COLLIER: Will improvement be enough this weekend?

One of Gus Malzahn’s favorite things is the bounce-back game.

He rarely loses two in a row, and his Auburn teams almost always look notably better in games immediately following a bad loss.

(Gus’s detractors will surely — and accurately — note that he ought to be good at it after all this time.)

Pressure does seem to focus Malzahn’s mind for whatever reason. The Auburn team that played Ole Miss Saturday was, while far from a perfect product, much more focused, better-prepared and better coached than the one that collapsed a week earlier.

The offensive game plan was a lot smarter, starting with the obvious but still welcome decision to run the ball much more. Unleashing freshman phenom Tank Bigsby on a suspect Ole Miss front was just what the football doctor ordered. A big step forward in the run game created room for Bo Nix and Seth Williams to get back on track.

Oh, and J.J. Pegues about killed a guy.

There’s much left to accomplish. Pass protection remains meek, even against a weak defense. Anthony Schwartz still isn’t getting enough chances in space and the offense once again took most of a quarter off starting late in the second period. The latter flop wasted an opportunity to go up by two scores and relieve the need for yet another last-minute comeback.

It was “good-enough” offense, which after last week’s serial buffoonery did constitute an improvement. Good enough won’t be good enough for much longer, but you have to start somewhere.

On the other side of the ball, the result also looked a lot like good enough, but in that case I think the numbers and individual plays were a bit deceiving. While the offense made a good step in the right direction, the defense’s progress was closer to giant-step territory.

I listened to the radio broadcast of the Ole Miss-Alabama shooting match while driving home from the Arkansas game a couple of weeks ago. Two things stood out:

• An awful lot of offense

• Eli Gold being as subdued (even ... scared?) as I’d heard him in a long time.

For once, I’m not picking on Gold here. Anybody who got a look at the way Lane Kiffin’s offense — mostly recruited to Oxford during three losing seasons while Ole Miss was on probation — carved up Nick Saban’s defense would have been foolish to not be worried.

I feel safe in guessing that Kevin Steele started out worried, and then progressed quickly to “Okay, let’s do something about that.”

There was some griping in the aftermath over the 283 rushing yards Auburn gave up on Saturday. Under normal circumstances I’d agree; if you allow that kind of yardage on the ground you often lose.

In this case, though, conceding runs in the short field to keep the passing game under control was intentional, smart and correct.

Auburn’s had a lot of trouble rushing passers lately and almost as much trouble in man coverage. Going with a heavy presence up front and playing man deep likely would have been a disaster against a team and quarterback that rolled up 365 yards through the air against Alabama.

Instead, Steele played it safe and kept plenty of his guys in the defensive backfield to prevent QB Matt Corral from carving up defenders in single coverage.

It worked.

If the television announcers were accurate (hardly a safe bet, given that one of them was the ridiculous Jordan Rogers) and Kiffin was actually surprised by Auburn’s 3-8 set against his passing quarterback, Joey Freshwater’s much-touted “analytics” didn’t include a review of last year’s Auburn-LSU game.

That was dumb. Kiffin ought to have seen what Steele did to mitigate Joe Burrow and 2019’s Bayou monsters and guessed he might see something similar here.

But he didn’t. Corral was, er, corralled and Ole Miss was held to a paltry 161 yards passing. Decision: Steele.

The defense is far from complete, with way too many missed tackles and still lacking in a dependable pass rush, but this was a solid and welcome move forward.

Steele deserves a raise for pulling this one off because Auburn and Malzahn needed this win very badly.

Another loss to a second-tier SEC team could have shattered the rest of the season. Now, Malzahn needs to maintain the intensity and push for more improvement — from his players and his staff and himself.

Gus either takes this reprieve and makes something of it or we can all get settled in for more of the same.

He can’t afford to wait around for another loss to get things stabilized again.