We’re less than two weeks away from the first Kentucky-Tennessee football game with playoff implications for both teams.
The Wildcats and Volunteers entered their lone respective open dates Sunday in very different moods, with Kentucky having won its fifth consecutive Southeastern Conference contest with Saturday night’s 34-17 downing of Vanderbilt in Lexington. Tennessee, by comparison, had a 24-17 lead and the ball in South Carolina territory with less than four minutes to play but couldn’t close it out as the Gamecocks rallied for a 27-24 triumph.
In a season in which an SEC team looks unbeatable one weekend and struggles the next, Kentucky was the only league program to post a perfect October.
“We have good players who are connected and love this university and love their teammates,” Wildcats first-year coach Will Stein said Saturday night in a news conference. “We have a coaching staff that’s one of the most elite in the country in terms of our preparation and how we call games and how we adapt. We have complete buy-in.
“It’s not always perfect, but I think we’re in a really good spot mentally right now.”