John Clay's Sidelines

Perusing the various SEC sports blogs — there are some really good ones out there — stumbled on an interesting point made by a fellow named T Kyle King at Dawg Sports, who in his SEC rankings puts Kentucky right smack-dab in the middle of the SEC at No. 6.

Here’s what King wrote:

6. Kentucky: Rich Brooks has done a great job of resuscitating this program. The Wildcats were down 14-0 in the Commonwealth and it looked like they were going to get run out of their own building, but they used dramatically improved special teams to make a real game out of a budding blowout. Three straight postseason appearances is nothing at which to sneeze for U.K. and one has to wonder . . . if Kentucky can come up with a backup quarterback as good as Randall Cobb, why couldn’t L.S.U. come up with a better backup quarterback than it did?

Excellent point. After all, until he was shifted into a starting role for the Mississippi State game, Cobb was the UK backup behind Mike Hartline. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that Cobb was quarterback No. 2 in UK’s two-quarterback system. Had he not been injured in the pre-conference part of the schedule, no doubt the plan would have been to rotate him with Hartline as much as possible. Cobb would have entered the game in the second quarter, and if the team caught fire, he would have remained in the game. But he wasn’t healthy enough, then had not had enough practice time, to make that work in the early part of UK’s SEC schedule.

Look around the league. Auburn couldn’t settle on Chris Todd or Kodi Burns. Tennessee couldn’t settle on Jonathon Crompton or Nick Stephens. Steve Spurrier can’t settle on anyone. Vandy has Chris Nickson and Makenzi Adams. As Dawg Sports points out, LSU has gone back and forth between Jarrett Lee and Andrew Hatch, without much luck.

In his short stint at quarterback, you can make a case that Cobb has been more successful than any of those backups who have ascended to the top (and dropped back down again).