Heading into the bye week with his team as the talk of the SEC, University of Kentucky head coach Will Stein is enjoying every bit of his first season at the helm. In fact, he's so comfortable with how his team is playing, he's even willing to admit when he catches a lucky break or his players improvise during games.
A smiling Stein revealed the latest instance of a player deciding to go off script after the Wildcats claimed their most recent win, a convincing 34-17 victory over Vanderbilt
Stein said tight end Willie Rodriguez was supposed to throw the ball on a "Wildcat" formation play that scored a touchdown against Vanderbilt. Rodriguez saw open grass and took off, keeping the ball instead and scoring a go-ahead touchdown in the closing seconds of the first half.
Kentucky was on upset alert and trailing 10-7 at the time of the play.
"Well, I guess it's out there that we tried to throw it right there. It was a pop-pass on that look and, yeah, he just, I guess, saw grass to the right, and that's what good football players tend to do, is give them the ball and good things can happen," Stein explained.
Of course, Stein was still all smiles and didn't mind the switch up by Rodriguez since Kentucky won the game in the end. Kentucky, a program that was entering 2026 coming off a 5-7 2025 campaign that prompted a change in leadership for the first time since 2013 and led to the firing of Mark Stoops, has been doing a lot of winning to this point in the season.
Through eight games, the Wildcats are 7-1 and are sitting at the top of the entire SEC with a 5-1 mark in conference play. And Stein, hired following a three-year stint as Oregon's offensive coordinator, already has Kentucky in the midst of the program's best season in years.
The only question for Stein moving forward is if he can keep Kentucky at this level and follow Curt Cignetti's blueprint of transforming a program historically known as an afterthought to basketball at the school into a national champion powerhouse.
This article was originally published on HEAVY
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