With its season on the brink, Ole Miss is searching for answers. Kiffin must find them.
Where does Ole Miss go from here? How do the Rebels respond to two crushing defeats?
As chants of “L-S-U” echoed through the bowels of Tiger Stadium, Lane Kiffin sat through his postgame press conference with a look of disbelief spread across his face. Kiffin seemed to be searching for answers after a 29-26 overtime loss to LSU that has Ole Miss’ season on the brink of failure. He repeatedly said Ole Miss controlled the game.
“We had the game and we just let it slip away,” Kiffin said. “This is hard. This one will be around forever.”
He said he didn’t feel like the better team won. His point is valid, as the Rebels were handed their second defeat of the year in a game in which they trailed for a total of zero seconds. Kiffin struggled to reconcile where his team sits at the bye week at 5-2 (1-2), and pointed out that Ole Miss gave two football games away.
Nothing he said is untrue. But the message falls on deaf ears in the bottom-line business that is college football, particularly when you examine who is ultimately responsible for Ole Miss losing two games that it led in the fourth quarter, with possession of the football and a chance to go up two scores and put the game away.
This loss followed a similar script to the home loss to Kentucky two weeks prior. The offense sputtered, left points on the board early in the game and were not able to deliver the kill shot when given multiple opportunities to do so. The offensive line struggled to protect Jaxson Dart. The offense went into a shell when Tre Harris got hurt and the running game was uncreative and inconsistent. The defense played well enough to win the game, gave the offense multiple chances to seize control, but ultimately allowed a few back-breaking pass receptions late that led to game-altering scores. Both opponents converted crucial fourth downs late in the game.
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The curious return of Ulysses Bentley IV
Ole Miss actually ran the football better than it did in its previous two SEC games. The Rebels ran it 42 times for 180 yards (36 for 213 with sack yardage removed). Why was that the case? Ole Miss was forced to play seldom-used running back Ulysses Bentley IV due to Matt Jones being unavailable due to injury. Bentley rushed 11 times for 107 yards (9.7 yards per rush) and broke off a 50-yard touchdown on a 4th & 1 play — a scenario that the Rebels have essentially never converted this season when using a traditional running back as the ball carrier — in the second quarter that put Ole Miss ahead 10-0.
It was a welcomed sight for puzzled Ole Miss fans who had been clamoring for Bentley to play. In 2023, he was an effective complement to All-American Quinshon Judkins. When Judkins transferred to Ohio State, it was presumed Bentley would be the starting running back, or at least play a major role in the running game. Ole Miss brought Henry Parrish back to Oxford from Miami, where he’d followed current running backs coach Kevin Smith to in 2022 after following him to Oxford in 2020. Smith spent one year at Miami in 2022 before returning to Kiffin’s staff in 2023. Parrish returned this offseason. Parrish has been the starting running back all season. Until Saturday evening, Bentley barely played and was supposedly beaten out by former walk-on Matt Jones. As the Ole Miss running game sputtered for six weeks, questions about Bentley’s role became more frequent. Kiffin essentially gaslit the fanbase for not blindly accepting that a serviceable, multi-year SEC running back was no longer explosive enough or good enough in pass protection to play meaningful snaps. Saturday night made that notion seem utterly ridiculous. Bentley’s performance was the first time a running back ran for more than 85 yards in an SEC game this season and just the third individual 100-yard rushing performance all year.
After Bentley scored, television cameras caught an excited Kiffin as he turned around and yelled something at Smith. I have no clue what was said, but I would love to find out. Kiffin was asked about it in his Monday press conference and sort of gave a roundabout answer that it was just excitement for Bentley and the adversity he’s overcome. The question left unanswered is why it got to this point in the first place.
Parrish is clearly Smith’s guy. He’s an average SEC running back. If they think he’s the best running back on the team, that is fine. Playing Jones over Bentley, or at the very least not playing Bentley at all until Saturday night, is completely illogical. Bentley didn’t even lead the team in carries in the loss to LSU. Parrish, who is clearly not completely healthy, led with 14 carries for 42 yards. In three SEC games, Parrish has generated seven runs for eight or more yards. Bentley had six runs for eight or more yards in Saturday’s loss.
I don’t pretend to know what Kiffin’s process is as far as personnel decisions. I do know he trusts his staff to do their job and stays out of the way, which, generally speaking, seems like a good management strategy. At the end of the day, this is Kiffin’s program, and he’s the man making $9 million to win football games. Why it took six games, a home loss when the team was three-score favorites, and an injury to try literally anything different in the running game from a personnel standpoint is completely baffling. Is it fair to say Ole Miss beats Kentucky if Bentley plays? That’s probably a little bit of a stretch. But wouldn’t it have been interesting to see what it looked like? What if he hit a home run like the 50-yard touchdown on Saturday night? The other running backs haven’t been able to do that this year. The one running back with breakaway speed was kept on the shelf. Would it have made a difference against the Wildcats? We’ll never know.
