The national sports media has been fawning all over Lane Kiffin since Ole Miss managed to hang with Alabama for three quarters of a game during the Covid-plagued 2020 season.
Those over-the-top expectations persisted into this year despite the fact that “Joey Freshwater” has only gone .500 (he’s currently 7-7) since returning to the SEC last year. As recently as last week, national commentators were speculating on Ole Miss’ prospects for making the College Football Playoff field.
I don’t pretend to be able to predict future commentary, but thanks to Auburn, I do think we’ve heard the last of that particular storyline.
And while I thought Ole Miss was overrated by the media coming into this game, “overrated” isn’t the same thing as “bad.”
Kiffin has borrowed many pace and formation concepts that flummoxed his one-and-done Tennessee team when it faced Gus Malzahn’s first Auburn offense way back in 2009. He then supplemented it with a heavy dose of big-time passing game savvy.
The results are impressive. The Rebel Black Bear Landshark Ackbars went from a joke to an offensive machine in very short order.
Dazzled by all that flash, almost everybody in the national press assumed as a matter of course that Ole Miss would win at Jordan-Hare Saturday for only the fourth time in their history.
That didn't happen because Bryan Harsin’s recovery plan, just ten months in, already has eclipsed Kiffin’s.
While the Auburn offense put in a solid if somewhat unspectacular performance, rolling up nearly 500 yards of balanced offense and holding the lead from its first possession through the final buzzer, the Tigers' defense was the big story this week.
I was seriously worried about Auburn’s prospects on defense going into this month. The complete lack of a pass rush against Penn State compounded with a shambolic first half against lowly Georgia State made me seriously wonder if defensive coordinator Derek Mason was bringing more Vanderbilt than Stanford to the table.
Auburn’s 3-1 October run put many of those concerns to rest. Quieting an imploding LSU team and a good-but-limited Arkansas team was one thing. Mason’s troops holding what was considered one of the top offenses in the country to 20 points and zero big scoring plays this week was a much bigger deal.
Kiffn has built his offense and aura around “Score From Far,” a motto deemed important enough that an Ole Miss staffer was wearing it on his cold-weather hoodie Saturday night.
Mason’s sometimes-frustrating “keep it in front of you” approach took that game away, and forced Kiffin to fight it out in the Red Zone. Freshwater wasn’t able to handle that aspect of big-boy football. His vaunted attack went a piddling 4-for-8 inside the 20s with only two touchdowns.
Certainly getting Owen Pappoe back after five weeks lost to an ankle sprain suffered in Happy Valley was a big deal, but Auburn had Ole Miss overmatched across the front line, severely limiting the options of UM’s excellent quarterback Matt Corral.
Corral got his stats, eventually rolling up just over 300 yards through the air, but he also blew three of four fourth-down conversions and slung the ball up for grabs to Auburn’s Jaylin Simpson late. That mistake ended Ole Miss’s chances for a comeback win.
It was the first time this season that UM did not have a touchdown pass.
The game defied a lot of expectations. If you’d told me going in that both teams would combine for a mere six points after halftime, I’d have assumed they’d have to play in a freezing downpour.
Instead, an interminable second half — artificially extended by Kiffn’s now-trademark fake injuries on defense — saw Auburn failing to land a knockout punch yet still holding the ball for nearly 12 minutes of the final quarter.
For the second game in a row, that combination of smothering defense and ball-control offense put the game away. One imagines that Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who was in attendance Saturday night, was looking on with considerable approval.
With two-thirds of the regular season now in the books, Auburn finally is turning some heads on the national scene. Most of those heads will be watching College Station, Texas, this coming Saturday. Thanks to Texas A&M’s own mid-season recovery, you have to expect most of them will be anticipating an Aggie runaway.
As Lane Kiffin could advise them, however, they might want to rethink those expectations.
If Auburn keeps playing like it has for most of October — and there’s no particular reason today to think it won’t — the Tigers are positioned to make this stretch run an Amen Corner to remember.
