The House of Blue

***It's Tuesday, so per Kentucky's new media availability rules that means no Joker Phillips. I spent a bunch of time with Randy Sanders instead, who had really good stuff to say about DeMarcus Sweat.

***Of note, Sweat has touched the ball nine times this season. He's generated 252 yards and 2 TDs. It's no wonder the staff wants to get him more involved, but part of that falls to Sweat as well.

"Older is nice, but talented is better," Sanders said. "We're working hard with DeMarcus and pushing him hard to learn what to do and how to do it. DeMarcus has to do his part. Some days he's much better at it than others, but we need to see consistency out of him because there is no doubt he can make plays. We talk about erasers and guys who can make things happen and he has that ability, but right now when he gets on he field there is a good chance somebody's band is going to be playing, we just need to make sure it's ours.

"He's good at catching and running after he catches it but he's not real good at being where he's supposed to be. We're working on getting him where he's supposed to be. They're all different. Some guys come in and learn pretty quick. It is normal for them to have to go through the progression of being where they're supposed to be when they're supposed to be there. They can learn the playbook but the volume of defenses and how they have to react to that is what increases so much in college. He obviously has ability and we need to get him involved as much as we can, and we need him to do his part."

***Sanders discusses Kentucky's running game and how they need to make sure they bolster that as the season goes along and SEC defenses become the opponents:

"We need to run the ball better than what we have," Sanders said. "I thought we ran the ball well against Louisville the game just got out of hand and we couldn't (keep running it). Last week I would have liked to run the ball better than we did against the looks we were getting. I tried to stay with it for a pretty good while trying to make it happen and finally gave up and decided it wasn't going to happen and we just started throwing it. We need to be able to run the ball more efficiently than we are.

"I thought Jon Jon (George) did a great job but there's a reason that he's normally behind Raymond (Sanders) and CoShik (Williams). I thought he played well for us but those other guys are really good runners. Western's front, give those guys credit, there is a reason they held Alabama to just over 100 yards rushing. They're pretty good. The looks we were getting and the numbers in the box was conducive to running the ball."

***It doesn't get much easier this week against a Florida defense that ranks in the top 35 nationally in every major defensive category:

"We're going to get a bunch of big, angry guys over there on the other side of the ball," Sanders said. "Defensively, scheme-wise they're probably very similar to what we saw (against Western) but the speed, size and strength is increasing."

***After reviewing the tape of the Western Kentucky game, Sanders said not all of the four interceptions were mistakes by Maxwell Smith and he thought Smith showed a lot of maturity and toughness with the way he finished that game despite the poor start and being hit a lot later in the game:

"We had one bad throw where the throw got away from him," Sanders said. "We had one miscommunication between he and a receiver. The safety made a great play on one and we had one bad decision. That's basically what it amounted to. Obviously, we have to eliminate those things but the one thing Max normally does is throw it where he wants it to go and he had one get away from him on the first interception.

"I thought the guy competed. That's the thing about quarterback, you can play 70 or 80 plays really good and four bad ones and you get beat. Quarterback and corner are probably the two positions where that can happen faster than anywhere else. I try to teach and preach to them the most important play is the ext one. Let it go and play the next one. You can't get outside your discipline and I thought he did a good job of that."

***Sanders said they continue to work on the sharpness of the deep ball and discussed why some of the shots they took the other night did not come to pass:

"They were challenging us to throw it deep," Sanders said. "One of them I thought we should have caught. One was right after (Smith) got dinged up a little bit and the ball didn't com e out of his hands (right) and then a couple of deep balls late there were a whole lot of people on that field that were real tired, both on offense and defense. He overthrew Demarco (Robinson) one time and Demarco normally runs 4.5 and he was probably running 4.7 at the time. Everybody was gassed at that point."