Ole Miss 10 Alabama 24

My best friend and fellow Ole Miss alum messaged me yesterday just before kickoff and said that he thought Ole Miss had the better team this year, and I just wrote him back, quite charitably I think, that we definitely have the better quarterback, but left the rest unsaid.

This game wasn’t even close. Ole Miss was outplayed and ground down, as is almost always the case when it takes on Alabama. Yes, the Rebels took a 7-6 lead into the locker room at halftime, but they left so many points on the field and failed to capitalize on Alabama mistakes, and you cannot do that when you play the Crimson Tide, much less at Tuscaloosa. You will need every point you can get if you want to beat them.

In the third quarter, the sense of impending doom started to set in, because I’ve seen this before. Many times before. Alabama depth becomes obvious, and they start running at you, ripping off 5 and 6 yard carries with ease, which opens up the pass. They’re like a machine. If you’re on the opposing team, full of hope, it is really hard to watch.

In years like this one in which the Ole Miss starters can compete with the Alabama starters, what happens when you need substitutions? Well, that’s where Alabama beats you, because your two-deep is a much steeper fall-off than theirs, and forget it when you get into the three-deep. You’re fucked. That’s exactly what happened yesterday. The third quarter rolls around, and Ole Miss can’t move the ball at all. The starters on the offensive line start to get beat up pretty bad, so running becomes next to impossible. Their 6-yard carries are matched by your 1-yard carries. You can’t run, so now your quarterback, in this case Jaxson Dart, is getting harrassed on every play, has no time to read the field for open receivers, and it just gets ugly.

So, even though the Alabama quarterback was obviously green and Jaxson Dart was obviously poised, when the line play breaks down, the green quarterback looks better, and the experienced one looks a lot worse.

Football is such a retarded game, as I’ve said, but this is another reason why. It’s a game of which the team that has the highest number of athletic 300 lb. players wins, almost every single time, well, like 9 times out of 10, and the exception is a fluke win.

Put another way, the only way Ole Miss was ever going to defeat Alabama yesterday was on a fluke, and well, history is undefeated because Alabama made Ole Miss look silly, or as the CBS announcer said, “Ole Miss is just average”.

So, we have taken our measurements, and again the Rebels have come up wanting. It doesn’t improve as the season goes on, either, because you have the players that you have, and they get beat up. That’s football.

LSU visits Oxford next weekend, and that ought to be a loss, if looking at the depth chart. LSU has the big boys on par with Alabama. Georgia does, too. This means that Ole Miss is competing in the middle of the pack with Auburn, Texas A&M, and Arkansas, three games that are complete toss-ups.

Here’s a realistic prediction now that the measurements are in: Losses to LSU and Georgia, let’s be charitable and split it between A&M, Arkansas, Auburn, and Mississippi State, puts the Rebels at 7-5 and in a lower-tier bowl game that it will fail to take seriously because of Lane Kiffin, giving the Rebels a repeat of last year at 7-6, and I think that is a charitable prediction. This team could easily, and I mean easily, drop all four of those games, or it could do a little better. My point is, the level at which Ole Miss is competing is now absolutely clear, and that’s thanks to Alabama, and it is kind of nice to get such a clear read on things this early in the season. I was really hoping it would be competitive with Georgia, for example, because I hate those motherfuckers, but now I can let that go.

Here’s my whimpering hotty toddy: Hotty Toddy!