Every player says the locker room is fine. It is the most predictable sentence in college football, and Patrick Kutas said it on Tuesday.
Right now we’re more just pissed off that we lost. Nobody likes that feeling. But emotionally we’re fine. It’s not like something where the locker room’s torn apart. If anything, it’s even lighting a fire under us.
Patrick Kutas
Take that on its own and it is the script. What makes it worth reading is everything Kutas put around it, because none of the rest is scripted — and because the charting backs the part of it that can be checked.
He Led With What Was Wrong
Asked what he made of the Florida tape, Kutas did not start with effort or heart. He started with the first two quarters.
“Whenever we get the opportunity to start with the ball, we just got to start fast. We got to start fast, we got to sustain it, and then we got to end fast. I thought we were just a little sluggish coming out, first and second quarter.”
And then the claim that makes the rest of it interesting: “If we can start fast, then we can be one of the best offenses in the country.”
That is an offensive lineman, in a bye week, nine days after a 24-point loss, saying out loud that he does not think the ceiling has moved.
He Is Not Guessing
This is where the Florida game gets strange, and where Kutas has more support than he probably knows.
Every Ole Miss offensive lineman improved his pass blocking from the LSU game. Terez Davis graded 89.4, a season best. Brycen Sanders went from 63.7 to 84.7. Delano Townsend went from 29.3 — the worst mark by any Rebel at any position this season — to 75.9, a complete reversal. Kutas himself graded 75.4, Tommy Kinsler 74.3, Connor Howes 68.8.
Ole Miss lost by 24 on its best protection day of the season. Trinidad Chambliss threw for 298 yards and a touchdown and ran for 64 more and two scores. Deuce Alexander caught seven for 134. The offensive line was not what went wrong in Gainesville, which is precisely why Kutas can say the ceiling is intact without it sounding like a man reading from a card.
His own read on the unit is more modest than the numbers: “I think we’re in a good spot. Obviously there’s stuff you can do to improve every single day. But the longer that we play together and the more practices we get, the more reps we get, then we’re just going to gel together even more than we are right now.”
Sitting In It
Pete Golding told his team after the game that he wanted them to sit in the loss for two weeks rather than wash it off. Kutas was asked whether that is difficult.
Difficult but necessary. It sucks. But again, you can’t just wash it off. It’s got to — it’s going to sit with you until you play the next game, just inevitably.
Patrick Kutas
Then he did something that is supposed to be in tension with that and apparently is not. He absorbed the instruction completely and kept his perspective anyway.
“Coach Golding, he’s putting in our head, don’t forget that feeling. Obviously that doesn’t define us, one loss early in the season. Coming off a loss into a bye week is a challenge, but nothing that we’re not ready for.”
A staff telling a team to sit in a defeat, and a player who took the message and still knows where it ends. Those two things are supposed to pull against each other in a week like this.
What A Bye Week Is For
Kutas described the week in terms almost nobody uses on a podium, which is to say honestly and in both directions.
“Get your body right, get your mind right, kind of get away from it a little bit. But also know that this is an opportunity to assess what you did well, what you did bad, and then put a little bit of focus into the next game too.”
On the self-assessment itself: “Get real with yourself. You got to be real honest. Really look at yourself in the mirror. Look at the tape. See what went wrong. What did we do to make this not work? What did we do good?”
And on whether the loss should change how the team practices, he declined the premise politely. There is emphasis on some things, he said, but the work is the same. “We got a bye week, so why not get better?”
He has already started on Vanderbilt in the only way an offensive lineman can this early — looking at the players rather than the scheme. “I’m going to go look at their guys, see how they play as players. And then later on in the week, or next week, you’ll get more into scheme stuff.”
Ole Miss is idle this week and plays at Vanderbilt on Saturday, October 10.