Ole Miss Rebels 10, Alabama Crimson Tide 23 - Postgame Report

The announcers were going through the replay and could only see a potential hands to the face against the Alabama. Then the refs announce that it was against No. 2 on Ole Miss’ defense, who happened to be standing on the side lines, nowhere close to being in on the play. The amount of blown calls/no calls in the game was ridiculous. As for our offense we definitely can’t afford so many dropped passes or poor blocking by the o-line and expect to win many games. I remember seeing Sowell try to cut the defensive ends legs out from under him by dropping to the ground several times just to be thrown to the ground and the defender get through. I wish he would just body up against the defender when this happens. The defense was great in this game and show good progress. Hopefully we can continue to improve and pull an upset over Arkansas. Given the defense they showed against Auburn we should at least be able to run our offense effectively next weekend.

Alabama is the better team, and would probably beat us 9 out of 10 times this season in T-town. However, I thought last night we kind of let an opportunity slip through our fingers. Before I go on, let me say that Bama played really well on defense and deserved to win that game. Officiating wasn’t great, but most of the time they were right. We shot ourselves in the foot with some dumb penalties. The only two calls that I thought were questionable were huge within the flow of the game though: (1) the roughing the kicker penalty that resulted in Bama’s first TD (2) the offsides call on the onside kick. The hands to the face call late in the game was horrendous, but didn’t really affect the outcome.

Our D played great. You really can’t heap enough praise on them. I wish they had played this way all season up to this point. If they can continue to play this well the rest of the season we will be a tough out for anyone left on our schedule. The offense was, as Ghost said, pathetic. I actually thought Masoli did relatively well. He avoided pressure well, didn’t take sacks and got rid of the ball when necessary, and did the best with what he was given. He had some receivers drop some really good passes. He had the entire Alabama D-line in his face as soon as the ball was snapped in the first half. I thought playcalling was alright for the most part. We had to abandon the run a little bit when we got down so much early. I thought the possession where we recovered the Bama fumble was pretty bad playcalling though. If I remember right, we had it first and ten on their 20 and they called for Masoli to line up under center and take a 5 stop drep and make a pass that was almost picked off. If there ever was a time to run the ball, it was then, and we asked Masoli to do something he is not very good at it (pocket passing).

My biggest beef was with our offensive execution in general. I played basketball growing up, not football, so maybe someone can help me out here. Is it that hard to get back in the groove after a bye week? Our WR’s dropped a lot of passes and we just seemed to be out of sync all night. I understand some of that goes to the Bama defense. I just remember sitting their watching the game and repeatedly thinking, “We had two weeks to prepare and this is the best we can execute?” Like I said, I wasn’t too upset with playcalling considering the circumstances. But we had several plays where the RB lined up on the wrong side and Masoli went to hand it off (or keep it) and he would go left and the RB would be on his right. Not sure who was at fault, or maybe I am just not remembering the game correctly.

I thought Masoli tried to do too much by himself, & threw off his back foot several times instead of setting his feet, but I know he had pressure. Just play within yourself and trust in your teammates.You don’t have to do it all on your own.
 
WR- too many dropped passes, but you came on in the 2nd half and made some big 3rd down conversions. I only wish we would have thrown to the TE’s at least once.

O-line has improved so much! Remember when we couldn’t get 1 yard on 3rd down at the first of the year? You guys need to bring it the rest of the season, your no longer freshmen. Great job Markuson.

Defense, best effort all the way around and great tackling. Rebel Defense shut down the premier running game in the nation. Secondary started slow, but has come a long way. You were put in bad situations all game and limited bama in the red zone to FG’s. GREAT short yardage stops on 2nd & 3rd down & 1 forcing bama to punt. Tyrone Nix has made some good adjustments, including covering backs out of the backfield & some new blitzes.

Special teams did a very good job, even though we outkicked the punt coverage, but we still made tackles that punished the return man and really didn’t give up a lot of yards.

The penalties & the lack of production in the first half killed us, but I am very proud of this team and where they have come from week 1. Keep working Rebels.

In the big-picture history of Ole Miss vs Alabama, we lost an opportunity here to beat the defending national champions on their home field on homecoming. The team and the crowd were dead, with about a third of the crowd leaving at half time and over half gone by a minute into the fourth quarter. They were beatable.

However, although our defense played fantastic it didn’t seem like overall we were ‘sharp’ as a team, with the primary ways this killed us being dumb penalties and dropped passes. These led to AWFUL field position issues throughout the first half, which is tough on any SEC road team. If my rough tally was right at halftime, we had given them almost as many yards in penalties as they had managed in total offense, and far more than we had generated in total offense. And we had multiple drops where you could just hear the whole stadium go through the “oh crap — thank God” cycle, when we could have turned that into “oh crap — what has happened to our invincible D?” and really piled it on to last week’s loss.

On our third offensive play of the game, we dropped a pass. I had a terrible angle on it, but it looked like it was totally catchable. Was it? From my angle on the rest of the field, it looked like he had dozens of yards if not a touchdown. Quite a different start than 3-and-out.

A few other notes:
- They almost never showed replays in the stadium. Maybe 10 the whole game?
- Their pregame and during-game really wasn’t that impressive, all things considered. I think ours is objectively better, and LSU’s is far better. They work the 13 national championships into a lot of things (as they should), but in general just not the sort of tradition-rich impressive stadium environment you might expect.
- All their cheers involved spelling or saying BAMA or saying Roll Tide Roll. I got the impression that was about all the complexity many of the fans could handle.
- A number of idiot fans called me “black bear” or some such on multiple occasions like that was somehow derogatory. After returning from a week hiking in the TN mountains where I actually saw a black bear, I don’t have a problem with where we can run with this mascot theme.

that Markieth Summers has always been disappointing, but wasn’t Bolden a decent receiver out of the backfield at one point? Can’t remember a game this year where he has not dropped at least one easy pass. Several games it has been more than one.