Nobody is required to tell you anything on a Monday in October. A head coach can stand at a podium for twenty-four minutes, say some version of “we have to be more consistent” fourteen different ways, and everyone goes home with nothing.
That is not what Pete Golding did.
A reporter asked him whether the staff uses fines as a corrective tool. Reasonable question. And in the middle of answering it, Golding produced this:
We did talk about, go through all the stats, like, 62 missed tackles, right, for 482 yards right now, which is 70 percent of the rushing yards that we’ve given up for the year. 70 percent, right? So we didn’t hide that.
Pete Golding
Sit with the third number. Seventy percent of every rushing yard this defense has surrendered all season traces back to a missed tackle.
Nobody asked for it. There is no world in which a head coach owes the public an internal audit of his own defense’s failures nine days after a blowout. He produced one anyway, and then told the room his team had already sat through it.
🔍 Why That Number Ends An Argument
Since the 52-28 loss at Florida, every conversation in Oxford has been about scheme. The call sheet. Whether this is still Golding’s defense. Whether somebody else should be calling it.
Seventy percent says no. It says the ball carrier was found, the leverage was right, a defender was in position — and the tackle was not made. You cannot draw up a play that makes a man wrap up, and you cannot fix tackling by changing play-callers.
Golding conceded the uncomfortable half of it himself:
It ain’t new concepts, right? Aren’t new drills, and all those. But obviously, right, it wasn’t taken. We didn’t go out and do it consistently.
Pete Golding
Which is the better of the two available problems. A broken structure in October is close to unfixable — you cannot install a new system in four days with players who learned the old one in spring. Sixty-two missed tackles is a Tuesday practice. It is also, as Golding admitted, something they have been drilling since spring that still did not transfer to a Saturday.
🎯 The Most Specific Football In The Room
The best part of the twenty-four minutes was not the number. It was the teaching, and it explains how 62 gets fixed.
You’re not going to be perfect, you’re not going to make every play, but where do I miss? If I’m an outside-in piece, I got to miss outside. Make the ball bounce. I’ve got a fence outside.
Pete Golding
He is not asking for zero missed tackles. He is asking that when a defender misses, he misses toward his help. Miss outside, the back cuts back into pursuit and it is a seven-yard run. Miss inside, the back is gone and it is a touchdown.
Golding said he showed them the same player on two different tapes — same call, head on the outside, feet never stopping, tackle for loss; then the Florida tape, same call, head on the inside, jump cut, fifteen-yard gain.
🎥 What He Actually Did With The Bye
Three things, and all three are unusual for a top-ten team in October.
One. The entire team watched the defensive tape. Not the defense. The offense and special teams sat in the room for every series.
Normally you do that in a defensive unit meeting room, right? But what a lot of people don’t realize is, when you’re in this room, what you do, you do to everybody in this room.
Pete Golding
He said offensive players thanked him for it afterward — because players get in their circles off the field, think they are better than they are, and never watch the other side of the tape.
Two. They practiced one day without calling a single defensive play.
We went last Tuesday, we didn’t make a defensive call. And it was about getting your cleats in the turf and striking blocks and running and hitting and hitting and running.
Pete Golding
Three. Sunday night, coming off the bye, Ole Miss went full pads and live. Golding’s reasoning: “You’re gonna fight like you train, you gotta train like you fight.” Teams protect bodies in October. He scheduled a hitting day instead.
And then the honest button on all of it:
It don’t matter what I say. It matters what product is on the field at 2:30 on Saturday.
Pete Golding
🏈 Kewan Lacy Is Back, And He Is Not All The Way Back
The first question of the press conference was the one everyone wanted.
Rested all last week, did rehab, not trying to practice him. Practiced last night, came back, did individual, did some team sessions. Obviously a lot of that was non-contact last night, but fully anticipate having him this week.
Pete Golding
That is a yes. It is not a clean yes. “Anticipate” is not “cleared,” and nothing in the official game notes puts a percentage on him.
And then Golding said the part that tells you what Saturday actually looks like:
Even coming back, right, he’s not gonna take the toll of 40 to 50 snaps and all those things. So those guys got to be able to come in and execute and play efficiently.
Pete Golding
Even available, Lacy is on a snap count. This is a rotation, not a restoration — which makes JT Lindsey and Makhi Frazier part of the plan rather than insurance. Golding on both: Lindsey “is a very explosive player,” Frazier “runs the football extremely hard.” He also did not oversell their Florida tape: nobody, he said, walked out of that game loving the performance at any position.
