Ole Miss beat Tulane, so now, what are fair expectations?
Offensive line play, running game and a look around the SEC
Well, that one didn’t play out like I figured it would, but Ole Miss passed its first true test of the 2023 season with a 37-20 victory at a ranked Tulane team.
To the surprise of many, Green Wave veteran quarterback Michael Pratt was not able to play after suffering a leg injury in their week one win over South Alabama. It was Kai Horton’s game to win or lose, and while he had his moments, particularly in the first half, the Ole Miss defense thwarted him, which was a significant reason for the lopsided 27-3 second half the Rebels put together to seal the win comfortably.
What stood out from this victory? Let’s start with the bad.
The offensive line was an issue
To me, the most surprising thing from this game was Ole Miss’ inability to run the football. In our Friday game preview, I wrote that it was almost a given that the Rebels would score points on Tulane and have at least some consistent success running the football. My reasoning for this was not that I thought the Green Wave’s defensive front was bad (it’s a good unit with depth), but simply the fact that Lane Kiffin offenses at Ole Miss (and really everywhere he’s been) have essentially run the ball on everyone they’ve faced, with only a handful of exceptions. That was clearly not the case on Saturday and it is why the Rebels fell into a 17-7 hole and stalled offensively in the first half after the first two drives.
Ole Miss ran for just 89 yards in the game at a clip of 2.4 yards per rush. Quinshon Judkins totaled 18 caries for just 48 yards — by far the lowest rushing output of his young career. He has averaged at least four yards per carry in every other game of his college career. He was hardly the root cause. Judkins’ didn’t have any space to run. He was met by defenders at or near the line of scrimmage on the majority of his carries as the run blocking in front of him failed.
The offensive line was overwhelmed by Tulane’s defensive front. The Green Wave had a lot of guys in the box and appeared intent on making Ole Miss beat them by throwing the football, and doing so quickly with the pressure they applied on passing plays, which proved to be effective — particularly after Tre Harris exited the game in the first quarter with a leg injury.
“They presented us with a lot of challenges and are really tough up front. Their front seven gave us a lot of problems,” Kiffin said.
It’s only one game, and while it would be premature to sound the alarm bells concerning the offensive line after eight quarters of football, the unit struggling against its first opponent of consequence was surprising, as I did not have that circled as a potential area of concern entering the year with what the Rebels returned up front and the additions they welcomed in the transfer portal.
The left side of the line is particularly interesting to me because Ole Miss is electing to play two transfer portal guys in left tackle Victor Curne and left guard Quincy McGee over returning starter Jayden Williams and regular contributor Eli Acker. That’s not to suggest the coaching staff is wrong for that decision. I think it is probably as simple as Curne and McGee winning the job in camp. I make note of it simply to point out that Ole Miss does have other experienced options on that side of the line if needed.
Pass blocking wasn’t any better. Tulane brought a lot of pressure and gave Jaxson Dart little time to throw the football. The Green Wave were effective in how they attacked the Ole Miss offensive line with their pass rush and it left Dart scrambling and the offensive line reeling. Dart was sacked four times yet still somehow managed to go 17-27 for 267 yards with two touchdowns and an interception.
“I thought he maybe tried a little too hard when we were struggling offensively,” Kiffin said. “But I thought he settled in and played well.”
While panic is not the phrase I’d use when talking about the offensive line, at least not yet, it is a significant concern. The running game is the core of what makes Kiffin offenses great and Ole Miss will not be able to sustain success on that side of the ball without it. And it goes without saying that the Rebels will not be successful if they cannot protect Dart. The line’s struggles bogged down the offense for most of the first half, and as the Rebels got down 10 points, the defense forced a couple of stops that allowed the offense to regain their footing. It does make me wonder if the game would’ve turned out differently had Tulane had its starting quarterback playing while the Rebels sputtered offensively, and if the deficit would’ve swelled beyond 10 points. But hypotheticals are pointless and of no value and Ole Miss did what it needed to do to win the game.
Injuries at tight end are a significant factor
Ole Miss needs to get healthier at tight end, but not for the reason you might think. The absence of a dependable blocking tight end is hurting the running game too. While Michael Trigg played well in his 42 snaps on Saturday and caught the most important touchdown of the game, run blocking is far from his greatest strength and that’s not a surprise. Trigg is a different type of tight end than a Casey Kelly or Caden Prieskorn in what he does well. Kelly, for all of his flaws elsewhere, was a pretty good blocking tight end that was an asset to the running game. As Ole Miss makes due with Trigg and Kyirin Heath until Prieskorn returns from injury, a lack of a variety and depth at tight end is hurting the running game.
