Even in a 41-9 victory over Charlotte, it was a bit of a slog for Ole Miss, which is understandable given what looms for the Rebels in less than a week as the circus that is LSU rolls into Oxford.
Let’s take a look at what we learned in the win, and what it means for next week and beyond for Ole Miss.
I haven’t formed a concrete opinion on this team yet
I’ll get to the more pressing issues in a minute, but I would first like to offer a general thought on my opinion of this team, which is really a lack of a concrete opinion at all. I think Ole Miss has the best quarterback in the country, a top three running back and has the ability to be one of the most dynamic offenses in college football. I think the Rebels have talent on the defensive side of the football, but have had some concerning mistakes that mostly stem from a lack of communication on the back end of the defense in the secondary. I don’t know what to make of this team after eight quarters of football, with the latter four coming against an inferior opponent in a game in which the Rebels came in banged up at several positions, particularly on the defensive side.
I think it is a bit foolish to form strong opinions about Ole Miss through two games. The defense has not looked great through two weeks, but portions of it have shown flashes of being good, and in some cases, dominant. Maybe I am foolish for thinking this, but I just refuse to believe, at this point, that this defense is going to be bad given the talent it has on the depth chart. There is too much talent in all three phases for this group to be an obvious Achilles heel for the Rebels. We could glance back in a month and I could end up looking like a complete idiot for refusing to believe the defense is bad, and I’ll be the first to admit I am wrong, but I just can’t get there yet.
I think the offense has been fine. I think there are questions at receiver and on the offensive line, but as long as the Rebels have Chambliss taking snaps, they’ll be in every game they play this season.
I bring this up because it seems as if many fans and other media people have had no problem forming concrete opinions about Ole Miss — that the Rebels are bad on defense, clunky on offense, are going to lose next week and are staring 8-4 or worse in the face. Maybe I am just too chronically online, which is one of the few downsides of being in the writing/podcasting/media space, and that’s not actually the consensus opinion. But it just seems like there is a strangely negative opinion of an Ole Miss team that beat a ranked opponent at a neutral site and then handled a terrible group of five team by 32 points.
I don’t quite know what I think of this team yet. I still like the pieces on the roster on both sides of the football, despite the team not playing great football collectively in the first eight quarters of the season. I think forming a strong opinion on the Rebels is premature. Next week is an entirely different story. I think we are going to learn a lot about Ole Miss on Saturday night against LSU and I think the next four quarters of football for this team will perhaps be the most telling four quarters of the 2026 season.
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The secondary was a problem, again.
For the second consecutive week, the Ole Miss secondary had a couple of obvious coverage busts that left receivers wide open down the field. It may not show in the base-level statistics, as Charlotte threw for just 179 yards in the game, but there were obvious problems in the secondary if you watched the game. And, once again, they stemmed from either communication issues — guys not knowing what to do or what coverage Ole Miss was in. That’s a problem that you hope would’ve been mostly fixed after week one, particularly against such a weak opponent, but those issues remained. The secondary is probably the single biggest reason there is angst going into next week’s match up with LSU.
“We’ve got to learn from other guys’ mistakes. Everyone doesn’t get a ‘my bad.’ When we see it on tape, we have to have the ability to correct it” Pete Golding said. “We are going to continue to rotate guys and find five guys on the back end that do shit right. Because, right now, we don’t have five.”
Golding seemed particularly frustrated with the secondary for the second consecutive week. Antonio Kite and Sharif Denson did not play in this game. Both guys are starters. Kite left the Louisville game early on with an injury and Denson has yet to play this season with an injury that, to my knowledge, has only been disclosed as a “soft tissue injury”. Missing two starters is a tough thing to overcome. But against an opponent like Charlotte, it should not matter. Continuing to have major busts against an opponent like that is alarming. Golding has mentioned that the secondary is reeling from injuries, and that not having those two guys out there has hurt the Rebels, but again, it shouldn’t have mattered on Saturday — not that Golding was making excuses, he’s said multiple times that it is not an excuse or an acceptable outcome.
