Texas football game-by-game predictions for the 2024 season
Game 11: vs. Kentucky (Nov. 23)
Location: DKR (Austin, TX)
Texas's Week 11 matchup against the Kentucky Wildcats will have only been the second time these two programs have met on the gridiron in the history of this series. The Longhorns won a low-scoring rock fight of a matchup in the 1951 season over Kentucky, by a narrow margin of 7-6, in the only meeting between these schools ever on the gridiron.
Leading the Wildcats into Austin for the first meeting ever between these teams as SEC foes is the underrated head coach Mark Stoops. Hailing from the infamous college football coaching family, the Longhorns faithful will face a brother of a former longtime Oklahoma head coach they're extremely familiar with facing over the last couple of decades from their days in the Big 12.
Kentucky and Florida could both be real trap games for the Longhorns, given the timing at which they come on the regular season schedule at a key point in SEC play in November. The Kentucky and Florida games come on alternating weeks in November, intertwined with two big-time rivalries for the Longhorns against Arkansas and Texas A&M.
Stoops and the Wildcats love being in this sort of underdog role on the road playing in the SEC late in seasons in November. Kentucky has the grit and proven experience on this roster necessary to make this game difficult for the Longhorns in late November, despite it coming at home at DKR and that it will potentially be a night game (it falls in the flex window between 2:30 and 7 p.m.).
Kentucky is 4-1 in true SEC road games in the 2020s.
The point with all of this is to say that Texas obviously can't take this game against an experienced and prepared Kentucky team lightly.