LEXINGTON, Ky. (WDRB) — Kenny Minchey has a camera attached to his helmet.
This is either an excellent way to develop a quarterback or an especially elaborate way to eliminate the phrase, "That's not what I saw."
Will Stein can see what Minchey sees. He can hear what Minchey says. He can watch where his eyes go before the football does. Big Brother, if Big Brother had played quarterback at Trinity High School.
Minchey came to Kentucky to be coached by Stein. Stein appears determined to take him literally.
There is a lot riding on the arrangement. Minchey spent three seasons at Notre Dame but has never started a college football game. He has thrown 29 college passes for 212 yards. His last start came during his senior year at Pope John Paul II High School in Hendersonville, Tenn.
Yet when Kentucky opens the season Sept. 5 against Youngstown State, Stein will put his offense in Minchey's hands. Seven days later, Alabama comes to Lexington.
No pressure.
Kentucky's wager isn't merely that Minchey is talented enough. He was a four-star prospect and an Elite 11 finalist. He nearly won Notre Dame's starting job last season before CJ Carr got it. The larger wager is that Stein and offensive coordinator Joe Sloan can take all of that ability, combine it with what Minchey learned during three years at Notre Dame, and accelerate the final stage of his development.
It's one of the reasons Minchey is here. When he entered the transfer portal, Minchey initially committed to Nebraska. Then Kentucky hired Stein. Minchey changed his mind and there was little question, once he arrived, about who the job belonged to.
Stein wanted him, made him the starter and saw no reason to stage a competition for appearances' sake.
"I think it's easy to see just based on his past," Minchey said. "Him and Sloan, they're obviously offensive geniuses. They've coached some really good quarterbacks and they've had success in the past, not only developing quarterbacks but also winning football games."
There is evidence. At Oregon, Stein coached Bo Nix, Dillon Gabriel and Dante Moore. Sloan worked with Jayden Daniels at LSU.
Minchey didn't come to Lexington looking for a graduate seminar in patience. He had already taken that at Notre Dame. He came to play.
"Ready to go," he said when asked recently about starting again. "I just want to play football."
First, however, comes the laboratory.
Kentucky has used DJI cameras mounted to quarterbacks' helmets during practice. What normally requires some reconstruction in a film room — What did you see? Where were you looking? Why did you make that call? — can now come with evidence. Stein can match what the quarterback says he saw with what the camera says he saw.
Kentucky quarterback Kenny Minchey prepares to take a snap during the program's annual Spring Game in Kroger Field.
For a coach who played the position himself, it's about as close as he can get to climbing inside Minchey's helmet without requiring medical attention.
And medical attention, strangely enough, is part of Stein's vocabulary.
After games, Stein says Kentucky will "go to the doctor," a Sunday examination of what worked, what didn't, and why, covering players, coaches and Stein's own game management.
"You know, whenever you fail, there's an opportunity for growth," Stein said. "And on Sundays after games, we'll what we call go to the doctor, and we'll figure out what we did well, what we didn't do well, and act accordingly to improve our program in all facets."
For Minchey, Kentucky has already begun making diagnoses.
The first is almost counterintuitive: Do less.
Stein calls quarterback "an art and a science," and his early work with Minchey has centered less on creating spectacular plays than avoiding unnecessary disasters.
Take the easy money. If the defense gives you something, take it. Don't get impatient. Don't force the football downfield because nothing exciting has happened lately. Understand the down and distance. Understand the situation.
Be the point guard.
"I don't want Kenny to feel like he's got to go win us a game," Stein said.
There will be moments when he has to.
"But the key I think for all young quarterbacks is to know that more quarterbacks on Saturdays lose the game for their team than they do win it," Stein said.
They lose it with bad decisions. By putting the ball in jeopardy. By refusing to use their legs when the play calls for it. Stein noted that quarterbacks manage to do the same thing on Sundays.
"When you can eliminate the bad first," he said, "that's when you can take another step as a quarterback."
This might be particularly useful advice for someone who has been waiting three years for his chance. After all that time preparing to prove he can be a starting quarterback, one of Minchey's first lessons is that he doesn't need to prove it on every snap.
So far, Stein likes the progress. Minchey has had what Stein called an "elite camp." After Kentucky's second preseason scrimmage, Stein said Minchey had just completed his best week of practice.
There are qualifiers.