I also wonder if having those two out there would actually solve the coverage-bust problems. I understand the concept of starters being better players than back-ups, but the entire secondary seems to be lost at times and communicating poorly. Is having two starters back is going to fix that? It’s not as if the secondary is giving up explosive plays because it lacks the talent to cover the receivers. It’s guys being in the wrong place and not knowing what to do.
It sounds like both Kite and Denson should be back next week, which will help, but I am not sure if their presence alone solves the secondary’s problem. I wrote about this last week, but Golding had a very interesting quote after the Louisville game in which he talked about injuries in the secondary during preseason camp, and that guys were rotating to different positions a lot, but that it didn’t keep Golding from calling the defense as if the secondary was at full strength.
“In these big games, you have to be very multiple to have a chance to win,” Golding said after the win over Louisville. “It’s very easy to go vanilla early on to let them have a crutch. I wasn’t going to do that because that is not who we are going to be, and that is not what it takes to win championships. There were some of those things from a coaching standpoint to clean up as far as who is in the game and have they shown us the ability to do that or not. But, to me, you aren’t going to know until you get into it… Getting a couple of guys banged up in the back end didn’t help. Sharif (Denson) didn’t play, who has started all of camp. (Antonio) Kite goes out of this game early. I should have done a better job in the second half, to be honest with you, to not put too much on them, which I probably did.”
That’s all well and good, and I understood what Golding was saying at the time, but after another week of coverage busts that clearly stems from confusion on what to do, what coverage their in, or properly communicating either or both of those things, at what point do you simplify it so the secondary feels comfortable that it knows what do on every play and feels confident enough to execute it?
Golding added a lot of talent from the transfer portal to bolster what was already a decent secondary in 2025 that returned enough guys to feel good about. Golding has talked a lot about positional versatility in the secondary. He seems to like the idea of guys being able to play at multiple spots. He was really high on Florida State transfer Edwin Joseph, who was recruited to Tallahassee as a corner, but spent most of his career there playing nickel corner (slot corner) and safety. Denson played nickel and corner at Florida, and versatility was seemingly one his best attributes as a portal recruit. Joenel Aguero played nickel and safety at Georgia. Golding seems to really like the idea of being able to move guys around. But if you don’t have five guys on the field that know what they’re doing at all times, what good is positional versatility?
I wonder if Ole Miss goes back to the proverbial drawing board this week when it comes to the secondary and simplifies things a bit in the name of trying to put your best five guys out there, and allowing them them play freely and confidently rather than thinking about what they’re supposed to do and what coverage they are in. Ole Miss is about to face a quarterback in LSU’s Sam Leavitt that will turn the football over — he threw three interceptions against a terrible Louisiana Tech team — but will absolutely torch the Rebels if he is given wide open throws via coverage busts.
It sounds like they already tried to simplify some things coming into this week, at least to some degree
“I thought, this week, with this game plan being very simple, I was hoping to see a bigger improvement,” Golding said. “That is something we are going to have to go to work on tonight.”
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Kewan Lacy played.. a lot
I opined last week that after Lacy left the Louisville game with a bone bruise, that he wouldn’t take the field again until the LSU game. I didn’t see what Ole Miss gained from playing Lacy against Charlotte. Lacy carried the football more times than any running back in college football in 2025 (306 carries). What good would come of putting more tread on the tires against a team Ole Miss was going to obliterate?
Well, I was wrong. Lacy played and took essentially all the meaningful carries for Ole Miss in this game. Lacy toted the football 13 times for 87 yards and scored two touchdowns. Makhi Frazier carried it twice and J.T. Lindsey registered one carry.
I can’t really say I understand this one. I guess if Lacy was healthy and wanted to play, then he was going to play. We often over-analyze the risk of injuries in sports to the point of forgetting that these are world-class athletes who are highly-competitive people, and that football players do in fact want to play football. I just figured Ole Miss would take a more conservative approach to Lacy in this snoozer of a game. It was even more surprising to see the two running backs behind him have a combined total of three carries. I am not second guessing John David Baker or the Ole Miss coaching staff, I just found this kind of strange.
