​Ask Kentucky football coach Will Stein how he plans to spend the first night of his head-coaching career, and he starts down one road before swerving onto another: “I’m going to go have a cold beer and f*****g”—he catches himself—”excuse my French, I was going to say F-ing hang out with my family, sorry. Apologize, sorry, Big Blue Nation. They probably liked that.”They probably did. It was the loosest sixty seconds of an otherwise exacting hour, and it tells you almost everything about the version of Stein who just beat Youngstown State 45-13: a coach with a beer in one hand and a red pen already in the other.The final score wasn’t close. Kentucky ran for 205 yards, threw for 301, and held a legitimately dangerous dual-threat quarterback to 59 yards on 28 carries. Stein gave the opponent his full respect without giving an inch of credit to his own defense’s margin for error: “I think that guy can play a lot of different places. Not just in this league, but all over the country. He can run it, he can throw it, and for the most part we stopped him running the ball, which was a big part of the plan. ” Praise for the other guy, a checked box for his own game plan, in the same breath—a trick most coaches can’t manage after a 32-point win.What Stein couldn’t do, even for one afternoon, was leave well enough alone. Somewhere in the first half of an already comfortable game, his offense huddled a beat too slow. Most coaches forget that by the postgame buffet. Stein brought it up unprompted: “That’s where it pisses me off as a coach,” he said. “You have to play at a certain standard every single snap. Regardless of circumstances. I don’t care if it’s hot, and I don’t care if it’s freezing cold or raining. Sleeting, snowing, you need to get your butt back to the huddle and get to the line of scrimmage ASAP so we can dictate the pace.”Dictating the pace, it turns out, is the whole point of the operation. “We dictate the pace of the game,” Stein said. “That’s how our offensive is really built. You will see us huddle, you will see us speed break, and you will see us no-huddle. To me, if you just go one pace the whole game, that’s where the defense can kind of catch on and get your rhythm. We like to mix it up on people.” It’s a tempo built to be annoying on purpose—a fitting description, honestly, of Stein’s whole news conference for anyone hoping to just enjoy a season-opening blowout in peace.His new quarterback got the identical treatment his opponent’s did: real praise, filed immediately next to real notes. Eighteen-for-27, 304 yards, and four touchdowns in his first career start, and Stein’s headline take on it doubled as a syllabus. “That’s not how you play quarterback; how you play quarterback is you take the easy money. You take what they give you,” he said, before circling back to the compliment. “I thought the majority of the game he managed extremely well. He had a lot of checks and kills built-in. He was able to elude some rushers on naked