No. 10 Ole Miss suffered their second loss of the season to No. 18 Auburn. Injuries piled up, and the offense had a hard time getting anything going.
On their second possession of the first quarter, Ole Miss quarterback Matt Corral was stepping back to throw, and as he was moving around the pocket, it appeared that he tweaked his left foot.
Corral looked like he was in a lot of pain, as he had to get helped off the field and carted into the locker room. But 10 minutes later, Corral walked back to the Ole Miss sideline under his own power, ready to get back in the game.
“I thought the way he came off, it was really bad,” Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin said when asked about Corral’s injury. “You know, like broken. I was kind of surprised that he’d come back, especially to come back and have some type of movement skill.”
“I couldn’t feel my ankle, heard a pop, and honest to God didn’t know what it was,” Corral said about his injury and how he came back so quickly. “I couldn’t feel it for five minutes and got an x-ray. I told them if nothing was broken, I’m going back in.”
Corral was put into a difficult situation. Ole Miss was depleted with injuries on the offensive side of the ball.
Offensive lineman Ben Brown had season-ending shoulder surgery after the game against Tennessee and Jonathan Mingo, Braylen Sanders and Dontario Drummond, all three being the Rebels’ top wide receivers, were out for the game. Drummond did start in the game but was forced to sit out for the majority of the second half with a hamstring injury.
Ole Miss’ offense was led by wide receiver transfer from Western Kentucky University Jahcour Pearson and by tight end Casey Kelly, who both had career games. Pearson and Kelly both reeled in seven receptions. Pearson went for 135 yards and Kelly had 81.
The Rebels had plenty of opportunities to score in the red zone, but they couldn’t capitalize. Corral threw a costly interception as the Rebels were about to score, and Ole Miss went for it on fourth down on three different possessions in the red zone and couldn’t convert on any of them.
“We don’t make three fourth downs in the red zone and throw another interception, so that’s four times in the red zone with no points. That’s going to be hard to win,” Kiffin said when talking about their opportunities to score. “So, to be in an 11 point game with that says you must be doing something right on the other side of the ball, which we did on defense.”
The Rebel defense seemed to be on their heels in the first half, giving up 28 points to the Auburn offense led by junior quarterback Bo Nix, who rushed in for a couple of scores.
Defensive coordinator D.J. Durkin did a good job of making adjustments at halftime to turn it around on defense. Ole Miss gave up only three points the entire second half. The only downside? The Rebels only scored three as well.
“I thought we played well by tackling,” Kiffin said about how the defense adjusted in the second half. “Bo (Nix) keeps drives alive as you’ve seen in the LSU game. You can be right there and you can’t tackle the guy and that happened to us early on. But, he was getting out of them and we started making some of them.”
Defensive lineman Sam Williams had another great game, posting five tackles and a sack. Although, penalties did hurt them as the game went on.
The Rebels had seven penalties during the game. That is something Kiffin is trying to fix as Ole Miss ranks first among FBS teams in penalties per game with 9.7.
The Rebels will look to bounce back in their next game when former Ole Miss head coach Hugh Freeze comes back to Oxford along with his Liberty Flames football team. That game will be played this Saturday at 11 a.m. CST.