Ole Miss needs to get healthier on offense in general, but particularly at the tight end spot for a multitude of reasons, with aiding the running game toward the top of the list of reasons.
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Harris’ injury greatly affected the offense
When asked about how Harris’ absence affected the offense, Kiffin had an interesting answer after Saturday’s win.
“I wouldn’t have thought that. We’ve got a lot of confidence in our other skill players, but for whatever reason, once he went down, it felt like it affected us,” Kiffin said.
Harris caught two passes and the game’s first touchdown on the opening drive as Ole Miss raced down the field. He suffered a knee injury shortly after and did not return to the game. His absence coinciding with the offense sputtering its wheels wasn’t a coincidence, though some of it can be attributed to Tulane’s defense settling in once Ole Miss got off its prepared script, but even Kiffin acknowledged it affected the team. Receiver is something we’ve discussed a lot regarding this team entering the year, and while Dayton Wade and Jordan Watkins played good games and helped power Ole Miss to a win, Harris’ health is of critical importance for this offense, particularly with Zhakari Franklin yet to play due to an offseason injury.
It doesn’t sound like Harris will play this week, but that is just a combination of speculation and unconfirmed bits of info I have gathered. If that is in fact the case, even with Ole Miss as an overwhelming favorite over Georgia Tech, the receiving corps and how well everyone else behind Harris plays will be of great interest. The positive spin to the Harris injury and how Ole Miss played Saturday is that it still managed to get by with its top receiver and tight end out, and with Franklin out too, this offense could end up being even more explosive than I thought when fully healthy and firing on all cylinders.
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The defense wasn’t perfect but played well enough to win
The Ole Miss defense is still figuring out its identity and getting familiar with a new scheme and a host of new players two games into the season, but the unit’s play, particularly toward the end of the first half and in the second half were a huge reason why Ole Miss won this game.
After Tulane scored to go up 17-7, the defense allowed just three more points and held Tulane to 167 yards of offense on 57 plays — good for just 2.92 yards per play. Even on the two sustained drives the Green Wave mounted in the second half, one for 45 yards and one for 67 yards, Ole Miss forced them to run 10 and 14 plays respectively to earn that yardage. Those two drives ended in a turnover on downs and a field goal.
There were a couple of things that surprised me about the defensive performance, none necessarily good or bad.
Suntarine Perkins played single-digit snaps. As we discussed in the game preview, I pondered what Perkins’ role would be in this game and whether or not his snap count would increase from week one. It decreased. I had Chase Parham on the Sunday podcast, and he alluded to the fact that Perkins may have missed an assignment early in the game that resulted in him not being used defensively for the remainder of the game. I couldn’t tell whether or not that happened from watching on TV, but it makes sense. I am still of the belief that the best version of this defense features Perkins playing a significant role.
I also don’t think this game, and his diminished role in it, is indicative of how his true freshman season will go. It seemed to me, an untrained eye, that Ole Miss valued experience and assignments in this tricky road test against a talented Group-of Five school above all else — that the mindset may have generally been “let’s win this and survive and avoid the catastrophic mistake”. The reasoning for this is that true freshman Ayden Williams also had a gaffe early in the game and did not play a role after that. Williams was not prepared to receive the football on a Dart throw to the right, seemingly thinking he was blocking as opposed to running a route, and didn’t play hardly at all after that. Again, it’s just a hypothesis, but I found it interesting as it pertained to Perkins.
A week after Ole Miss played a boatload of defensive linemen early in the win over Mercer, the Rebels did not rotate a lot up front. I won’t go into specific snap count numbers, as that is a paid feature of being a RebelGrove subscriber (which you should do immediately. It’s well worth the cup of coffee price per month), but there wasn’t as much rotation as I assumed there would be. A week after flashing some real explosiveness, Zxavian Harris only played a handful of snaps. Josh Harris did not play at all. I don’t necessarily think that this is indicative of a similar lack of depth issue as the team had a year ago. If you are a RebelGrove subscriber and are familiar with the top-heavy snap count issues that plagued the team a year ago, you’re probably familiar with this picture. It still wasn’t quite as top-heavy as last year, but it was still indicative of a handful of players playing a lot of snaps in the sweltering heat.
