Waking Up 3-0: Ole Miss passed Lane Kiffin’s Georgia Tech test with flying colors
Lane Kiffin had some concerns in the days leading up to Ole Miss’ trip to Georgia Tech, its first road trip of the 2022 season.
Chief among them was how well some 28 transfers (24 of them from the portal, including starting quarterback Jaxson Dart) would respond to their first step out of their still-developing Ole Miss comfort zones.
“Everything’s new,” Kiffin said in the lead-up to kickoff. “So now we’ve got to go on the road with all of these guys that have never been on the road with us and challenges that come with that.
“It’ll be a very big test for us.”
Ole Miss passed with flying colors.
The Rebels steamrolled the Yellowjackets, 42-0, to move to 3-0 on the season. Ole Miss next hosts Tulsa Saturday at 3 p.m. CT.
Kiffin, issuing a Georgia-Tech-specific challenge to his team earlier in the week, implored the Rebels to “pack your run game and pack your defense.”
Ole Miss ran for 300-plus yards and six touchdowns against a Power 5 team for the first time since Kiffin brought Tennessee to Oxford in 2009. The Rebels have allowed 13 points in three games. Only Georgia, the defending national champion, has given up fewer points.
Ole Miss has held eight straight opponents to 21 or fewer points, the longest active streak among Power 5 teams, and the longest by any Ole Miss team since a 10-game streak in 2013. Veteran defensive end Cedric Johnson became the first Rebel to record a sack and a blocked punt in a single game in a decade.
“Any time you go on the road and play an ACC team and win 42-0, a lot of good things had to happen,” Kiffin said. “The defense, a shutout on the road, first time in eight or nine years or something like that, with playing a lot of people.
“I think we played every person we brought. It was really neat, seeing those guys make plays at the end. And then 62 carries for over 300 yards rushing. It’s kind of old Georgia Tech numbers.”
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Ole Miss came out of the gate with an almost stubborn commitment to running the ball.
The plan worked.
Ole Miss rushed on 35 of its 44 first-half plays as the Rebels built a 21-0 lead. They ended with a season-high 547 yards of total offense, including a season-high 316 rushing yards — the most against a non-SEC Power 5 opponent in available game-by-game records since at least 1967.
“It doesn’t always go that way,” Kiffin said. “A lot of times games end up completely different than what you planned for, but that’s really what we planned to do — crack safeties and get the ball in the perimeter and pull the ball with the quarterback when needed.
“It’s something we really hadn’t done through two weeks.”
The end result was the first Power 5 shutout for Ole Miss in 14 years (Mississippi State, 2008). Additionally, Ole Miss goose-egged a non-current member of the SEC for the first time since whipping Florida State 33-0 in 1961.
“I think the two starting ends are playing like really elite rushers,” Kiffin said. “And then (Jared) Ivey plays a lot, so that’s a lot to deal with. We moved (Cedric Johnson) around today and ran some plays that give our offense problems all the time.
“We’d really saved some things through two weeks offensively and defensively (and) we used some of those today. Some were the engineered run game with the quarterback involved in it. Then on defense moving around a lot with Ced.”
Let’s take a look back at the Ole Miss win that was, with highlights provided by Ole Miss Sports Production.
