In a 4-8 season with a 1-7 finish in the SEC, the highlights of Kentucky‘s 2024 campaign are few and far between compared to the lowlights. Unfortunately for the Wildcats, Netflix‘s SEC Football: Any Given Saturday found none of the former and all of the latter.
The documentary crew wasn’t there for the 31-0 weather-shortened shutout in the opener against Southern Miss, the respectable home effort that saw the Cats lead No. 1 Georgia into the fourth quarter, the upset win at No. 6 Ole Miss or even Cutter Boley’s promising second half at No. 3 Texas. Instead, they showed up for Kentucky’s most humiliating moments from start to finish: the 31-6 loss to open SEC play vs. South Carolina, the 48-20 midseason loss at Florida to save Billy Napier’s job and the 41-14 rivalry beatdown to put a bow on the stink vs. Louisville.
Fun, right?
Shane Beamer takes the early spotlight in Lexington
Netflix certainly went into the USC matchup in Lexington with a UK angle in mind, only to abort mission after watching things unravel for the blue and white. Instead, we got way too much Shane Beamer, who called his shot with the Gamecocks before kickoff.
“Put the whole SEC on notice right now, because we’re just getting started,” he told his team in the pregame huddle.
Then-redshirt freshman LaNorris Sellers was also making his first SEC start at quarterback, finishing 10-14 for 166 yards and two touchdowns in the blowout win. Considering the stage and moment as a double-digit underdog, his coach put him up there with the likes of one of the best dual-threat talents in football history.
“I’ve been around some freshman quarterbacks like Michael Vick at Virginia Tech. It’s exciting to see LaNorris get ready to take the next step, because you know it’s coming,” Beamer said.
As the final horn blew, the 48-year-old coach pulled his daughters aside on the field and told them the outcome was never in doubt.
“Y’all weren’t worried, were you?” he said.
Beamer said in a follow-up interview that the win at Kentucky was when he knew South Carolina could put together something special the rest of the way, despite entering the year picked to finish 13th in the SEC.
“Even I walked off the field and said to myself, ‘I think we’ve got a chance to do some really big things this year.’”
It was a performance that left national analysts rethinking both teams’ trajectories — the Gamecocks potentially being a sneaky contender for the College Football Playoff and the Wildcats, well, not.
“South Carolina absolutely destroyed Kentucky,” On3’s Andy Staples told the folks at Netflix. “… South Carolina’s been in the SEC since 1992, and the Gamecocks have been underdogs pretty much the entire time. They’re playing against all these teams that have won national titles. Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Auburn, LSU. If South Carolina dominates the LSU game, we have to completely revise what our expectations are for that team.”
Anything the Cats can do to help.
Kentucky helps Billy Napier keep his job at Florida
Speaking of that, how about Napier staying alive in Gainesville? Florida had started the season 3-3 with the third-year coach’s seat blistering hot. Fall to the Wildcats once again after losing both matchups before in 2022 and 2023 — including a 33-14 blowout in Lexington the year prior — and his office would be cleaned out by Sunday morning.
“For years and years, Florida never lost to Kentucky,” Michael Bratton, otherwise known as SEC Mike, said on the show. “This is one of the biggest sticking points that people have with Billy Napier. He cannot beat the Kentucky Wildcats.”
“Napier? A dead man walking as there is in the coaching business right now,” ESPN’s Paul Finebaum added. “We would find out whether DJ Lagway was enough to save and salvage Billy Napier’s career.”
Like Sellers, Lagway was making his first SEC start at quarterback, replacing the injured Graham Mertz — out for the year with a torn ACL, suffered in a 23-17 overtime loss at No. 8 Tennessee the week before.
He’d go on to throw for 259 yards in a 48-20 win that saw Florida outgain Kentucky 476 total yards to 309, the fanbase all smiles, singing “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty at the top of their lungs inside Ben Hill Griffin Stadium.
“In what has been a nightmare season, in the blink of an eye, everything can change,” Bratton said. “Because all of a sudden, as a Florida fan, you’re starting to see reasons for optimism. Now, it’s the DJ Lagway show.”
“I had written Billy Napier off completely this season. I thought they were done,” Staples continued. “They proved me wrong.”
“All the talk, all the ‘dead man walking,’ all the ‘Billy Napier is done, stick a fork in him,’ all of that disappeared,” Finebaum added to finish yet another disappointing segment for the Wildcats.
Part of Diego Pavia’s rise to superstardom
The only clips of Kentucky we see until the finale come in episodes three and five featuring Vanderbilt, highlighting Clark Lea’s time in Nashville ahead of and during the Diego Pavia craze. To start, former Commodore quarterback Mike Wright is seen rushing for a long touchdown inside Kroger Field in 2022 to lead the program to its first SEC win since 2019. Then we get a brief look at Pavia leading Vanderbilt to back-to-back SEC wins over Alabama and Kentucky to start the season 4-2.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Vanderbilt is a team you gotta look out for,” Pavia said confidently on the Kroger Field sidelines following the 20-13 win in Lexington.