Does this mean anything? I don’t know. The aforementioned guys missing from the presumed defensive line rotation are all large-bodied interior pieces, and Tulane runs an offense primarily based on speed and space, but it was still something that seemed notable. I think the defensive line rotation the next two weeks, or lack thereof, against Georgia Tech and Alabama will be telling.
And for the record, I thought the defensive line held up pretty well and played a pretty solid collective game. J.J. Pegues was disruptive. Isaac Uwku had some moments. This is far from a criticism and more so an observation as this team preps for a rigorous eight-game SEC slate. My completely scientific and analytically-driven grade of the Ole Miss defensive line was calculated to this: good.
We talked a lot about Tulane’s speed at receiver rather than the unit’s lack of size. Ole Miss got burned by that speed a couple of times, notably on a 57-yard deep ball across the field from Horton to Lawrence Keys on Tulane’s first drive that set up their first answering score. But aside from that, the secondary was pretty good. Horton finished the game 15-37 for one touchdown and one interception. Even though he’s a backup quarterback, that dog will hunt. I think Ole Miss might really have something strong in Zamari Walton and Deantre Prince at the two corner spots. I am still not sold on the safety and nickel corner slots. Some of that is due to the absence of Ladarius Tennison — who moved to linebacker for a portion of fall camp, by the way — and the new faces at the position. But overall, again, my super scientific grade, forensically calculated by my incredibly-skilled eye for talent and fundamentals, graded out to: hey, pretty fine, for the most part.
If you’re forcing me to evaluate the Ole Miss defense after eight quarters of football, my facetious grade calculations aside, I believe it is slightly better than I assumed they’d be after two games. After all, I predicted Tulane to score 30 points in the game (I think I said 28 in this newsletter, but in the RebelGrove picks I said 34, so there you have it). Yes, this defense is far from perfect. Yes, they are still trying to find an identity and learn what their collective strengths are. But Ole Miss has an adult, who is a great recruiter, in charge of its defense who has a knack for putting players in positions that underscore their strengths rather than demand more from their weaknesses and I do believe they could round out to be a pretty respectable unit in year one of the Pete Golding era.
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Portal King? Please, Lane Kiffin is the Kicker King
I planned to wrap up this column after the defensive thoughts above with some final thoughts about this team as it wades into Georgia Tech week. But, as a former 5-foot-nothing, sub-150-pound private school athlete, I would be missing my calling and bastardizing my duty to small guys across the globe to not pay homage to the ridiculous kicker powerhouse that Lane Kiffin has established in Oxford.
With 1:53 remaining in Saturday’s game and Ole Miss facing a false-start-induced 4th-and-6 from the Tulane 39-yard line, nursing a 27-20 lead and the game very much in doubt, Kiffin placed his trust in a transfer kicker Caden Davis, to attempted a 56-yard(!!!!) field goal. For those of you who watched the game, I need not remind you of the consequences of a very understandable miss from Davis. NFL teams do not expect or lean on kickers to make field goals from 55-plus yards. Yes, NFL teams are way more open to giving kickers opportunities to hit bombs, kicking an oblong leather object off the ground, through a pair of narrow aluminum posts erected from the ground like a pair of mini twin towers, from over 150-feet away — but they still do not grade kickers on their inability to be automatic from such a preposterous distance.
ENTER KICKER U
Lane Kiffin proverbially said “TO HELL WITH THAT. I HAVE A STABLE OF THOROUGHBREDS WHO WILL HIT NUKES FROM END ZONE-TO END-ZONE, AND IF THEY DON’T, NEXT MAN UP!”
“GAME OVER, PRIVATE SCHOOL NERDS.”
Davis absolutely drilled a 56-yarder (that would’ve been good from 66 yards) to put the game out of reach. All joking aside, it was a pretty jaw-dropping moment for a number of reasons.
It was remarkable that Kiffin had confidence in a new kicker, in Davis a Texas A&M transfer who was supposed to be a punter and was rumored to have a massive leg with accuracy being optional, to execute the most consequential play of the game.
It was remarkable, that in a college football world in which kicking is questionable and bad far more often than it ever is competent — let alone good — that Ole Miss had one player (better put, a weapon) capable of executing the job.
It was far more remarkable that Ole Miss presumably had two finely-tuned little guys ready for the moment, sandwiched between a year in which one of them was ineligibly to play and was replaced by a one-year transfer — who was also consistently nails — to get this job done.
None of that made sense to you? It’s understandable. I have a tendency to be long-winded and ramble. But I’ll try to articulate what I mean.
