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The Basket Weaving Bowl: Ole Miss's No. 1 Offense Runs Into a Texas Defense That Allows Nothing Deep
By MVPeav · @MVPeav ·
Texas has lost two straight, to Oklahoma and Florida, both unranked, both by 3, and the reward for that is No. 7 Ole Miss walking into Austin on Saturday night to see what's left.
This one comes with a soundtrack. Back in May, Sark said all you have to do is take basket weaving and you can get an Ole Miss degree, and Ole Miss was annoyed enough to ask the SEC to look at it. Five months later the Rebels are 5-1 with the most efficient offense in the country and the Horns can't run the ball.
And Arch Manning gets to do all of this against the school where his grandfather Archie and his uncle Eli starred. Fun week to be a Manning.
Kickoff is 7:30 ET.
Ole Miss: Moves the Ball on Everybody, Stops Almost Nobody
Nobody in the country stays on schedule like Ole Miss. The Rebels' offense sits 1st in FBS with a 52% success rate, a fancy way of saying they turn 2nd and 8 into 3rd and 2 all afternoon and never let a drive die of natural causes.
Trinidad Chambliss is the reason. He's thrown for 1,676 yards and 14 touchdowns, and his line has let him get sacked 5 times in six games, the fewest in the SEC. A quarterback who's never on the ground and never behind the sticks is a miserable thing to defend.
The other side of the ball is a different conversation. Ole Miss is 102nd in EPA per play allowed, and when Florida got a look at that defense it hung 52 on it in Gainesville. The LSU win and the Louisville win were real, but both of those were games the offense had to carry.
Last week was 31-3 over Missouri, so maybe the defense is coming around, or maybe Missouri just didn't have the firepower to find out. I lean toward the second one.
Texas: A Top-10 Defense Attached to a 95th-Ranked Offense
The Texas defense is the best unit on the field Saturday and it isn't close. The Horns give up 272.5 yards a game, 7th in FBS, and they allow an explosive play on 7% of snaps, the lowest rate in the country. You can move on them, but you do it one 6-yard gain at a time, and most offenses run out of patience before they run out of field.
The pass defense is the part Ole Miss should be nervous about: 5.6 yards per attempt allowed, 3rd in FBS. Chambliss has been living on efficiency, and this is a defense built to erase the big play entirely.
Then there's the offense, and I don't know how to say this nicely. Texas is 95th in EPA per play. It runs the ball at 3.6 yards a carry. It's sitting at -3 in turnover margin. Every one of those is a different way of saying the same thing. Drives don't go anywhere and sometimes end with the other team holding the ball.
Florida is the game that tells the whole story. Manning got sacked 5 times, and the last one came with 1:58 left, a fumble that ended the Horns' last chance in a 27-24 loss. Oklahoma by 3 the week before that, and now a locker room that has to be wondering what happened.
And yet. This is the same team that beat Ohio State 24-23 in Austin and went to Knoxville and beat Tennessee 20-17. The defense can beat anybody. The question is whether the offense will let it.
The Matchup That Decides It: Texas's Run Game vs. a Soft Ole Miss Front
Everybody wants to talk about the No. 1 success-rate offense against the No. 1 explosive-play defense, and sure, that's the marquee. Ole Miss will move it. Texas will make them do it 12 plays at a time. I think both sides mostly get what they want there: the Rebels score, just not in bunches.
The game gets decided on the other side, where it's bad against bad. Ole Miss gives up 153.5 rushing yards a game, 71st in FBS. Texas runs for 134.5 a game, 85th. One of those weaknesses is going to look like a strength for three hours, and whichever one it is decides the night.
That matters more than the Chambliss side because of what it does to Arch. If Hollywood Smothers and Raleek Brown are getting 4 and 5 yards a pop, Manning gets to throw on 2nd and 5 and the sack problem mostly goes away. If they're getting 3.6 like they have all year, he's dropping back on 3rd and 7 against a defense that knows it, and we already saw that movie against Florida: 5 sacks and a fumble to end it.
Ole Miss doesn't have that problem. Chambliss has gone down 5 times in six games. One quarterback in this game has been clean all season and the other got buried in his own stadium.
Basket Weaving, Kiffin's Exit and the Manning Family Reunion
Start with the quote. Sark isn't wrong. It's also a dig you could aim at basically any school in college football these days, so I'm not treating it as some deep insight into Oxford.
What I do believe is that quote is still plastered on a board in the locker room over there, and the Rebels are coming to Austin with a chip on their shoulder and a point to prove. That's a bad combination to hand a 5-1 team with the No. 1 offense in the country.
Pete Golding is the guy carrying it in, by the way. Lane Kiffin left for LSU before the playoff, Golding got the keys, and a Saturday night in Austin as the No. 7 team is about as big as a road trip gets for a first-year head coach.
And then there's Arch, who gets to spend Saturday staring across at the school where Archie and Eli starred. The Manning name means something in Oxford, and he's the one in burnt orange trying to ruin their night.
One more thing before the sims. Florida beat both of these teams. The Gators beat Texas 27-24 in Austin and beat Ole Miss 52-28 in Gainesville. Lose by 3 or lose by 24, pick your flavor, but that gap tells you which defense you'd rather have on your side.
What 10,000 Sims Say
Texas wins 58% of my sims, and the typical one lands 27-24. Before anyone in Oxford fires off an email, half of my sims land between Ole Miss by 7 and Texas by 12, so this is a coin flip that happens to land on the Horns a little more often.
The version where Texas wins is easy to spot. The Horns run for about 190 yards and Manning gets sacked about twice. In the version Ole Miss wins, Texas runs for about 131 and Manning goes down about 3 times, which sounds a lot like the Florida game.
The Rebels' run game flips the same way: about 121 yards when they win, about 85 when they lose. That's the Texas front deciding whether Chambliss gets to play on schedule or has to win it from the pocket.
The quarterback lines are the tell, tho. Chambliss's median is 280 passing yards and 2 touchdowns. Manning's is 233 and 1. Even in a game Texas wins more often than not, Chambliss outpasses Arch, which means Texas isn't winning this with Arch's arm.
Bottom Line: Texas Wins It on the Ground or Not at All
Two straight losses doesn't bother me much. It's what produced them that does. Dropping a pair of 3-point games to unranked teams is a rough stretch, but an offense that gets 3.6 yards a carry is the actual problem, and nothing Texas has put on the field this year suggests there's a better version of it waiting to show up.
That leaves the Horns with one path: hold this thing in the teens. Can they do that against an Ole Miss offense this good? I have my doubts. Texas gives up 17.8 a game, so the ask isn't absurd on its face, but the Rebels score 37.5 a game and haven't looked like a team that plans to stop.
The case for Texas is the one my sims keep making. Ole Miss's front is soft, Smothers and Brown can live on it, and if Manning is throwing on 2nd and 4 instead of 3rd and 9, the sacks disappear and 27 points is reachable. The defense will hold up its end either way.
But if this turns into Manning against Chambliss, dropback for dropback, Ole Miss wins going away. One of those quarterbacks has been sacked 5 times all season. The other got sacked 5 times in one game.
Texas wins this on the ground or it doesn't win it at all, and I'll believe that run game when I see it.