Blake Purchase played his first SEC game on Saturday night, in the loudest building Vaught-Hemingway Stadium has ever been. He did not drive home.
“I actually walked home after the game, so I was thinking, I was like, man, we got to play Florida, a good Florida team in seven days,” the senior defensive end said Tuesday. “So you kind of got to just like — that was a good game, it happened, just move on to the next one for real. So just, it’s SEC, tough game every week.”
That is the whole week in one answer, from a player who got here in January.
The first SEC game
Purchase came to Ole Miss from Oregon. Saturday was the first time he had played a conference opponent in this league, and he did not pretend otherwise.
“First of all, that was an amazing game. Like, the crowd was crazy. It was a great experience. It was just great atmosphere, everything,” he said. “It was my first SEC game, so that was really cool, just playing an SEC team for the first time.”
Asked whether the veterans in the building had genuinely flushed it by Sunday, he said the message came from the top and came fast.
“That was really PG’s main thing — on to the next game. We didn’t come here just to win that game. It was a big game, big week for everybody, but we won it. It’s on to the next one. You can’t live in the past. It’s all about what you do tomorrow in the next game.”
And when a reporter pushed on whether that is ever actually true, or just the thing players are trained to say, Purchase made the case for why it has to be.
“It has to be, because if you stick in the past, in the SEC, you’re going to come and get beat if you try to stick and think about the past, what you’ve done well,” he said. “Every week you gotta just move on. It’s definitely tough. Like, a big game, there’s a lot of emotions in that game. So I think the biggest thing is getting past just the high of we won the game, and just get back to work.”
Two players, one answer on Jadan Baugh
Here is the thing worth circling. Purchase plays on the defensive line. Sharif Denson plays nickel, in the back end. They took the podium separately on Tuesday. Asked about Florida’s running back, they gave effectively the same scouting report, and neither of them offered a scheme.
Purchase first, on what makes Jadan Baugh hard to handle:
“He’s a pretty big back. He got good speed, he got good balance. He’s forced a lot of broken tackles. So you gotta do a good job by wrapping up and getting him on the ground. He’s really physical out there. He got a good stiff arm. So he’s a really good back all around.”
Denson, who used to practice against him at Florida: “You just got to bring your feet, wrap up, gang tackle him.”
Wrap up. Get him on the ground. Bring a second body. A defensive end and a defensive back, asked the same question in different sessions, landed in the identical place — which usually means the coaching point is the coaching point, and there is no clever answer available.
Purchase also flagged how Florida intends to use him: “They going to definitely try to run him early and often, I would say.”
Eye control, and the circus
Pete Golding spent a chunk of Monday describing a Florida offense built to move your eyes — the shifts, the motion, what he called the circus. Purchase was asked what that means for a defensive lineman specifically, as opposed to the secondary.
“It definitely is going to be harder for the back-end guys, the shifts and motions and stuff like that,” he said. “But I would just say, like, just knowing what call we’re in — if we’re going to change out of a call with a shift or anything like that, just being tuned in with the backers, getting us right.”
Then the part that is really the job:
“At the end of the day, you got to keep your eyes on your keys, because they’re going to try to throw a lot of motion stuff to kind of get you looking around. But you got to keep your eyes on your key and just focus on your job and not try to look around with everything else they got going on back there.”
His read on the offense as a whole was blunt and unflattering to anybody hoping Florida is a soft 3-0: “They got a good team, a good quarterback. They got some good perimeter players too. So it’s just a really good, all-around good roster. I think they got a really good offense. They do a lot of shifts and motion and stuff you gotta really pay attention to and communicate well out there.”
What his room has to clean up
Three weeks in, Purchase was asked to assess his own position group. He started with a compliment and spent the rest of it on details nobody in the stands would ever notice.
“I think we’re playing pretty well, but just little things like make sure our eyes in the right place, just really knowing our job inside and out,” he said. “We missed some small things in the game — little things that we got to do that other people wouldn’t even know just watching film. So just knowing we got to just attack the small details. And really, I think the big thing is eye control, like knowing where to put your eyes pre- and post-snap.”
Eye control came up twice in a six-minute session, unprompted the second time. Against an offense whose entire design is to move your eyes, that is not a coincidence.
On his own adjustment to a new defense: “I feel like I’ve adapted pretty well. It’s definitely, you know, learning curves here and there in the games. Just coming back, correcting it every Sunday after the game, watching the film, see where I wanted to get better at.”
What getting Sharif Denson back did
Purchase and Denson arrived at Ole Miss in the same January class. Denson missed the first two games and played his first football of the season on Saturday, and Purchase’s description of what that did for the defense was immediate.
“He’s a big communicator back there. I think he’s one of the leaders in the secondary, like, the whole time I’ve been here since we came in together in January,” he said. “You’re seeing him really kind of take that leadership role in the back end. It was definitely huge. And then seeing him make that big play early in the game — that just gave us all a lot of confidence, like, oh, Reef’s back, like, we good.”
Tuning it out
Saturday will be Purchase’s first road SEC game, in a stadium that has sold out twenty straight. His answer on the environment matched what Caleb Odom said from the offensive side an hour earlier — the speakers are already on in Oxford.
“We do a lot of crowd noise stuff at practice, obviously, just to get used to it,” he said. “And then it’s really just prepping for the team just like any other week, just going over what they do well on offense, what new install we have to put in and stuff like that.”
“And then we show up on Saturday, just focus on your keys and try to — I don’t want to say not think about the crowd, but just kind of tune it out and just play football.”
Photo: Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss looks to pass against LSU, September 19, 2026, at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. Mandatory Credit: The Clarion Ledger / USA TODAY Network via Reuters.
Ole Miss is 3-0, 1-0 in the SEC. Next up: at Florida, Saturday, September 26, 3:30 p.m. ET on ABC. Hotty Toddy 🦈