Do you remember why Kiffin got this job? Forget the fact that he’s one of the best offensive minds in the sport and was over-qualified to take over an SEC West program starving for relevance (at the perfect time for Ole Miss). Do you remember what literally led to him having this opportunity? It was the infamous Piss and Miss — a celebration that altered more careers than any froggy millionaire booster could ever dream of affecting.
For the vast majority of you still hanging onto this column, I don’t have to rehash the 2019 Egg Bowl for you, the night in which the Piss and Miss was conceived. Elijah Moore lifting his leg to spray some invisible pee to water the grass in one of the turf-prided Mississippi State end zones in November of 2019 led to Matt Luke being fired and Kiffin being hired — and also a dense, lengthy list of trickledown effects that is a conversation for another day.
When Kiffin arrived, he didn’t have much time to address the kicker position, whether it was due to Covid, a scholarship crunch, or simply more pressing issues. He cannot be blamed for it. Logan made 6-10 field goals with a long of 39 yards during the 2020 season. His lack of usage was essentially due to his boss saving him from himself. That year, Kiffin, understandably, was like a desperate Las Vegas gambler, if it was between kicking one at the uprights or taking a shot on 4th down, the man was hammering his fourth down odds.
That all changed the next year when he signed a true freshman named Caden Costa. Whether fans want to admit it or not, Costa was a massive weapon for Ole Miss. Costa made 9-11 field goals from 30-49 yards and was 1-2 from 50-yards plus. That stat line is the envy of 95 percent of college coaches. Shortly before the Egg Bowl, it was discovered that Costa was primed to be suspended for a season due to a failed drug test that RebelGrove confirmed to be steroids.
In response, Kiffin landed a transfer portal kicker named Jonathan Cruz, who made 88 percent of his kicks, was 11-12 from 30-49 yards and was 1-2 from 50-plus yards. Cruz, was inexplicably, even better than the freshman All-American Costa.
Now, fast-forward to 2023. Costa is now eligible and presumably has clean pee. I just assumed it was his job to resume, as he did one hell of a job when his urine samples netted zero solid grey lines.
Well, boy was I wrong. In a manner that would make all MAIS athletes, and private school alums across the world, proud, Caden Costa has seemingly been replaced by another Caden — Caden Davis — a kid with a monster leg who effortlessly drilled a 56-yarder to ice the game. Both Costa and Davis, referred to in gated neighborhood groups across the southeast as Caden 1 and Caden 2, kicked in the season opener. But Saturday (being serious here) proved who won the job.
As much fun as my immature self is having with this self-manufactured kicker drama (solely me, to be clear), it is pretty remarkable that, in a sport in which quality kicking lacks across the board, that every single kicker Kiffin has recruited is a bonafide stud. This will win Ole Miss a game or more this season. Make no mistake about it. Costa won Ole Miss a game or two in 2021. Davis will do the same in 2023.
Whatever your thoughts are on Kiffin’s recruiting efforts, kicker is not an area in which you are allowed to question him, and it will prove to be massively important at some point this season. I guarantee you that.
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Actual final thoughts
Yes, Ole Miss is still figuring what is, and what it is not, on both sides of the football. You, as a fan, might be tickled with the result of the first two games, or, completely underwhelmed. I do not fault you for being in either category. Instead, I will pose a question that should give you some hope, after watching two weeks of football: who is your favorite in the SEC West?
Is it LSU, who had the doors blown off it by Florida State on Labor Day Eve?
Is it Alabama, who has a turnover prone quarterback, that got pushed around for 60 minutes by Texas at Bryant-Denney Stadium?
Is it Texas A&M, who lost to an average Miami team in a half-filled, soulless, professional stadium and gave up 48-points while proclaiming offense, not talent, was its problem?
Is it Arkansas, who was up 14-6 on Kent State at halftime on Saturday?
Is it Auburn, who tried every possible way to award a win to the home of free speech — Cal?. I mean seriously, Auburn was so bad in that game, netting 230 yards of total offense, that Hugh Freeze optionally took personal responsibility for something, much to the surprise of many — including one particular massage parlor in Tampa, Florida.
Is it Mississippi State, who was forced to overtime by a hapless Arizona team?
All of these teams have more redeeming qualities than what I described, but you get my point. Ole Miss is figuring out what it is, just like every other SEC West program — and maybe the SEC West is not as daunting as the last decade as the last decade, as you remember.
We will have more on Georgia Tech later this week.