Our defense played MORE THAN well enough to win, and UK definitely did no physically "beat" our defense. We pressured Levis heavily in the first half, and completely shut UK down. We were an AR pick away from going into half time with a 16-7 lead in the worst case scenario. UK's one "legitimate" first half TD was on a "caught" jump ball pass, which I would argue was defended about as well as could be expected.
Even though our offense was almost non-existent in the second half, the defense still only gave up 13 points. And that's after we tried to gift them points by turning the ball over on downs twice inside our own 40-yard line.
I would agree with you for the most part that UK "physically beat" our offense however. We were not able to establish a consistent rushing attack like we did against Utah. I think we should have tried harder to establish the running game, but that's not what happened. Despite our anemic running game, we still averaged more yards per carry than UK, (4.5 vs 4 ypc.) and that's even with the sack yardage taken out of the calculations. However, it did feel like UK's DL dominated our OL for much of the game.
We lost this game because of two horrible picks thrown by Richardson, and the fact that the offense could not overcome their mistakes and find a way to score points.