LEXINGTON, Ky. (WDRB) — Will Stein allowed himself an observation Saturday.
His Kentucky team, when the light hits it just right, looks like a legitimate SEC football team.
This is generally considered desirable for a football team that plays in the SEC.
Stein wasn't pounding a podium or predicting championships after Kentucky's second scrimmage of preseason camp. There were fumbles. There were dropped passes. There were players still missing. There were enough things wrong to keep coaches employed for another two weeks.
But there was also this:
"When we have our full strength, we look like a real SEC team," Stein said. "We're really big up front. We got big receivers, big tight ends and backs."
There are worse things to discover in August. There is, however, a catch hiding in that sentence: "When we have our full strength." The SEC is not generally known for permitting that condition to persist.
Plenty of teams in this league look impressive when the first 22 get off the bus. The programs Kentucky is trying to catch tend to have another impressive-looking group getting off behind them. Sometimes another one after that.
So maybe that's the real question for Kentucky. The Wildcats are beginning to look the part. How many of them look the part?
A week earlier, Kentucky had spent much of its first scrimmage looking considerably less imposing. Stein came out of that one disappointed in the Wildcats' enthusiasm and execution. He talked about players operating in survival mode instead of attack mode.
A week later, nobody was using the word survival.
The offensive line was moving people. The defense was taking the football away. CJ Baxter was taking real reps. Tegra Tshabola, the Ohio State transfer lineman, was back. Kenny Minchey looked more comfortable.
Nobody threw a parade. In the SEC, they generally wait until at least the third scrimmage for that. But there was progress.
"I thought they responded correctly from the previous Saturday as a whole," Stein said.
That's probably the most significant development from Scrimmage No. 2. Given that there were no stats and that every Kentucky success required another Kentucky player to fail, it should be no surprise. The main takeaway is that the Wildcats were challenged and responded.
Joe Sloan saw it on offense. The coordinator said Kentucky lined up and operated "significantly better." He again liked the movement up front. He saw Minchey playing with more comfort. He saw receivers making plays downfield.
And he finally got to see Baxter doing some of it with them.
"When CJ was out there, it was really fun to see," Sloan said. "He brings a different element to what we're doing."
That element is roughly 230 pounds. Sloan described Baxter as a "big, big kid" who can make lateral cuts, has played enough football that little surprises him and brings a certain presence to the backfield. Kentucky would like to make that presence somebody else's problem soon.
The same applies to its offensive line. Tshabola, now healthy, received a scouting report from Sloan that was refreshingly short on nuance.
"He's violent," Sloan said.
Football remains one of the few occupations where this is included in a favorable performance review.
At quarterback, Stein and Sloan were looking for Minchey to lean less on the security of the protected black jersey and push the pocket to make plays, like he'll have to when live defenses start chasing him. They saw more of that Saturday.
"I mean, that's playing quarterback as a whole," Stein said. "Even the best players, it's just about taking the easy money. You don't have to force plays down the field. You don't have to get antsy — you just make the correct play each time, and the ball's going to move forward. It's an art and a science. … More quarterbacks on Saturdays lose the game for their team than they do win it."
There is probably a motivational poster in there somewhere, although you likely wouldn't sell many to quarterbacks.
Minchey, Stein said, has had an "elite camp." Saturday he looked more comfortable, and Kentucky has been pushing him to use his legs more. Sloan wants him running five to eight times a game. During a two-minute situation, Minchey scrambled for roughly 40 yards.
Which brings the column back to depth — because that's where Saturday got most interesting.
The first-team defensive line had a relatively short day, and that was intentional. Jay Bateman wanted to pull his frontline players out and see what happened when the next group had to function without them.
What happened was instructive.
"It got a little sloppy there," Bateman said. "And they got tired."
There's August honesty for you. Bateman liked plenty of what he saw from the younger group — he singled out several players by name — but in a conference where the gap between the top and everybody chasing it is often decided well beyond the starting lineup, those snaps were the ones that mattered most.
Sloan made essentially the same point about the running backs.
"How good is your first 11 to 14 players?" he said. "But then throughout the season, you're going to get challenged based on how your depth is and the development."
Bateman, for his part, doesn't sound particularly interested in winning a schematic beauty contest. Ask him what he wants his defense to become and he'll give you three things: play hard, communicate and be physical.
"If you'd watch the first 10 or 12 plays of us today," Bateman said, "you'd say, like, that's — I'd be pretty happy with that, man."
It's a start. The first 10 or 12 plays were never going to be the problem.
Next Saturday Kentucky will stage a mock game. And Stein means mock game. The Wildcats will go to the team hotel. They'll see the meeting rooms. They'll bus to the stadium. They'll conduct a fake Cat Walk and, as Stein put it, "fake high five people." They'll rehearse pregame and halftime and the sideline and the communication and as much of an actual Saturday as can be manufactured without charging anybody for parking.
For now, Kentucky is bigger. Healthier. More comfortable. More physical. More organized than it was a week ago. When the light hits it just right, it looks like a legitimate SEC football team.
The trouble with the SEC is that the lighting is rarely that forgiving.
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