Ole Miss dropped its first game of the season over the weekend, losing to Florida 52-28 in a second-half blowout. The Gators rushed for over 300 yards, including six scores on the ground, exposing Ole Miss’ clearest weakness.
With the loss, Ole Miss fell to 3-1 (1-1 SEC) on the year, also dropping five spots (No. 9) in the latest Associated Press Poll. No. 21 Florida jumped 13 spots to move into the poll’s top-10 as it improved to 4-0 (2-0 SEC), following its home thrashing of the Rebels in Week 4.
In Episode 99 of The Rebel Rundown, Ole Miss On SI’s Tyler Komis takes a look at the Week 4 loss in Gainesville and what it means going into the bye week.
“That was an old fashioned butt-whooping right there,” Pete Golding said Saturday following the Rebels’ first loss of the season. “I thought in all three phases, especially in the first half, we just couldn’t really get anything going offensively. Third down was a struggle defensively losing leverage, having missed tackles, explosives in the run game and in the pass game. Didn’t think we executed really well on special teams either. Kickoff was an issue all night and the return game and it started with bad field position. So you play a really good football team that’s coached really well in a tough environment. You got to be you got to play better on all three phases. And that starts at the top. We got to do a better job of coaching them and obviously we didn’t do the things necessary Monday through Friday in order to play a really good football team. So we’re going to have a lot more of these. I just left the locker room and I told them after the LSU game, man look this is one game. This doesn’t define your season. You know this is ‘What have you done for me lately?’ business. And it’s no different for tonight. You know the sun’s going to come up tomorrow and we’re going into a bye week and we really gotta evaluate the things that we’re doing well. We need to continue to do well. And we’ve got a lot of issues right now in all three phases that we’ve got to address, starting with coaching and playing in order to put a better product on tape.”
“You got to make a decision that you know what, I’m not okay with that. And that’s not okay. And that starts at the top for us. And you know, and we put some things on tape that we’ve got to clean up and we’re going to continue to get exposed as long as they’re on tape. But I think it’s a good time for the bye week for us to really evaluate how we’re doing it. The guys that are doing it, are they doing it consistently enough? Do we have some guys that we need to look at to play better football? So I told our group I love our group. I think they’re wired the right way. But right now it’s not a good enough product. And that starts with me.”
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