Head-scratching decisions seem to be a trend with this year’s team.
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There are personnel decisions that are puzzling
Ole Miss struggled mightily on the offensive line on Saturday night, just as it did in the loss to Kentucky. The Rebels have been injury-riddled on the offense line. They lost Caleb Warren and Gerquan Scott before the season started. Jeremy James hasn’t played since the season opener and Jayden Williams is out for an extended period of time after an injury suffered sometime before the Kentucky game. The running game struggles, as well as the inconsistency of the offense as a whole, is in part due to inconsistent offensive line play. It’s tough to overcome injuries. But what is head scratching is that the Rebels were seemingly healthier on the offensive line on Saturday than they’ve been at any point this year. Scott returned for the Wake Forest game, and has been rotated sparingly at right guard in place of Julius Buelow. Warren has dressed since the Kentucky game, but has only played a few snaps at center against South Carolina after Reece McIntyre got hurt and a few snaps at guard in Saturday’s loss after Nate Kalepo was injured. James has dressed the last two games but has not played at all (as best I can tell).
Maybe none of them are fully healthy yet. But if James is healthy enough to dress out and Warren has played a few snaps the last couple of games, I wonder why the coaching staff has not tried anything different personnel-wise given the offensive line’s struggles? I don’t want to turn this into an exercise of second-guessing Kiffin and his staff at every turn. I’m not remotely qualified to do that. It’s tough to work guys back from injury in the middle of the year, particularly on the lines of scrimmage. Cohesion on the offensive line is crucial, and this unit has already been robbed of time to create cohesion due to early-season injuries. Maybe that’s why Ole Miss has stuck with the same five the last three games, despite James and Warren being two of the most experienced linemen on the team and Scott working as the first team center for most of preseason camp. Perhaps the bye week is an ideal time to make changes and work the others back in. Kiffin alluded to that in his Monday press conference and noted that the injuries have handicapped them. So, again, it’s easy to second-guess everything after losses.
It all just seems puzzling given how badly the unit struggled on Saturday night.
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Passing game appears to be Harris or bust
The offense also doesn’t spread the football to its playmakers efficiently at all. Ole Miss is paying Juice Wells and Caden Prieskorn a lot of money and has been unable to get them the football. Prieskorn has three catches for 64 yards in SEC games. He’s been targeted just five times. Wells has only recorded a catch in one conference game. He had three for 97 yards on 10 targets in the win over South Carolina. Wells was targeted just twice against Kentucky. StatBroadcast does not show any targets for him against LSU but I know there was at least one at LSU that he dropped. Cayden Lee has been tremendous when thrown to this year. He had nine catches for 132 yards on 13 targets in the loss to LSU. He recorded just two catches apiece in the South Carolina and Kentucky games on as many targets.
With Lee’s game on Saturday being the lone outlier, it’s pretty much been Tre Harris or bust for this passing offense. And why wouldn’t you get him the football? He’s arguably the best receiver in the country. But he’s also been injury-prone in his short time at Ole Miss. He missed the second half of the South Carolina game. The Rebels scored just three points in the final two quarters as the offense was conservative and tried to run the clock and get out of there with a win after having a three-score lead at halftime. Harris again exited the game around halftime in the loss to LSU. Ole Miss only mustered three field goals in the second half and overtime. Dating back to his time at Alabama, Kiffin has a history of feeding his best weapon, which is great when that pass catcher is available.
Losing a top receiver in a hostile road environment against a ranked team is hardly an easy obstacle to overcome, but it seems apparent that the Rebels’ offense is too-heavily reliant on the availability and production of Harris. They’ve been pretty toothless when he’s not on the field. In past years, the offense struggling when its top target is unavailable has been understandable due to a lack of depth at receiver. This year was supposed to be different, or at least the offseason spending suggested it would be.
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The offense has failed this team
No player or coach on this Ole Miss team could’ve possibly imagined being in the position the Rebels currently find themselves in — a two-loss team in early October with five SEC games still remaining. Dart was speechless in his postgame press conference.
“I don’t know how we lost this game,” he said in response to multiple questions. “I don’t understand how we lost this game.”
There are several factors that have contributed to how Ole Miss got in this precarious place. The offense not producing when it matters most has been the single largest component.
In the loss to Kentucky, Ole Miss twice possessed the football with a 17-13 lead and a chance to either extend the Rebels lead to seven points or seal the game with a touchdown and a multi-score lead. The offense went three-and-out both times.
