Ole Miss survives, Mullen fired, all eyes are on the Egg Bowl
Some brief Vanderbilt thoughts, Mullen firing encapsulates madness of coaching carousel and an early look at the Egg Bowl
Hope everyone is having a good Monday. We’ve got a new podcast out with former Ole Miss recruiting specialist Weldon Rotenberg discussing Ole Miss’s 31-17 win over Vanderbilt, Matt Corral’s legacy, how the Rebels match up against Mississippi State and an insane coaching carousel that is only going to get weirder. Check that out here or anywhere you get podcasts.
We have a few game thoughts, some early Egg Bowl match up stuff and Kiffin rumors to get to today.
Ole Miss wins ugly over Vandy on senior day
I suppose I should’ve seen this coming, or at least entertained the possibility of it more than I did last week. Ole Miss won. It was far from a thing of beauty. If there were ever such thing as a trap game, letdown game, whatever cliché you want to use, it was this one. The Rebels had just come off an emotional, physical win over Texas A&M and faced the most important Egg Bowl in seven years five days later. If there were ever a time that human nature comes into play and this staff and players were looking ahead, it’d be this one. I’d even go as far as to wonder how much Egg Bowl prep happened last week. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Ole Miss won. It wasn’t pretty, but it won, and the Rebels are one victory away from its first 10-win regular season in program history.
I don’t have a ton of analysis as it pertains to this game, but I listed some thoughts I wrote down while watching.
Vanderbilt seemed to take advantage of Ole Miss’s tendency to keep everything in front of them and not give up explosive plays. Yes, it’s not great that this version of the Commodores compiled 454 yards of offense, but they averaged 5.5 yards per completion and 4.3 yards per rush. It was death by a thousand papercuts.
Ole Miss’s inability to sustain drives allowed Vanderbilt to control the ball and the clock. The Rebels were 1-of-8 on third down and the Commodores possessed the football for close to 39 minutes of this game. It’s sort of wild Ole Miss scored 31 points and won by double digits in a game in which it converted one third down.
Vanderbilt running the football well on Ole Miss to the tune of 213 yards on 49 attempts is the only potentially concerning thing to me about this game defensively. But given the way the defense has played since the Arkansas game, I tend to give to give them the benefit of the doubt. Hell, Vanderbilt ran 93 plays. Some of that is the defense’s fault, but the offense not sustaining drives didn’t help either. I just have a hard time believing that the same defense that manhandled Texas A&M at the line of scrimmage and stifled the Aggies’ running game would struggle this badly against Vanderbilt’s rushing attack more than once if this game were played 10 times.
Vanderbilt also played well. Ole Miss played sloppy. Both things can be true. The Commodores went with Mike Wright at quarterback, which gave them a running element at the quarterback position that Ken Seals doesn’t offer. It was pretty effective. Vanderbilt also played with a lot more energy. You could’ve mistaken the touchdown score to cut it to 31-17 for a game-winning touchdown to send them to Atlanta. I don’t even really mean that as an insult. Credit to those guys for not rolling over and quitting after a completely demoralizing season.
The offense struggled to run with consistent success. That’s probably the only real thing I takeaway from this game from an offensive standpoint. It’s not great. Ole Miss misses Ben Brown. The Rebels will need to find a way to run the football better against Mississippi State. I don’t know how effective tempo will be in this game. State is going to go slow when it has the ball. Ole Miss simply has to run the ball to sustain drives or it will be in a world of trouble on Thanksgiving night.
It was an ugly game. It’s the first time since the Matt Luke era I legitimately struggled to pay attention at certain points in the game. It was incredibly boring. But Ole Miss still won by two scores and went 7-0 at home for the first time in nearly 30 years. On to what is now the most important game of the season.
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Rebels go for 10-win season in Starkville
The stage is set now. Both teams are relevant and playing good football. Ole Miss is going to need a special performance from Matt Corral and this offense if it wishes to leave Starkville with a win. The Rebels are healthier on that side of the ball than they have been in nearly two months. They cannot afford to sputter early on in this game because Mississippi State has played better in the second half all year.
I think Ole Miss matches up pretty well with Mississippi State defensively. Getting pressure without blitzing will be key and actually getting to the quarterback when the defense does blitz will be key. Will Rogers has figured out how to run this air raid scheme and the two ways it gashes opponents is when he has time to throw and when the blitz comes and doesn’t get there.