“There’s a part of this that’s getting guys in the flow of the offense,” Golding said. “Early in the season, there are so many new guys, you have to find some continuity within the group. Our goal was to go out there, really get rolling, and have some decisions to make going into the second half. I thought we were going to be able to do that, but our defense went out on the first drive in the second half and allowed points, which made it a three-score game. That didn’t allow us to do some things earlier that we would’ve liked to.. We wanted to get No. 5 (Lacy) rolling and get him going to allow him to enter conference play healthy.”
As long as Lacy is healthy, I suppose this isn’t really a big deal. But of all the guys with minor injuries entering the game, Lacy was the one I least expected to play.
There’s also another component of this. While I don’t want to assume a ton based on the carries dispersal against Charlotte, the coaching staff said for most of the offseason that they anticipated Lacy’s workload to be lighter this year due to more depth in the running back room. And while 13 carries in this game isn’t some insane number for Lacy, this game was not at all indicative of newfound depth in the running back room. This is something worth monitoring over the next couple of weeks as the Rebels enter the SEC schedule.
Cunningham had his first real moment as a Rebel
I wrote about the receiver room a few times in the preseason and did so again last week. It’s a mostly unproven group behind Deuce Alexander, who was excellent in the season-opening win over Louisville. Auburn transfer Horatio Fields had a nice game against the Cardinals, but Traylon Ray was the only other Ole Miss receiver to record a catch (2) in that game. Ole Miss is going to need more than that a receiver behind Alexander. There are intriguing options, like Syracuse transfers Johntay Cook and Darrell Gill. Sophomore Caleb Cunningham is another option and is probably the most fascinating of all of them.
Cunningham was a highly-rated four-star recruit from Choctaw County High School. Ole Miss landing him over Alabama and Mississippi State was a major recruiting win. He was injured for most of his freshman season. Golding mentioned in preseason camp that Cunningham was healthy and was finally looking like the guy they thought he would be. Cunningham didn’t play in last week’s win in Nashville.
“Managing some of the soft tissue stuff, there were very specific roles and packages that didn’t come up,” Golding said when asked about Cunningham after the win over Louisville. “That’s definitely a focus moving forward. We have got to get Caleb more involved as he gets healthier because he is an explosive player.”
That answer made me wonder how healthy Cunningham actually is. I wrote last week that if Cunningham is healthy, he would certainly play in this game, which he did. Cunningham had six catches for 65 yards in his first extensive action in an Ole Miss uniform. Six catches against a hapless Charlotte team is obviously not enough to declare Cunningham on a path to stardom, but it can only be seen as a very positive sign for both Cunningham and Ole Miss.
“Caleb’s a big receiver out there,” Chambliss said. “I feel like he can do a lot for us this year. He’s a big target, and I love throwing to a big guy. He’s got great hands. I am excited to get him going.”
Cunningham’s emergence could be a season-changing development for the Rebels if he becomes top-end SEC receiver. Again, we are a long way from that. But if Cunningham hadn’t played much in this game, it would definitely be a cause for concern.
He had his first real moment in an Ole Miss uniform on Saturday. Are there more coming in the near future?
Some other notable injury news
Golding said Ole Miss came out of this game pretty clean on the injury front. Here are a few injury situations to monitor entering the week.
- Right tackle Tommy Kinsler IV didn’t play in this game. He exited the win over Louisville in the second half with what appeared to be a leg injury. The right tackle position was the biggest question mark and potential point of weakness for this offensive line entering the season. Kinsler, a Miami transfer, beat out LSU transfer Carius Curne for the starting job. It was interesting, however, that when Kinsler went down in Nashville, it was Connor Howes that replaced him and not Curne. From what I could tell, Curne did not play in Saturday’s win until late in the second half. I don’t think the staff trusts Curne to play with the consistency needed to be a tackle in the SEC.
It sounds like Kinsler will be back for the LSU game, which is great news for an Ole Miss offensive line that, like most offensive lines in this current era of college football, lacks depth. Howes has acquitted himself well in place of Kinsler, but if Kinsler remains out, the Rebels are one more offensive line injury away from being in a very precarious spot.
- As I mentioned earlier, Denson should play against LSU. The staff was hopeful to have him available for this game, but they ultimately decided to give him some sort of injection that will ensure he will for sure be ready for “Tuesday” (Ole Miss’ most demanding practice of a typical game week). It sounds like he will “for sure” be available against LSU, as Golding put it.
