Spring Spotlight: Kentucky's rebuilt offensive line comes into focus

[Matt Dillon]

Preparations for the 2026 college football season are underway at the Joe Craft Football Training Facility. In a few short weeks, cleats will be hitting the grass practice fields and/or the turf at the Nutter Field House as Kentucky head coach Will Stein gets set to begin his first spring practice as the leader of a program. There will be a lot of new for the Wildcats in 2026. Things will be brand new in the offensive line room.

Cutter Leftwich has followed Will Stein from Oregon to Kentucky and will be this program’s fifth new offensive line coach since the 2020 season. This program needs some offensive line stability and must find some long-term answers after consistently going to the transfer portal in the offseason. However, that will take some time. Now is about building the best unit possible for 2026. Kentucky needs multiple transfer portal additions to hit. Perhaps no position needs to good spring practice more than the offensive line.

Spring Spotlight: Kentucky's rebuilt offensive line comes into focus - On3

[Jaxcat]

From what I've read, at least on paper, our OL this year should be > 2025 OL >> 2024 OL. While paper pedigrees don't always translate to the field, it sure looks to me like the new OL we brought in are at least as good, if not better as a unit, than the 5 starters last year. There appears to be a few positions that are pretty much locked in, barring some unforeseen situation. But two positions that look to have several candidates who must fight it out for the starting spot. Competition is always a good thing, imo.

Without knowing anything, I would be willing to bet that Leftwich is a better OL coach than Wolford. In his two stints here, I did not see much improvement as the season wore on nor was there any focus on developing depth that I could see. TBF, the 2025 OL far outperformed the 2024 OL but the bar was so low on the '24 OL that improvement almost had to have been a given up to some point. I am hopeful that Leftwich will provide both improving on-field play AND getting multiple OL snaps so that, if needed, we can plug and play. There are certainly > 5 OL on the squad who I expect to see a reasonable number of snaps this year. I also believe we'll have a much better play caller who will be better at avoiding the obvious plays that so often got blown up by the defense before the OL had much chance to even get started.

While I believe 5 or more wins is not very likely with our schedule, I do expect a better, more entertaining product on the field than the rock fights we witnessed as Stoops' regime wound down. I find it hard to imagine that next year's team will enter the 4th quarter against anyone with < 100 yards of total offense. I won't be as willing to throw in the towel and turn the UK game off if we fall behind by 14 pts because our offense will have some bite to it and will be able to score 24+ points on just about any team. That doesn't mean we'll win but I would hope there won't be the annual (or two) game where it's obvious the offense is not going to score 10 points barring a pick 6 or kick return.