☕ Morning Coffee
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 everybody goes home with nothing.
Pete Golding was asked whether his staff fines players. In the middle of answering it, he said 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 given up all season traces back to a missed tackle.
Nobody asked. There is no world in which a head coach owes anybody an internal audit of his own defense nine days after a blowout. He produced one anyway, and told the room his team had already sat through it.
🔍 Why It Ends The Argument
Since Florida, every conversation in Oxford has been about scheme. The call sheet. Whether somebody else should be calling it.
Seventy percent says no. It says somebody diagnosed the play, kept his leverage, arrived — and did not make the tackle. You cannot draw up a call that makes a man wrap up, and you cannot fix tackling by changing play-callers.
Golding gave up the uncomfortable half himself: “It ain’t new concepts. Aren’t new drills. But obviously it wasn’t taken.”
Which is the better of two problems. A broken structure in October is close to unfixable. Sixty-two missed tackles is a Tuesday practice. It is also something they have drilled since spring that still did not show up on a Saturday.
🎯 The Best Football In The Room
The number was not the best part. The teaching was, 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 you miss, you miss toward your help. Miss outside and the back cuts into pursuit — a seven-yard run. Miss inside and he is gone.
He showed them the same player on two tapes. Same call, head outside, feet never stopping: tackle for loss. Florida tape, same call, head inside, jump cut: fifteen yards.
🎥 What He Did With The Bye
| 1 | The whole team watched the defensive tape. Not the defense — offense and special teams in the room for every series. “What you do, you do to everybody in this room.” He said offensive players thanked him for it. |
| 2 | A practice with zero defensive calls. “It was about getting your cleats in the turf and striking blocks and running and hitting and hitting and running.” |
| 3 | Full pads, live, Sunday night off a bye. “You’re gonna fight like you train, you gotta train like you fight.” Teams protect bodies in October. He scheduled a hitting day. |
And the honest button: “It don’t matter what I say. It matters what product is on the field at 2:30 on Saturday.”
🏈 Lacy Is Back, And He Is Not All The Way Back
First question of the press conference, and it was the one everybody wanted.
Rested all last week, did rehab, not trying to practice him. Practiced last night, did individual, did some team sessions. A lot of that was non-contact, 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.
Then the part that tells you what Saturday actually looks like: “Even coming back, he’s not gonna take the toll of 40 to 50 snaps.”
Even available, Kewan Lacy is on a snap count. A rotation, not a restoration — which makes JT Lindsey and Makhi Frazier the plan, not insurance.
And here is why it is Lacy specifically, and it is not sentiment. He has a rushing touchdown in twelve straight games played — the longest streak by an Ole Miss player since 1956. The only SEC players longer this century are Derrick Henry at twenty and Tim Tebow at fourteen.
The streak survived for the saddest possible reason. It is intact because he did not play.
💼 The Ninety Seconds He Probably Did Not Plan
Back to the fines question, because he started where 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… Like in all of our jobs. 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 said his players renegotiate contracts in December and January, and the October tape is the document on the table.
Every word is true. Everybody in the sport knows it. Almost nobody says it into a microphone. And look at the framing — “like in all of our jobs.” He put himself in the sentence.
Then the line he actually cares about: his responsibility, before anybody gets cut loose, is to call them in, say plainly this is not okay, define the expectation, and give them the chance to meet it. Documentation, expectation, a chance to correct, then consequences. That is due process, in a football building.
One more, and it will matter Saturday: “This thing ain’t going to be set till Friday.” Four days out from a conference road game, the lineup is open — and it is not a bluff, because “we’ve got safeties that started the year at safety that are starting at corner.”
👀 Vanderbilt: Plans For All Three
On the Commodores’ two quarterbacks: “It’s almost like two different offenses, to be honest with you.”
Jared Curtis is the five-star true freshman who flipped from Georgia to stay home. Blaze Berlowitz followed offensive coordinator Tim Beck from New Mexico State — and former New Mexico State head coach Jerry Kill is on Clark Lea’s staff too. That pipeline is the whole offense.
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 have plans for all three.
Pete Golding
Plans for all three. Not two quarterbacks — three looks. Curtis. Berlowitz. Both at once, in a package that does not exist on tape.