In the loss to LSU on Saturday, Ole Miss led 20-16 and got the football back with 1:10 remaining in the third quarter. It was the first of three possessions the offense had with a chance to extend the lead to seven points with a field goal, or score a touchdown, earn a multi-score lead and put the game away. Ole Miss threw an interception in plus-territory, punted on its second try and settled for a Caden Davis field goal on the third possession. The defense finally broke on LSU’s final offensive possession and allowed a touchdown that tied the game to force overtime.
While the defense has not been perfect, it has given the offense five chances to essentially ice the game in the final quarter of the Rebels’ two losses, and the offense failed to do so each time. The Ole Miss defense has given up under 400 yards of offense (in regulation) in both losses, holding the two opponents to under 100 yards rushing. The Rebels’ defensive front has been legitimately great this season. The secondary has been mostly sturdy though inconsistent in spurts. This defense was supposed to be the missing piece from past Kiffin teams — the lacking element to compete with the best programs and to pull away quicker from average and lesser opponents. The offense has not held up its end of the bargain.
Dart hasn’t played well enough so far through three SEC games. He appears less decisive than ever, holds the football too long at times and has missed some open receivers on key downs. Whatever your opinion is of Dart as a player, this isn’t the best version of him we’ve seen at Ole Miss, which is odd considering it’s his third year in the same offensive system. That tells me something is off with how this offense is being run or called that is not helping Dart out despite him being far from blameless in the offense’s failures.
Weiss Jr. is often a convenient scapegoat for fans. He’s rarely mentioned when the offense is humming and is the subject of criticism when the offense falters. I don’t know what portion of the blame pie Weiss deserves in all of this because I don’t know enough about the nuances of play calling in an SEC game to even come up with a remotely educated answer as to why this is his fault. What I do know is that this offense, from a play calling standpoint, tends to get stuck in the proverbial mud often and the passing game appears to be less creative than ever. In layman’s terms, a lot of Ole Miss’ plays in a game seem to be slamming a small running back between the tackles for a marginal gain followed by a contested deep ball from Dart. It is of course much more nuanced than that. My point is simply that something seems off. Watch a couple of games from last year that Ole Miss won and tell me if the offense looks remotely the same this year — and this version was supposed to have much better personnel. It just doesn’t make a ton of sense.
Kiffin has been given the resources. He now must find the answers.
Ultimately, all of this rests on Kiffin’s shoulders. He is the supposed offensive savant. Again, he seems to be a coach who trusts his assistants to do their job and stays out of the way. But at a certain point, the head man making $9 million per year is responsible for stepping in. Ole Miss is searching for answers, whether it’s the Bentley mystery, the offense sputtering and the inability to finish games.
Ole Miss’ season is teetering on the brink of abject failure and it’s all due to a pair games the Rebels should have won but completely squandered, mostly due to the ineptitude of the offense. In his normal Monday press conference, Kiffin said his message to the team was that they were two plays away from being undefeated and that they must accept the reality that they aren’t.
“There’s a lot left to play for,” Kiffin said. “I told them they are a really good team that is not finishing like a great team.”
I suppose there is still a path to making the playoff, albeit a slim one. If Ole Miss were to win its final five games and finish with a 10-2 record, the Rebels would certainly be in the conversation to earn an at-large bid into the tournament. But that seems like a foolish conversation at the moment, given the Rebels have at least four capable opponents left and have not proven to be a consistent enough team to five consecutive SEC games. For now, the focus should be inward, fixing the issues that plague this team and remaining engaged despite the team’s goals slipping away. Playoff or not, the next six weeks are crucial to the present and future of the program, even if the core of the team doesn’t have a vested personal interest in that future. The players billed this as ‘The Last Dance,’ for a reason. It’s a byproduct of being a veteran team led by transfers. How engaged is this football team in two weeks when Oklahoma arrives?
Kiffin encouraged the fan base to stick together. He said they’ll assess everything during the bye week because that’s what they do on bye weeks — not just because two games were lost in the final minute.
After Kiffin concluded his presser on Monday, he came back into the room and offered one final thought.
"Someone who's been in here a long time said something to me yesterday, 'make sure you look at it as a positive that our fans are really upset about the game,’ I'm glad we've created a new expectation,” Kiffin said.
That’s all well and good, except those expectations aren’t being met. Ole Miss has won a ton of close, one-score games under Kiffin. Some have wondered if the law of averages would eventually even things out this year. While valid, the resources Ole Miss spent to bolster its roster in the offseason to become a true championship contender was, at least in part, intended to prevent games from being left to chance, to ensure the Rebels played fewer one score games and instead won convincingly with more regularity. Kiffin has won a ton of games at Ole Miss and brought the program to new heights. At every step of the way, he’s been afforded the resources to further the program’s upward trajectory.
The fan base has met the expectations he set for them. They’ve shown up for games. They’ve footed the bill for the team’s payroll and have not received an adequate return on investment. Ole Miss is a team searching for answers. It’s up to Kiffin to find them.