A cat gets nine lives. Will Stein’s Kentucky football team keeps spending theirs in overtime.
Saturday night at Kroger Field, Kentucky beatNo. 10 LSU35-34 on a two-point run, and the head coach looked like a man who had just walked away from a car wreck. Stein said afterward he was running out of lives. He has used two in seven days.
Sunday, the Associated Press made it official: Kentucky is No. 15. The Wildcats jumped from unranked to the middle of the pack, the biggest move in the poll. The word “unranked” is where this gets uncomfortable. A week earlier, Kentucky climbed out of a 17-0 hole at South Carolina, won in overtime on the road, and was dropped from the poll as a thank-you. Nobody has satisfactorily explained that ballot logic.
The film
says earned
When you grade games by what happened on the snaps, not by the final ticket. By that standard, Kentucky’s win holds up.
Start with how the night began. Running back C.J. Baxter broke a 77-yard run on Kentucky’s first offensive play and finished with 123 yards and two touchdowns. That set a tone LSU never fully answered. The Tigers brought a top-three defense into Lexington by yardage allowed and surrendered 401 yards. Their own rushing attack managed 94 yards on 36 carries, which is not how you protect a late lead.
Discipline mattered, too. LSU drew seven flags for 50 yards. Kentucky drew two for 20. In a game that ended on a single play, those small gaps add up to a real one.
Kenny Minchey’s night was a study in patience. The Notre Dame transfer threw for only 40 yards in the first half and then went 206 in the second, finishing 23-of-36 for 246. He didn’t force throws when the game wasn’t ready to give them. He waited, and the passing game opened up after halftime.
The kicker, and the next play
Everything nearly came apart late. Adam Zouagui missed from 42 and then from 26 inside the final five minutes. The second miss came right after LSU quarterback Sam Leavitt fumbled at his own 13, the kind of gift a team can’t afford to waste. Some kickers never recover from that. Zouagui took the field again with the clock nearly gone and made a 33-yarder with 12 seconds left to force overtime. Saban preached the “next play” approach for years. Zouagui lived it.
The call everybody saw coming
LSU scored first in overtime on a 15-yard Leavitt run. Kentucky answered quickly. Minchey hit freshman Kenny Darby for 22 yards on third-and-8, Baxter pushed in from the 1, and Stein left his offense on the field.
Darby deserves a paragraph of his own. He originally committed to LSU, finished with four catches for 79 yards, and made the biggest reception of the overtime. The recruit who got away turned into the player who helped sink the program that lost him.
Lane Kiffin had also seen this movie. Kentucky won at South Carolina by the exact same score on a two-point try, and Kiffin told his defense to expect another one. Both coaches burned timeouts in a game of chicken before the snap. Then Kentucky spread out five wide, Minchey dropped back, saw a vacant middle of the field, and jogged in.
That is the lesson. A coach who telegraphs a play and still gets it is a coach whose team has out-prepared the opponent. Kentucky is now the first FBS team since overtime was introduced in 1996 to win back-to-back games by one point in the extra period.
Stein wasn’t spiking anything afterward. He was still catching his breath.
“I’m running out of lives after that one,” he said. “Wow. There’s really not a lot of words right now. I’m pretty shocked, in shock. I shouldn’t say shocked, I’m in shock. We are a really good football team. Really good football team. People count us out. I took a picture of College GameDay this morning and everybody picked LSU. Keep doing that. I appreciate that. Gives us a lot of fuel and a lot of fire because everybody doubts us. It’s a really tough group that has battled a lot.”
That last request, keep doing that, isn’t a complaint about respect. It’s a coach who has learned to burn disrespect as fuel.
How the SEC shook out
Georgia now owns the top spot, earning 66 first-place votes and reaching No. 1 for the first time since 2024. The Bulldogs got there by edging Alabama 20-17 in Tuscaloosa, and the Crimson Tide held at No. 6 despite the loss. Georgia hosts Auburn next.
The rest of the league’s poll picture:
Texas slid six spots to No. 7 after losing 27-24 to Oklahoma in the Red River Rivalry. Ole Miss sits at No. 9, Missouri at No. 13, Tennessee at No. 14, Kentucky at No. 15 and Mississippi State at No. 16. LSU tumbled 12 spots to No. 22. Florida fell out entirely after losing at South Carolina. That puts nine SEC teams in the poll, and only one of them is a story about respect.
The warning label
The rat poison is in full force, a reminder that a ranking is a receipt, not a plan. Stein’s team has a head start on that lesson. Kentucky already beat then-No. 9 Texas A&M 31-21 in College Station, already survived South Carolina, and already took the best shot from a top-10 opponent. It is 5-1 overall and 3-1 in the SEC.
The poll finally agrees with what the Wildcats have been saying since September. They don’t need permission from anybody. They just need the next snap.
This article originally appeared on UK Wildcats Wire: AP voters move Kentucky back in to top 25 after win over LSU
