Floppers 17 Kentucky 20

Ole Miss got caught flopping on camera. Jaxson Dart got the signal to flop from the coaches via that earpiece in his helmet and he told Matt Jones to flop and he flopped. I know we are living in this weird decadent and corrupted era. I get it. Nothing matters, especially not things like ethics or fairness and good sportmanship, but I still think flopping sucks and I have a difficult time cheering for this Ole Miss team now that all the plausible deniability is out the window. They got caught red-handed right on camera this time. Of course, no one had the fortitude to ask Lane Kiffin about it during the post-game press conference; we wouldn’t want reporters in this decadent era to actually do their jobs and report something true.

Kentucky just beat Ole Miss, flat out. It put on a clinic on how to beat this Ole Miss team. They held the ball 40 minutes compared to 20 for Ole Miss, and Kiffin explicitly mentioned that in the press conference, that his analytics show time of possession to be a non-factor in who wins the game. Instead, he pointed to Ole Miss going 1-10 in third down conversions. Lane Kiffin is full of shit. What a weird thing to say. If you keep the offense off the field, then apply pressure to Dart, you can keep Ole Miss from finding its rhythm, and so the offense never got anything going. Ole Miss’ attempts to adjust never really materialized. It kept running Robert Parrish, who seemed gimpy for most of the game (we can’t know if he was really gimpy or faking it, though) and I don’t know what Ulysses Bently did, but clearly he’s in some kind of dog house. Maybe he doens’t want to flop?

Still, after executing their game plan almost flawlessly, Kentucky still had to sweat out a last-second Ole Miss field goal attempt and miss to secure the victory, so it isn’t all doom for the Rebels, but aside from Mississippi State, every single opponent left on the schedule has a defense and now a template for how to beat Ole Miss. Honestly, it is really hard to cheer for this team, so undisciplined and unethical, and that sucks and Ole Miss fans deserve better than this. Where it goes now is anyone’s guess. It could be the come-to-Jesus moment Ole Miss needed to stop believing its own hype, or it could just go off the rails from here with two upcoming road games at South Carolina and LSU, two games Ole Miss could easily drop. God only knows. I know that all these things were present from game one, though, and it seems to me that SEC play is only going to magnify things. I’m talking about all the penalties and sloppy play. But, what do I know?

I do know this: Georgia dropped it’s contest with Alabama yesterday, too, at Tuscaloosa. After getting manhandled in the first half, it came roaring back in the second half and had a chance to tie the game with a minute left. If Georgia executes Kentucky’s game plan against Ole Miss, and of course it will, everyone who had that game circled on his calendar is now seeing the writing on the wall very differently. Flop all it might, Ole Miss doesn’t have that X-factor, the heart, that all great times have, something I’ve said about Kiffin’s teams over and over again, that they never play with heart. I know college football is changing and becoming an explicit NFL minor league, and I know that Kiffin is a visionary coach in that regard, but we’re just not quite there yet, you know, where players show up for work and punch a clock. Teams like Kentucky and Alabama and Georgia are still playing with something called pride, and Ole Miss has NONE, this team of coached floppers.