Kentucky has struggled with penalties this season.

The Wildcats have already recorded 54 penalties through 7 games, which makes them the eighth-most penalized team in the country. On average, they lose 68.4 yards per game due to penalties.

The lack of discipline is a major cause for concern for Kentucky and something they need to clean up moving forward.

On Wednesday, Mark Stoops addressed his team’s penalty problem.

“It’s very disappointing, and really no excuse for it to have this type of penalties,” Stoops said during the SEC coaches teleconference. “If I’m not mistaken, the last couple years, bottom line, we’ve been either 1 or 2 or 3 in the league in least penalized teams and right now, we’re the most penalized. So we’re not doing a very good job.”

Stoops knows that some penalties are hard to avoid, but he needs his team to take accountability and fix the small mistakes.

“Some penalties are going to happen, some aggressive penalties are going to happen, it’s just going to happen during playing ball,” Stoops said. “But some of it is just completely unacceptable and it’s selfish and it’s just not disciplined and so we need the accountability and sometimes it’s tied to competition and so we’ve gotta just do a better job of coaching it and have better control.”

Heading into the bye week, Kentucky has a chance to work on being more disciplined, and the Wildcats need to if they want to avoid losing some big games later on this season.