Playing for pride against Louisville
Then comes the Kentucky spotlight in the season finale for both the series and team, the Wildcats hosting the Louisville Cardinals in a game with nothing on the table but pride. They weren’t going to a bowl game, but they could at least earn bragging rights against their bitter in-state rival and end things on a positive note with optimism looking ahead to 2025.
It was also one final game with soon-to-be draft selections, Maxwell Hairston and Deone Walker — the featured names in the segment.
“As cutthroat as the end of the season is for playoff contenders, the stakes are different for a team like Kentucky,” Staples said of the significance of the 2024 Governor’s Cup. “Kentucky is out of the playoff mix. They’re 4-7. They’re playing against Louisville, their in-state rival. What does Kentucky have to play for? Pride. On top of that, some of the Wildcats are working toward their NFL future.”
Maxwell Hairston and Deone Walker draft profiles
First, an individual spotlight on the draft names, starting with the future first-round selection in Hairston.
“After college, I’m hoping that I’m a successful NFL player,” he told Netflix. “The SEC prepares you for that next level, because most of the guys I’m playing against now is guys I’m gonna play against on Sundays.”
“Maxwell Hairston is a blazing-fast cornerback from Michigan,” Staples said. “He’s faster than pretty much every receiver he plays, and right now, he’s trying to run his way into the first round of the NFL Draft.”
“A pick machine is what he is,” Bratton added. “He’s perceived by many to be the top corner in the Southeastern Conference.”
“This is a guy that can go on day one,” ESPN’s Harry Lyles Jr. foreshadowed, Hairston later picked No. 30 overall by the Buffalo Bills.
There, he’d be joined by Walker, also selected by the Bills in the fourth round at No. 109 overall.
“Deone, that’s my brother, both being from Detroit, Michigan. I’ve known him since high school, but we really got close being here together,” Hairston said of Walker.
After Kentucky defensive back Zion Childress told the Netflix crew to “zoom in on his head” to see Walker’s “rolls” — “He’s got a franks package on his head,” he said — the 6-7, 345-pound defensive tackle explained his ‘why.’
The game-wrecking talent wants football to be the reason his family lives comfortably.
“I want to be a ten-plus-year player in the NFL,” he said. “After watching my parents struggle, I want to make it to a point where they never have to worry again.”
“There is not another human being in the sport of football that looks or plays like Deone Walker,” Staples added. “He’s a 6-7, 350-pound dude who can move. He’s going to make an NFL team so happy.”
NFL teams are looking to see if “you give a crap”
The draft chatter aligned with their desire to prepare for a meaningless football game with nothing left to play for — on paper, anyway. Hairston wanted to prove to NFL teams he’d always give it everything he had, whether the season was going as planned or not.
“You can never know too much about your opponent, so the night before the game, I just wanted to make sure I get those last-minute notes and small details that I put down,” he said, reading his Week 14 scouting breakdown with the following words prominently featured on the cover: “Attitude. Toughness. Discipline. Pride.”
“NFL teams want to know, ‘Do you love football?’ Because once you get those millions of dollars, if you don’t, you’re not going to have that same sense of urgency,” Staples said. “Well, if you’re playing on a 4-7 team and you’re still trying to ball out, that tells those NFL teams exactly what they want to know.”
“That is something that they care about,” SEC Network’s Alyssa Lang added. “‘How much do you care? How much do you give a crap?’”
“You know who runs Kentucky.”
The Wildcats had won five straight against the Cardinals with a combined score of 217-88. This roster only knew the feeling of beating Louisville — and comfortably.
No matter how things had gone in the first 11 games of the year, all bets were off for game No. 12.
“Don’t come to Kentucky thinking it’s not gonna be a dogfight,” Hairston said. “I’ve never lost to Louisville so I don’t plan on losing to them now. They haven’t beaten us in five years. In-state rivalry, but you know who runs Lexington. You know who runs Kentucky.”
“How do we want to end it off?” Walker added. “Are we going to get blown out or are we going to come out and play the caliber of football that we know we can play, end off with a W?”
Louisville would outgain Kentucky 486 total yards to 328 — 358 of those yards for the Cardinals coming on the ground, leading to four scores. You saw the Wildcats do nothing but chase a cloud of dust, Netflix showing off the sad players and empty stands inside Kroger Field far too well.
“It’s hard to watch a Kentucky team get physically whooped,” the commentator said.
Hairston’s goodbye to Big Blue Nation
There wasn’t much more to say from there, but Hairston did want to make it clear he came in prepared and felt he left it all out there — not only against Louisville, but every game wearing Kentucky across his chest.
Now, it was time to take his talents to the next level and prove himself in the league.
“Even though the scoreboard might not have said what we wanted it to say, it showed me that I could still go out there and compete to a very high level. I studied a lot and I feel like I went out there and I executed as much as I could,” he said. “I gotta do whatever I can do to finally accomplish my dream. First, graduation, and then I’m going to declare for the draft. … I didn’t get to accomplish everything I wanted to do this season. It’s just the beginning of a long football career.”
He was closing one chapter of his football journey ahead of the rest to come once his name was called on draft night. It didn’t end the way he had hoped, but he’ll always be grateful for his time in Lexington.
“Kentucky’s a place I’ll never forget about, you know?” Hairston said. “I’ll always represent Kentucky, even when I’m in the NFL.”