Kentucky’s third-quarter fake punt against Alabama will be the play everyone circles from a lopsided second half, but Will Stein made clear after the game that he wasn’t shying away from the call.
With Kentucky trailing 23-17 and staring at 4th-and-3 on Alabama’s side of the field, Stein chose to gamble. The Wildcats went for a fake punt, but Alabama stopped Henry Boyer a yard short of the line to gain. Two snaps later, the Crimson Tide punched in a touchdown and pushed the margin to 31-17, turning the rest of the afternoon into a runaway.
Stein defended the decision in his postgame press conference.
“Listen, you play to win the game,” he said in his postgame press conference. “I know that’s the old Herm Edwards quote, I believe.
But it’s true. You’ve got to be risky at times.
You know, if it worked everybody would think it was great, if it didn’t, nobody thinks it’s great. It’s a decision that I made.”
He said Kentucky had liked the fake punt look before kickoff and believed the opportunity was there when it appeared.
“We didn’t get it. That was disappointing not to get.
But I felt it could spark us on offense and keep us on the field. You know, we want really changing the field in special-teams as much as we would have hoped for.
I felt like that was an opportunity to take advantage of what they showed.”
The call stands out because it was Stein’s first heavily debated decision at Kentucky and came in his first career loss as a head coach. At the time, the Wildcats were still within one score, and the defense had done enough to keep Alabama close despite spending much of the day dealing with short fields.
Still, the bigger story was what happened after halftime. Alabama put up 32 second-half points, Kentucky struggled to move the ball, and the final score settled at 45-17. In that kind of finish, the fake punt becomes the flashpoint - even if it was only one piece of a much bigger collapse.
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