This is going to be a fascinating matchup. It’ll be a chance for Matt Corral to author one more legendary chapter to his fantastic career and for this program to reach a milestone it hasn’t ever reached before, as well as cement its status as a New Year’s Six bowl participant. We’ll get into the game more over the next couple of days, but it’s a tall task for Ole Miss and should be a fantastic game.
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Around the SEC:
There wasn’t much of an SEC slate this week, but we will hit a couple of games before we get to the Dan Mullen news.
Alabama holds off Arkansas, 42-35 - If it weren’t for a terrific Bryce Young performance, this game might have turned out different. Arkansas simply couldn’t contain Alabama’s speed at receiver and Young was tremendous. With that said, the Razorbacks are tougher than hell, and for all the talk about what K.J. Jefferson isn’t as a quarterback, he’s really effective at what they ask him to do and is turning into a good player. He’s also a hell of a lot of fun to watch play football. I doubt many teams want to play Arkansas right now.
Missouri beat Florida, 24-23. - Dan Mullen was fired shortly after. It’s sort of fitting that the Tigers put the final nail in his coffin after what he instigated in last year’s game.
South Carolina beat Auburn, 21-17. - Shane Beamer and the Gamecocks are going bowling in year one. That’s a remarkable accomplishment with the roster he inherited. Auburn was without Bo Nix, but, man, what a rough month for Bryan Harsin’s team. He may not be long for this world in Auburn. It just doesn’t seem like a great fit.
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Dan Mullen out at Florida
Boy, did this situation deteriorate quickly. Hours after Florida lost at Missouri in overtime, Scott Stricklin fired Mullen after just four seasons. Mullen finished with with a 34-15 record and a 21-13 mark in SEC play — a year removed from winning the SEC East and going to the program’s third consecutive New Year’s Six Bowl. Perhaps the most indicative part of the insane time we live in when it comes to college football and coaches being hired, fired and the widespread impatience from athletic departments is that no one seemed to be remotely surprised that Mullen didn’t see a 2022. I thought he was safe for at least one more year. That’s usually what happens when a coach fires a couple guys on his staff before the season ends. It’s college football’s version a sacrificial lamb. But from reading local reporters over the last week, they all hinted at the fact that the conversation would dramatically change if Florida lost to Mizzou. That proved to be true. And look, let’s not pretend like this was solely about on-field results, or even mostly about on-field results. Mullen is a brash personality. Actually, scratch that, he’s an arrogant asshole. He’s a good football coach, but he’s arrogant and prickly. I mean, look at the statement he put out today. Good lord.
Mullen wasn’t recruiting well, which was thought to be the one thing that would lead to his demise when he took the job. He’s a good football coach and a great developer of talent, but he isn’t a good recruiter. Even worse, he refused to merely acknowledge it might be a problem. As ridiculous as I find a coaching being fired for a 34-15 mark after just his third career non-winning season, I understand the context of what seemed like an untenable situation, and that Stricklin was likely delaying the inevitable if he let Mullen stick around for another year.
With that said, and this isn’t even really specific to Mullen, we are in the middle of a bizarre time in college football when it comes to expectations, patience and program building. Job security is as rare as it’s ever been. There is no time to build a program if immediate results are absent. The 2019 National Champion fired its coach. Mullen got canned a year after going to the SEC Championship game. Again, I get that nuance is needed in both situations, but you’re seeing it across the sport. It’s mostly driven by the money. Every school keeps making more and more money. TV contracts keep going up. Salaries keep going up. LSU might end up paying someone $12 million to coach football. Don’t confuse this as me feeling bad for any of these guys. They all leave these programs as very rich men with generational wealth. I just wonder what the purpose of all of this is. Why is LSU trying to pay Jimbo Fisher or Lincoln Riley a record amount of money to come coach its football team — when nothing seems to be a certainty in this sport — and Billy Napier could probably had for a half of that?
It’s all a crapshoot. No one really knows how any hire is going to work out. Florida wanted Chip Kelly and Scott Frost and settled for Mullen. How many of you think either of the former two would’ve gone 29-9 in their first three years? So, what’s the purpose? It’s sort of a rhetorical question. I understand why. There is no incentive to get a good football coach at 60 cents on the dollar because all of these programs are so rich that there is no reason to save money. There is no value in getting option B or C at a discount unless option A turned down the absurd amount of money they threw at him.
