Missouri week is here, and Tuesday’s Locked On Ole Miss was all Pete Golding — one “he said what?” moment at a time. The head coach walked through why two former Rebels are suddenly lining up for Mizzou on Saturday, why four takeaways at Vanderbilt still weren’t enough for him, and why he just called the offensive line elite. Here’s everything that mattered from the show. Hotty Toddy.
Golding on why Austin Simmons and Caden Lee really left
Missouri walks into Vaught-Hemingway on Saturday with three players who were on Ole Miss’s roster last year: quarterback Austin Simmons, receiver Caden Lee, and cornerback Chris Graves Jr. But the part that made me stop the tape wasn’t the trash talk about Graves. It was Golding explaining that Simmons and Lee didn’t leave for another coach — they left because an NCAA appeal hadn’t been decided before the portal deadline. Once Trinidad Chambliss’s waiver came through, Simmons wasn’t winning that job, and he couldn’t take the risk of waiting to find out. Golding went out of his way to say both handled it with class and shouldn’t get blamed for how the LSU situation played out. My take: give Simmons and Lee a cheer in warmups, then once the ball’s kicked it’s just a football game.
Why it matters Saturday is simple. Golding said the Missouri pass game runs through Lee — an elite route runner who has practiced against this defense for years and “has a really good football intelligence of what we’re doing.” Simmons, meanwhile, has turned the ball over just once all season and keeps getting better. Golding’s answer to all that familiarity was my favorite line of the day: the whole game is “making the same thing look different and different things look the same.”
Four takeaways at Vanderbilt — and Golding still wasn’t satisfied
Most coaches take a victory lap after forcing four turnovers. Golding spent Monday downgrading them — some were opportunistic, a couple were tipped — and pointing at the ones that got away. “We’re a step late right now,” he said, which sounds strange about a four-takeaway game until you remember who’s next. Better teams don’t give you the ball, and Simmons has exactly one giveaway all year. The tackling was better too — six missed at Vandy, per Pro Football Focus, after a rough three-game stretch — but Golding flagged that the eye control still showed up in the play-action game.
The matchup he’s actually worried about is Missouri back Jamal Roberts, who just ran for 222 yards on 34 carries against Texas A&M and leads the way in yards after contact. The plan is straightforward: stop the run, make Missouri one-dimensional, and win your one-on-ones on the perimeter against that outside-zone stretch game they run so well. Golding even called Missouri’s defense “super sound” and one of the less aggressive units they’ve seen, which puts the whole thing on whether Ole Miss can finish drives. My read — Golding doesn’t sound like a coach who fixed his defense. He sounds like one who knows Vanderbilt was step one and Saturday is the test that counts. I think Ole Miss has the better team. They just can’t beat themselves.
The offensive line Golding called “elite”
For the first time all year, all five offensive linemen were named players of the game after Ole Miss ran for 196 yards at Vanderbilt. Golding singled out left tackle Terez Davis — “nasty, explosive,” with “really good feet,” and in his words “right now he’s playing elite football.” You don’t put the word elite on a left tackle in the middle of October by accident. And with Tommy Kinsler IV not in a great spot in pregame, Connor Howes took every snap at right tackle and some at left, which means Ole Miss now has two right tackles with starting experience going into Missouri.
Then came the explosive reel: seven different players, headlined by Shekai Mills-Knight’s 35-yard touchdown that Golding said made the room erupt. He called Mills-Knight a different-dimension back and said it’s on the staff to create more for him. Give John David Baker credit, too — Ole Miss has now scored on all 20 of its red-zone trips this season, 18 of them touchdowns. In the backfield, Makhi Frazier has separated himself, JT Lindsey is still in the mix, and Kewan Lacy was managed carefully (he sat the second half up 42-3). The one concern: safety Edwin Joseph could miss Missouri with a possible ankle sprain. Four days out, if this is the offense that shows up, the road to a December game in Oxford runs right through Saturday.
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