And the comparison that should stop you: Golding said Vanderbilt is formationally “very similar to Florida” — multiple personnel, shift, motion, to run the football. Florida ran for 302 yards on this defense nine days ago. Their bread and butter is the G lead, “and they’re not hiding it.”
Last piece, and nobody is talking about it. Offenses have learned to take the green dot away — “they’re not going to snap a ball with more than 15 seconds left on the clock… that’s take the game off the sideline, and let’s make 18 to 23-year-old kids communicate after a shift and motion.” Some teams, he said, snap it at eight or nine.
Put it together. Vanderbilt shifts, motions, changes personnel, snaps it before the call gets in, and runs a G lead at a defense that has missed sixty-two tackles. Possibly with two quarterbacks on the field.
⚾ And Then Five More Press Conferences
Baseball opened fall ball yesterday, deliberately scheduled to piggyback on football’s bye-week availability. Bianco said that part out loud too: “We thought we’d get a little more traction using football’s press conference.”
They started late, and the reason is the best infrastructure story on campus. Swayze had the oldest playing surface in the Southeastern Conference. The field had not been redone since the park was built — 1988, first season 1989. The fences came in in 2005. The 2009 grandstands took out foul territory and two giant culverts. Nothing was ever done to the drainage.
Bianco’s explanation of why it took this long is the most honest thing anybody said about athletic department budgets all year:
Those are the things that move the needle probably the least… When you’re running a budget in a department and it doesn’t generate revenue, it’s hard to — the optics when you’re sitting in the stand probably doesn’t look much different. And now you’re going to spend a lot of money to change the actual surface.
Mike Bianco
The roster is 21 new and 21 returning — exactly half. Eight left-handers, which four separate reporters asked about before it got to Bianco (“I’m the fourth person you’ve asked that”). Charlie Foster was the name everybody volunteered: mid-to-upper 90s, four or five pitches, three breaking balls, good command. Winston Pennant had two throws in the intrasquad that should have been two outfield assists inside two innings.
But the moment of the day was a refusal. Asked about leadership, Bianco would not take the question:
It’s just way too early for that question. It’s not even a good question at break in December… It’s different on February 15th when half of them aren’t playing, of the position players, and more than half of the pitchers don’t get to pitch. That’s when you start to figure out what kind of team you really have.
Mike Bianco
And then: “You don’t recruit guys because they’re great leaders. You don’t know that until they show up. I don’t think anybody, even his freshman year or sophomore year, would have said Tim Elko is going to have a statue here.”
Housekeeping: Judd Utenmark and Will Furniss are practice-only and will not go Saturday. Ole Miss opens against outside competition this weekend against Samford.
Full story is on the site this afternoon — Hunter Elliott on the bitter taste, Hayden Federico on dirtbags, and the two transfers who followed a pitching coach to Oxford.
📻 On Locked On Ole Miss Today
The Flagship — “He Said What?!?” The whole Golding press conference, line by line. The snap count, the 62, the ninety seconds about December, and plans for all three.
On the site: the Golding presser at 10 a.m., the fall-ball story at 3 p.m.
🔗 Five Clicks
1. Game Center — Ole Miss at Vanderbilt
Saturday, 3:30 p.m. ET, ESPN, FirstBank Stadium. Everything official in one place.
2. Jerry Kill joined Clark Lea’s staff
The former New Mexico State head coach, in an off-field role. With Tim Beck and Blaze Berlowitz, that is three pieces of one program in Nashville.
3. The bye-week practice report
The school’s own version of the week Golding described. Back to fundamentals, in their words.
4. Golding after Florida: a “lack of courage”
What he said nine days ago. Read it next to the 62, and the throughline is obvious.
5. The baseball schedule
Samford this weekend. On grass that is younger than most of the roster.
💬 Join the Everydayers
The Vanderbilt thread is open in the LOOM Private Discord — free to join. Today’s argument: does sixty-two missed tackles make you feel better or worse about Saturday? Better, because it is fixable. Worse, because they have drilled it since spring. Pick one.
Everything else lives at olemisshub.com, and if you want the show ad-free plus the members-only room, take your fandom to the next level with the Everydayer Club.
Hotty Toddy. 🦈
