Cats, Dawgs, and a mystery season

Some personal thoughts after UK’s shocker in Athens…
I’ve covered this team all year. Been at every practice, seen every snap of every game. And for the longest time, I couldn’t get a pulse on the squad. Most teams, you can sense an identity, something within a team that you can always see and is constant.
Tonight, I think Joker Phillips did the work for me and gave me a pretty good answer.
“I think we like the road,” Phillips said. “We try to take the approach of us against this whole stadium. Us against Georgia, the whole state of Georgia.”

Earlier in the season, this team wilted when bad things happened against Florida and Alabama. But starting with South Carolina, they fought back. Granted, they didn’t win against the Gamecocks, but they’ve been in every game since.
Once Mike Hartline went down in his best game of the season, they were determined to not let it wreck their season. Morgan Newton is 5-1 as a starting quarterback now, and UK has a chance to go to its best bowl since before I was born.
UK doesn’t have the talent of other SEC schools, but they fight. And in the fourth quarter, if they don’t make mistakes, it’s always going to be tough to contain Randall Cobb and Derrick Locke. So long as the Cats are in the game late, they’ll have a pretty good shot.
That’s been the difference since Florida and Auburn – they didn’t roll over. They gave themselves a shot in the fourth quarter.
There were Outback Bowl and Peach Bowl reps waiting to congratulate Rich Brooks in the media room after the win. A Liberty Bowl rep, who I recognized from the Auburn game, congratulated Brooks first, but something tells me he won’t be the first one to get to Brooks when the season is over and it’s time to choose bowl destinations.
-Ben Jones