Aside from money, I think the four team playoff is driving some of this madness. It hasn’t been good for the sport, in my opinion. We all still yell and argue about the sham of a playoff every year, in part because it’s not a playoff. It’s an invitational. How a bunch of dudes got into a room eight years ago and said, “hmm, we have five Power 5 conferences, what if we created a four team playoff that ensures at least one of us gets screwed out of it each year? Genius! Better yet, let’s select it on completely subjective criteria. That’s a bulletproof plan,” is still beyond my comprehension. But even beyond that, it’s driving all of these programs insane. There are 20 programs that think they should be in the four-team playoff most every year. There are another 20 that badly want to be in it and think they should at least flirt with making it once every half decade or so, when, in reality, there are five programs in this sport that have superior talent and resources to all others and take up the four spots every single season. In the eight years of the playoff, four schools have gotten 20 of the 32 total bids. Only 11 programs have ever appeared in the playoff. There’s no parity, yet programs across the country keep growing more impatient and irrational about making it. Again, I understand why, I just find the dynamic fascinating.
Change is coming, and it will create a healthier ecosystem for the sport. The 12-team playoff will give programs a real chance at making it. Programs like Ole Miss, Mississippi State and others will have a real shot each year at making the sport’s postseason, which is the entire point of the postseason. That’s what I never understood about anti-expansion people:
“Do you really want to see more blowouts? There are already enough in the four-team playoff.” Who cares? Since when is that the point? The NFL has six teams in the postseason every year that have no real shot of winning the Super Bowl, but 3/4 of the league is still in the playoff hunt at Thanksgiving every year. That keeps people interested and invest.
“College football has the greatest regular season in sports. Playoff expansion devalues that.” Oh, really? Remember that Texas A&M-Ole Miss game a couple of weeks ago? What an awesome game. It meant absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. Wouldn’t you want more games that matter in the season’s final month? The devaluing the regular season argument was always incredibly dumb to me.
Anyway, change is coming. And it will be for the betterment of the sport. I just wonder what effect it will have on this coaching carousel madness we are watching unfold this year. I imagine the middle class of the sport will become more irrational and impatient, rather than the upper-tier programs that still don’t quite have a realistic shot at earning a seat at the table. That’s healthier, in my opinion. It makes more sense to be unsatisfied with 7-5 when 9-3 might get you into the postseason, whereas, right now, I look at Florida and wonder “what do you expect? Who is going to do better?”
Kiffin meets with media
Lane Kiffin met with the media on Monday to preview Mississippi State. There were a couple of things that stuck out.
Kiffin once again took a shot at attendance. He was asked about the crowd size and the environment on Thursday night and said, “I don’t know. We didn’t travel well to our own game last week, so hopefully we travel better to this game.”
I understand that Kiffin is always marketing. He wants to create as hostile of environment as Vaught-Hemingway Stadium allows, generate more interest and get fans to go to games, but this is bordering on over the top. I get it, but it was the weekend before Thanksgiving, the students didn’t have school the next week and it was Vanderbilt. Attendance isn’t exclusively an Ole Miss problem, and if there were ever a game in which the crowd might dwindle a bit, it’s a 2-8 Vanderbilt team on a Saturday night the week before Thanksgiving. This just seemed unnecessary.
Kiffin was asked about the toxicity of the rivalry diminishing since he and Mike Leach got here:
“I don't think I knew about the toxicity as you referred to it. I've heard about it here. Someone said the other day that it doesn't really make sense that me and Leach are here because we get along. Maybe we were brought here to bring a state together. You shouldn’t hate someone because they go to a certain school. I've always liked him. He's funny, he's done a great job wherever he's been.
Kiffin doesn’t care about this rivalry. I think that’s a good thing. He treats it as another game, an important one, but another game that he and the Rebels need to win. That lack of emotion will help, because emotion often breeds irrationality in games like this.
On the horizon
We’ll have more on the coaching carousel and how it affects Lane Kiffin tomorrow
We will get deeper into the Egg Bowl matchup as well.
I will have a Wednesday podcast with a Mississippi State guest and a Friday reaction show.
That’s all from me today. Thanks for being a loyal subscriber. Send to your friends and tell them to join on the fun by smashing the subscribe button below. It is free.