‘We can’t buy a bucket.’ Why there’s hope for one bad UK football stat to correct itself.

By one measure, Kentucky football might be the most unlucky team in college football through three games.

Kentucky opponents have fumbled seven times, tied for sixth most nationally despite one of UK’s three games being ended early in the third quarter due to lightning, but Mark Stoops’ Wildcats have not recovered any of those fumbles.

Of the 30 teams still looking for their first fumble recovery, only Kentucky has seen its opponents fumble more than four times. Only 19 of those 30 teams have had an opponent fumble multiple times this season.

“It just doesn’t feel like we’ve caught a break yet,” defensive coordinator Brad White said after a 13-12 loss to then No. 1-ranked Georgia that included multiple missed opportunities for UK fumble recoveries.

While forcing fumbles can be a skill, statistical analysis has generally determined there is little actual skill involved in recovering them. Advanced statistics website Football Outsiders called the statistic “almost entirely random.”

UK coach Mark Stoops seems to agree with that assessment, frequently pointing to his first UK team ranking 15th nationally in fumbles recovered per game despite being 2-10.

“We were not very good,” Stoops said of that team this week.

But is there something missing for UK’s defense this season given the extreme nature of its fumble recovery percentage?

While there are some exceptions where awareness can be key in a recovery — see the 2021 UK loss at Georgia when two defenders watched a fumble roll by them because they thought it was an incomplete pass — most of the art of recovering fumbles centers on being in the right place at the right time.

UK Hall of Famer Danny Trevathan, who tied a Super Bowl record with two fumble recoveries in the Denver Broncos’ Super Bowl 50 win over the Carolina Panthers, once claimed to have a secret trick to recovering fumbles but ended his 10-year NFL career with just one more fumble recovery in 117 regular season games than he had in that one Super Bowl.

Teams practice picking up loose balls and drill players on when to simply fall on a fumble rather than attempt to pick it up and run, but for the balls that are loose with several players around there is not much time to focus on technique.

“When the ball’s down there, at that point, it’s 50-50,” Stoops said in 2018.

Even though Kentucky has yet to recover an opponent’s fumble this season, those miscues have still helped the Wildcats at times.

The three-and-out forced by UK’s defense in the fourth quarter that gave the Wildcats the possession that ended with a controversial punt near midfield was aided when Georgia quarterback Carson Beck fumbled a snap without any pressure. Georgia recovered that fumble, but for a 5-yard loss that turned a second-and-2 into a third-and-7.

For all the bad luck on defense, one could argue Kentucky has been almost as fortunate on offense with opponents recovering just one of its seven fumbles this season.

But it is hard to feel anything but snake bitten when Georgia all but ends UK’s hopes of getting the ball back for one last possession by fumbling forward for a first down Saturday.

“We couldn’t buy a bucket these last two weeks, but if our guys just keep putting in the time, those bounces will go our way,” White said. “We just can’t get frustrated.”

The good news is every Stoops-coached UK team has finished the season by recovering at least 30% of its opponents’ fumbles. The 2014 (32%), 2021 (30%), 2022 (60%) and 2023 (58.3%) teams had more variance than usual in the statistic, but Stoops’ other seven UK teams recovered between 40.1% and 54.5% of opponents’ fumbles.

Starting with an 0-for-7 hole in fumble recoveries all but ensures the 2024 Wildcats will finish near the bottom of the country in fumble recovery percentage but the only season since 2016 that saw more than two teams finish the season by recovering fewer than 20% of opponent fumbles was 2020 when the pandemic led to a wide variance in number of games played per team.

There should be better luck ahead for the Wildcats when it comes to fumbles at least.

“I can completely lose my mind if I just hang onto every little thing,” Stoops said. “Just like the ball bouncing around seven times and we can’t get an interception that we have that leads to a field goal. We just have to make the plays. There are no excuses.

“The officials are going to make mistakes as well. We have to overcome those things. It is what it is.”

Saturday

Ohio at Kentucky

When: 12:45 p.m.

TV: SEC Network

Records: Kentucky 1-2 (0-2 SEC), Ohio 2-1 (0-0 MAC)

Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1

Series: Kentucky leads 4-2

Last meeting: Kentucky won 20-3 on Sept. 6, 2014, in Lexington

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