Why it matters that it is Lacy specifically, and it is not sentiment: he has a rushing touchdown in twelve consecutive games played — the longest such streak by an Ole Miss player in recorded history dating to 1956. The only SEC players with a longer run this century are Derrick Henry at twenty and Tim Tebow at fourteen.
The streak is intact for the saddest possible reason. It survived because he did not play.
💼 The Ninety Seconds He Probably Did Not Plan
Back to the fines question, because Golding started answering it the way you would expect — you cannot make them performance-based — and then kept going.
But there’s a cycle coming in December and January, right, when everybody wants to renegotiate their contract, that, you know, it was very black and white based on, all right, this is good enough, this isn’t good enough. Like in all of our jobs, right? You’re going to have that meeting and like, hey, here’s your raise, or hey, you’re fired, go get another job.
Pete Golding
An SEC head coach just told a room of reporters that in December and January his players sit down to renegotiate contracts, and that the October tape is the document on the table in that meeting.
Every word of that is true. Everybody who covers this sport knows it is true. Almost nobody says it with a microphone in front of them. Note the framing he chose, too — “like in all of our jobs” — which puts a first-year head coach inside the same sentence as his players.
Then he drew the line he actually cares about:
I think it’s my responsibility before you fire somebody to make sure you really call them in and be like, hey man, this is not okay. This is the expectation. This is how we want it done. And clearly define it for them.
Pete Golding
Documentation, expectation, a chance to correct, then consequences. That is due process, described by a football coach, about college sophomores.
🗳️ The Depth Chart Is Not Set Until Friday
Buried in all of it is the line that will show up on television Saturday.
This thing ain’t set. And I told them, this thing ain’t going to be set till Friday.
Pete Golding
Four days out from a conference road game, the lineup is open — and it is not a motivational bluff, because he had already described what it looks like: “We’ve got safeties that started the year at safety that are starting at corner.” That is players changing positions, four games in, at the most exposed spots on the field.
The mechanism is daily. Whoever executes the right way runs out with the ones at the next practice, then has to do it again. By Friday the staff decides on the body of work, Monday through Friday. First-team reps are a rolling daily election and the ballot closes Friday.
And then the most generous thing he said all day:
There’s guys that could play winning football that don’t run out there first. And when their opportunity comes and they have the responsibility to go in and do their job, they got to make their layups as well.
Pete Golding
👀 Vanderbilt: Plans For All Three
Asked what Vanderbilt looks like with two different quarterbacks, Golding started where you would expect: “It’s almost like two different offenses, to be honest with you.”
On Jared Curtis, the five-star true freshman who flipped his commitment from Georgia to stay home: “Curtis is super talented. He’s a big body, really live arm. Does a good job at his age of taking what people give him. Got a really good quick release. Once you kind of get those feet moving a little bit, it’s kind of scary as well when he moves the pocket. And throws really well on the run.”
On the other, Blaze Berlowitz — and here is the connection Golding named that almost nobody in Oxford has made. Berlowitz followed offensive coordinator Tim Beck from New Mexico State to Vanderbilt, and former New Mexico State head coach Jerry Kill is on Clark Lea’s staff as well. Golding: “When one’s in the game, you can feel the New Mexico, the reason why he came with the coordinator, and it feels much more option-generated. Numbers, grass.”
And then the sentence worth reading twice:
I think we’ll see both of them in the game, no doubt. Probably see them both in the game at the same time too. So we got to do a good job and have plans for all three.
Pete Golding
Plans for all three. Not two quarterbacks — three looks. Curtis. Berlowitz. And both on the field together, in a package that does not exist on tape yet.
On the run game: “Their bread and butter is the G lead on offense, and they’re not hiding it.” And the comparison that should stop you — Golding said Vanderbilt is formationally “very similar to Florida, of multiple personnel grouping, shift, motion, to be able to run the football.” Florida ran for 302 yards on this defense nine days ago.
Last, the piece nobody is talking about. Golding explained that offenses have figured out how to take the green dot away:
They’re not going to snap a ball with more than 15 seconds left on the shot clock. And that’s take the game off the sideline, right? And let’s make 18 to 23-year-old kids communicate, right, after a shift and motion and everything else.
Pete Golding
Some teams, he said, are snapping it at eight or nine seconds. So the call cannot get in, and the answer has to get simpler: cleats in the turf, see your key, beat the block, tackle well.
Put the whole thing together. Vanderbilt will shift, motion and change personnel, snap it before the call arrives, and run a G lead at a defense that has missed sixty-two tackles. Possibly with two quarterbacks on the field.
That is the game. That is why the tackling week mattered.
Ole Miss at Vanderbilt, Saturday, 3:30 p.m. ET on ESPN, at FirstBank Stadium in Nashville. More all week at olemisshub.com.