Despite getting the win, one of the main takeaways from UK Football’s season opening win was the lackluster performance from the offense. 

Offensive coordinator Eddie Gran and select offensive players spoke to media after Tuesday’s practice, giving their opinion on what went wrong on Saturday and how they plan to fix it. 

“Too much talking, too much you know – there’s going to be times when we don’t have the perfect play,” Gran said of the offense’s problems on Saturday. “That’s going to come with time, that’s going to come with those guys working together.” 

Gran later elaborated that the communication issues were between the offensive line and the quarterbacks. He also said sometimes the offensive line had a difficult time communicating with each other.

The struggles within the offensive line led to a poor performance from the run game, which as a team averaged 2.2 yards per carry on 35 attempts. Despite the rough start to the season, offensive line coach John Scharlman believes the mistakes his group made are fixable.

“Some of those things are a little bit hidden until you go out there and play live,” Schlarman said. “You go against your defense, you learn their tendencies, you learn what they’re going to do, you know what they’re going to do, you anticipate it. You go against somebody else and you hadn’t seen that, and it’s live action on Saturday, now you have to work better on your footwork, your technique, your instincts, they all have to be on point and those were things that we have to improve on.”

The player who suffered the most from the offensive line’s struggles was Benny Snell, who wasn’t his usual self in Saturday’s game. 

Snell, who has ripped off many big plays in the past, wasn’t able to break loose from tacklers in Saturday’s game. Snell was disappointed with his performance but was quick to get over it.

“That’s just the way things go,” Snell said. “It was always one person messing up, sometimes it was me, sometimes it was the line, but it’s always close, but we going to fix that.” 

As the offense has had the chance to look at the film and the mistakes were made, the group believes they will return back to normal when they take the field on Sept. 9 to face EKU.

“I would bet that our execution is going to be better this week,” Gran said.