John Clay
Lexington Herald-Leader
LEXINGTON, Ky. — Unlike the best tight end in the NFL, college football’s best tight end isn’t dating Taylor Swift.
Brock Bowers is doing just about everything else, though.
“Absolute freak,” Kentucky coach Mark Stoops, whose Cats face Bowers and the Georgia Bulldogs on Saturday in Athens, Ga., said Monday. “Absolute freak.”
Take last Saturday. The No. 1-ranked Bulldogs were trailing 17-10 in the third quarter at unranked Auburn when the 6-foot-4, 240-pound junior from Napa, Calif., claimed the game as his.
First, Bowers caught a 29-yard pass from quarterback Carson Beck that set up a Bulldogs touchdown to tie the game at 17-17 with 1:03 left in the third quarter.
Bowers opened Georgia’s next possession with a 37-yard grab. Later that same drive, he caught a 28-yard pass on a third-and-9 and a 15-yard catch to the Auburn 10-yard line before freshman Peyton Woodring’s 38-yard field goal gave Georgia a 20-17 lead with 10:57 remaining.
After Auburn tied the score at 20 with 6:21 left, Bowers went back to work. His spectacular one-handed grab of a Beck pass for a 16-yard gain on a third-and-12 kept the drive alive. Two plays later, Beck hit Bowers with a 40-yard touchdown pass with 2:52 left that proved to be the game-winner — Georgia’s 22nd straight victory.
“Bowers did what he does, the guy is amazing,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart said after his star caught six passes for 148 yards and a TD in the second half, and eight passes for 157 yards for the game. “It’s a wonder why you just don’t go to him every play.”
For his collegiate career, Bowers has caught 149 passes for 2,237 yards (15.0 per catch) and 23 touchdowns. He’s also carried the football 16 times for 172 yards (10.8 per rush) and five more scores.
“Gonna be a fascinating prospect because he’s definitely not a traditional tight end,” Sports Illustrated’s lead NFL writer, Albert Breer, tweeted. “But as a weapon, he’ll be a big, big problem for NFL defenses.”
Bowers will be Kentucky’s problem come Saturday when the 20th-ranked Wildcats (5-0 overall, 2-0 in the SEC) take on the top-ranked Bulldogs (5-0 overall, 2-0 in the SEC) for a 7 p.m. kickoff on ESPN.
“What an incredible player,” Stoops said Monday. “You could tell he’s a complete player. He plays well without the football. He plays well with the football. He’s a team guy.”
Stoops was the defensive coordinator at Arizona when those Wildcats had a probable NFL Hall of Fame tight end named Rob Gronkowski.
“They’re just different players,” Stoops said Monday. “Both unbelievably great and talented, just different. This guy’s something I haven’t seen before.”
In fact, there’s an outside chance Bowers could follow Larry Kelley of Yale in 1936 and Leon Hart of Notre Dame in 1949 as the third tight end to win the Heisman Trophy.
“Brock Bowers is the best non-quarterback in college football,” CBS Sports Will Backus wrote on Sunday. “That statement isn’t open for debate. It should take something disastrous — knock on wood — to keep him from reaching New York as a Heisman finalist at the end of the year.”
As for this Saturday, Kentucky did a respectable job of keeping Bowers in check during the Bulldogs’ 16-6 win last season in Lexington. The tight end caught two passes for 10 yards as UK held the eventual national champs to their lowest point total of the season.
The 2021 game in Athens was a different story. As a freshman, Bowers caught five passes for 101 yards (20.2 yards per catch) and two scores in Georgia’s 30-13 victory at Sanford Stadium.
“I think Brock is going to get his,” Stoops said Monday. “He’s going to make plays. It’s kind of like going up against Michael Jordan or someone like that — you know they’re going to get theirs. But we have to compete at a high level.
“He’s going to make some plays, but we have to make ours when we have coverage, when we have a one-on-one, when we have a contested play with him. We have to win our fair share as well.”
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