"He's still a guy that hasn't played and started games," Stein said. "So there's going to be some growing pains."
But in the scrimmage, Stein liked that Minchey threw the football where it was supposed to go and "played within himself."
Sloan has noticed the same progression. Kentucky still needs more explosive plays in the passing game, he says. But Minchey has made some throws downfield and looked "significantly more comfortable" operating the offense.
Then the doctors found something else: Minchey wasn't running enough. This is where the problem of developing a quarterback who hasn't played much becomes more complicated.
Minchey can read a defense. He spent three seasons practicing against Notre Dame's defense, an experience Minchey credits with making him a better player.
But quarterbacks wear non-contact jerseys in practice. Nobody hits them. Spend enough time playing quarterback under those conditions and the pocket can become an unnaturally comfortable place.
Kenny Minchey warms up before the program's annual Spring Game in Kroger Field.
Sloan thinks Minchey needed to rediscover the moment when a quarterback should stop being a quarterback, tuck the football under his arm and become a running back.
"Our goal for him has been he's got to go run four, five, somewhere between five and eight times a game," Sloan said.
During Kentucky's second scrimmage, Minchey took off for about 40 yards in a two-minute drill. On other plays, Sloan said, he used vertical scrambles to turn potential zero-yard plays into second-and-6.
Four yards will not get you on SportsCenter. It will, however, keep you out of third-and-10.
"That's what he needs to do," Sloan said. "He's mobile."
And then Sloan explained why they've emphasized it.
"That's the hardest part about quarterback when you're not in a game situation for a guy who hasn't played games for a while," he said. "You get to stand back there and feel comfortable. So you don't necessarily — you kind of lose that."
Kentucky is trying to give it back to him. But there are some things even the helmet camera can't simulate.
That is the fascinating part of Kentucky's Minchey experiment. He is inexperienced without being entirely inexperienced. Ask Minchey what he got from three years at Notre Dame and he doesn't talk like someone who believes he wasted them.
"Three really good years," he called them.
He practiced every day against a defense loaded with high-level players. He learned in quarterback meetings. He went through game preparation. At SEC Media Days, Minchey said he prepared every week as if he were the starter, regardless of where he actually stood on the depth chart.
"I think playing against that defense every single day definitely made me a better player," Minchey said. "Definitely challenged me."
He believes those years "put me where I'm at today."
Stein believes it, too. He has praised Minchey's processing ability, football IQ, accuracy and athleticism almost from the moment he arrived. But there's a difference between knowing the answer and having to produce it with 300-pound men arriving violently from several directions.
That's what Kentucky is trying to bridge.
There is something almost amusing about the intensity of all this when compared with the quarterback at the center of it. Minchey is not particularly theatrical. Ask him about finally getting his chance after three years and he doesn't give you a speech about destiny.
"It's very exciting," he said. "All I want to do is play football."
Ask how he's processing the emotion of finally becoming the starter.
"Less emotions," he said, "but more so just trying to do my job on each play."
He isn't lacking confidence, either. Asked whether Stein and Sloan's history of successful quarterbacks creates pressure, Minchey replied, "Not pressure."
Then he added:Â "Obviously, I think I'm a really good quarterback."
Nor is the laid-back personality necessarily what teammates see when competition begins.
Minchey says he wants to win at everything, even rock-paper-scissors, and when that competitive side comes out, so does his voice.
"If I ever feel the need to say something, I'm going to say it," he said.
Safety Ty Bryant supplied a better example. Minchey and Kentucky's offensive players regularly gathered for throwing sessions, and when some players showed up late to one, Minchey sent them home. He hadn't started a college game. But nobody needed to tell him whose offense it was.
Soon he'll finally get to run it. And there is no camera angle, drill or Sunday diagnosis that can completely prepare him for what comes next.
Youngstown State will be the first examination. Alabama will be the second.
And when the games begin, the helmet camera comes off.
Until then, Stein can see what his quarterback sees. He can hear what he says. He can study his eyes, his decisions, his feet. They will have talked about coverages and situations, taking the easy money and knowing when to run.
They'll know almost everything there is to know about how Kenny Minchey looks playing quarterback in practice.
Then somebody wearing a different-colored jersey will be allowed to hit him.
And on Sunday, Will Stein's quarterback laboratory will finally have something it hasn't had yet.
Game film.
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