5 reasons why Kentucky Football should be on upset alert vs. Vanderbilt Commodores – A Sea Of Blue

For 15 years, Vanderbilt has played Kentucky down to the wire in Lexington. Here’s why Saturday could be another thriller.
The Kentucky Wildcats are riding high at 6-1, coming off the heels of three emotional wins. The SEC is unforgiving, and Saturday’s matchup against Vanderbilt presents a different hurdle for the Cats to jump over.
Most of the season, the Wildcats have entered games as the underdog with a chip on their shoulder.
Not this time. Kentucky will be favored against a team that hasn’t won in over a month.
Let’s not kid ourselves, the Commodores have undeniably struggled this season. But this game has all the ingredients of a nightmare scenario if Kentucky isn’t fully dialed in.
Here are five reasons Vanderbilt will be a very different kind of challenge for Will Stein’s squad.
Kentucky is coming off back-to-back-to-back thrillers against South Carolina, LSU, and Oklahoma. With a much-needed bye week staring them right in the face, followed by potentially one of the biggest Kentucky vs. Tennessee matchups in program history, it is human nature to let out a little bit of an exhale. That makes this the textbook definition of a trap game.
Vanderbilt is going to be desperate to get their first SEC win of the season and set up a finish to get to a bowl game, and Kentucky could be looking ahead to the week off. I’m not saying it will happen, but these are humans, and sometimes it does.
Don’t let Vanderbilt’s overall record (3-4) trick you into thinking they lack firepower. Quarterback Jared Curtis was the 2nd-best QB and player in the nation out of high school. He’s already thrown for 1,242 yards, completing nearly 63% of his passes.
Meanwhile, Kentucky ranks 117th in the country in passing defense. And that’s with star edge rusher Sam Greene pressuring opposing QBs often. He’s out this week with a knee injury, so that secondary will get really tested this week.
Curtis now has three SEC starts under his belt (which would have been four if a knee injury hadn’t sidelined him against Georgia). He is young and prone to mistakes (seven INTs), but he has the arm talent to stretch the field and punish blown coverages if he gets hot.
Will Stein has been very clear about what happened last season: Vanderbilt embarrassed Kentucky. That 45-17 blowout in Nashville may not mean a whole lot to a lot of the roster, since it is different. Even so, Stein mentioned it in his press conference, saying Kentucky was “embarrassed.”
But it also means that Vanderbilt is not intimidated by the Kentucky logo, and a lot of their players may feel they own the Cats. The Commodores have won three of the last four meetings, and belief is a dangerous thing in a desperate team. They believe they can win this game.
Even when their offense stalls, Vanderbilt has a perimeter weapon capable of flipping the field in an instant. Wide receiver Junior Sherrill has hauled in 41 catches for 628 yards (a 15.3-yard average) and four touchdowns.
If Kentucky’s pass rush doesn’t get home, and Curtis is in the zone, Sherrill is the type of elusive playmaker who can slip behind the secondary and generate the explosive plays that keep underdogs in the game. Last year, he had eight catches for 115 yards and a TD against the Cats.
This year, Sherrill racked up seven catches for 107 yards and a touchdown at Georgia. He’s a game-breaker, so Kentucky has to slow him down in order to achieve victory.
Kentucky leads the all-time series 49–45–4, but history tells us to throw the records out the window when these two clash. An absurd 41 games in this rivalry have been decided by seven points or less.
No matter how much Vanderbilt is struggling, or how good Kentucky looks on paper, or vice versa, this series has a bizarre habit of dragging both teams into a chaotic, four-quarter rock fight. Even the 2018 10-3 Kentucky team only won 14-7 at home vs. the Dores.
In fact, the Wildcats have not won a home game vs. Vandy by more than one score since 2014, which was a 17-7 defensive struggle. They’ve not won a game in Lexington by more than 10 points vs. the Dores since 2010, and even that was a game the Cats trailed by three at halftime.
Kentucky’s only SEC home loss this year came at home against Alabama. If the Wildcats show up and play to their standard, they should handle their business vs. Vanderbilt. But if they sleepwalk or if injuries take their toll just before the bye week, the Dores have enough to make this really uncomfortable, just as they’ve done many times in Lexington recently.
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Kentucky survives a wild college football weekend that saw OT, field rushes, and tons of ranked teams losing.
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Another great night and win for the Cats!
The Cats move to 7-1 overall and 5-1 in the SEC before heading to a much-needed bye week.
The Wildcats look to take down the Dores at Kroger Field.
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