealey for making the mistake, when in fact it's completely on them for putting him in the position to do it when they didn't have to.

Just a brutal, brutal play call.

-- One more reason the play call made no sense: The O line had been doing nothing in the second half. Here's how Cox describe the toss that ended up as a fumble: "We had one play where we had a pitch called and when I turned to pitch it, one of the defensive linemen had actually gotten through so fast that he grabbed my arm while I was trying to pitch the ball."

Again, how do you not learn from that?

-- The one thing Kentucky didn't want to do was put the game in Morgan Newton's hands. So why didn't Georgia force them to do just that? Newton had to throw just 17 passes in the game.

-- Three of those passes went for touchdowns. That's more than he had thrown in his career.

-- Going back to that list of reasons why Georgia lost, No. 1 might well be the work at the line of scrimmage. In the first half, Georgia rushed for 143 yards. In the second half -- 53. On the other side, Georgia had seven tackles for a loss in the first half, and just two in the second. Kentucky completely changed the game by changing who was winning the battles in the trenches.

-- The receivers had their moments, but A.J. Green was missed. Bobo said Kentucky stacked the box more than any defense they had faced this year without Green to help draw extra attention from the safety.

-- The fumbled kickoff by Branden Smith really swung the momentum, and he probably shouldn't have even been in there. Brandon Boykin was clearly healthy enough to play -- he was in on the next kick return -- but Georgia thought they could get by without him.

-- I'm not sure what to make of this quote from Smith: "It was hard. Everything was against our back. We were down. We just needed a touchdown to tie it up. I guess we just fell apart as a team. We weren't working together as a team. That's one thing with winning is you have to work together. I guess once we started getting down, all the mistakes started happening, everybody just let go."

-- There were plenty of bad flags, but Bryan Evans' pass interference call in the second half was a blessing. He was beaten badly in the end zone. And can someone please teach Georgia's DBs to turn around and make a play on the ball once in a while?

-- I have no doubt that there will be a lot of people calling for coaches' heads right now. Rightfully so. But again, it ain't gonna happen this week, so don't bother stressing yourselves out about it. And despite the season essentially being flushed down the toilet Saturday night, there's still much to play for this week. I, for one, am tired of St. Simons' posts on every AJC blog.

-- I hear Shreveport is lovely this time of year.