- Golding said they were “hopeful” that Kite will be available for LSU but that they likely won’t know “until the end of the week”. I have covered football long enough to know that this type of phrasing usually means the guy is a longshot to play in the game. I hope I am wrong. If Kite can’t go, that means you will see a lot more of true freshman Dorian Barney and sophomore Dante Core — neither of whom have played many college snaps.
- Linebacker Keaton Thomas played in the win. He suffered a foot injury against Louisville. Seeing him back on the field is certainly a good sign for an Ole Miss defense that desperately needs a good performance next week.
- Tight end Caleb Odom did not play in this game. He apparently suffered a minor injury in the win over Louisville that, in full transparency, I didn’t catch at the time. I had no clue he was injured. He had a nice game against the Cardinals and will be a big part of this offense. Golding talked about Odom’s absence in a way that insinuated that he would be back next week, which is a good sign.
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Deuce Knight played and looked pretty good
Golding said that his ideal scenario entering this game is that Ole Miss would play well enough in the first half to bench all of the starters at halftime and that Deuce Knight would start the second half for the Rebels. It sounds like the line of demarcation was a four-score game. Because Ole Miss led 27-0 at halftime, then allowed a field goal on Charlotte’s first offensive possession of the second half, followed by a three-and out from the Ole Miss offense. This sequence to begin the third quarter sounds like it threw a wrench in the Rebels’ plans to rest starters and play younger, less-experienced players.
Knight finally entered the game in the fourth quarter. He led an eight-play, 70-yard touchdown drive that culminated in Knight hurdling a Charlotte defender en route to a rushing touchdown. He flashed the tantalizing athleticism that made him a highly-touted four-star recruit out of high school. Knight is a Lucedale, MS, native who signed with Hugh Freeze and Auburn out of high school. Knight actually started a game last year for Auburn in what was a disastrous final season for Freeze on The Plains. He is a gifted athlete, at 6-foot-5, 225 lbs., and a tremendous thrower of the football.
If Ole Miss can keep him in the program after next year (I say that just as a qualifier as I would for any player on the team in this portal era, nothing more), he’s got a chance to be a star one day.
Horatio Fields, who played with Knight at Auburn last year, said in his postgame press conference that Knight told his teammates earlier this week that he was going to hurdle someone if he got in the game. So, apparently, he is a prophet in addition to being an incredible athlete.
It was a small sample size against a bad team, but I must admit, I was a bit in awe of Knight. I’d like to see more of him at some point this year.
Now, the circus arrives
The game that every college football fan in America has had circled for the last nine months is upon us. LSU returns to Oxford with a narcissistic sociopath of a head coach who possesses the social intellect of a 16-year-old child.
I am both glad this week is here and looking forward to September 20th when this game has passed, as it will mean we can cover the remaining nine games on Ole Miss’ schedule in a much more normal fashion, and that the oxygen-sucking melodrama that is the ‘Lane Kiffin returns’ storyline is in the rearview.
We’ll dive more into this game, why it feels like so much more than a game and all the other subplots later this week.
Golding and Chambliss were asked about it on Saturday night after the win over Charlotte. Both wisely downplayed it.
“Just super excited for SEC play, and to be able to do it at home for the crowd,” Golding said. “Tonight was awesome — good to get back in the Vaught and just feel that energy, felt like we picked up right where we left off from Tulane (last December). Good to get back in front of the fans, the students were awesome, good to have that juice. And it’s for real now. It’s SEC play. Every game counts for two. We wanted to come in, have a really good week, and focus on ourselves. We still have a lot to clean up, and then we’ll have to be at our best.”
Chambliss echoed the sentiment. Neither mentioned Kiffin by name.
“It’s going to be a crazy weekend in Oxford, but it’s just another game,” Chambliss said. “Everything going on outside of football really doesn’t matter to us. We are just worried about football.”
I think you’ll see a similar approach from Golding and Ole Miss throughout the week, which I think is wise. I am sure Kiffin will say something inflammatory on more than one occasion this week because of his unquenchable thirst for attention, but I don’t think you’ll see Ole Miss take the bait, at least not publicly.
We’ll have more coverage this week. As always, thanks for reading.