Texas lost Colin Simmons on Monday and never got him back.
That is the week. Everything on Locked On Ole Miss from Monday through Friday was a different road to the same intersection. The best pass rusher in college football is not playing Saturday night, and the team losing him has not scored more than 24 points against a Power 4 opponent all season.
Ole Miss has not scored fewer than 28 against anybody.
No. 7 Ole Miss (5-1) at No. 19 Texas (4-2). Saturday, 6:30 p.m. Central, ABC, Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. Texas by 3.5.
Colin Simmons Is Out, And It Changes Every Snap
Monday it was a Yahoo Sports report and an Orangebloods window of three to four weeks. Wednesday he was doubtful. Friday the SEC availability report listed him out, along with edge Richard Wesley. Running back Hollywood Smothers is doubtful. Receiver Kaliq Lockett and offensive lineman Jaydon Chatman are questionable.
Here is why this lands harder than a one-player injury usually does. Simmons has 10.5 sacks and 16 tackles for loss. Texas has 19 sacks as a team. One player is 55 percent of his own defense’s pass rush, and no other Longhorn has more than three.
That share-of-production math was ours. We compiled it Tuesday and it is the best single argument for why this absence is different in kind, not degree.
Now the other side. Ole Miss has allowed five sacks in six games. That is 0.83 per game, fewest in the SEC and 10th in the country. Trinidad Chambliss is 142-of-210 for 1,676 yards, 14 touchdowns and four interceptions, a 67.6 completion percentage, behind a line that has been close to the same five men every week.
Pete Golding described the Texas front Monday as “really explosive up front, create a lot of pressure with 4.” The whole design is getting home with four so you can drop seven. Remove the man who is half the rush and the coverage has to hold longer on every play.
Stephen Willis put the mechanism plainly on Thursday’s crossover with Locked On Longhorns: “if he doesn’t play, it’s the difference between trying to keep a tight end in and a running back chipping and doing what you can to actually being able to run your full offense.”
That is the real change. Not that Texas got worse. That Ole Miss gets to send five receivers out instead of three.
Pete Golding Refused To Call Texas Broken
One housekeeping note first. Golding is Ole Miss’s first-year head coach and he still calls the defense. Bryan Brown is the defensive coordinator. We credited Golding with the Missouri game plan all week and never said Brown’s name, so it is said here.
Golding spent Monday doing the opposite of what the rest of the country spent the week doing.
On Arch Manning: “the conception of that he’s not an elite player right now is crazy to me. All right, you can go watch up and I’ll get you a 25-play cut-up and he should be the top pick in the draft.”
On Steve Sarkisian, whom he worked with at Alabama: “I think he’s one of the best play callers in the country, and it’s not close. I think he does the best designing plays to get his best player the ball in stride as well.”
On what is actually wrong in Austin: “a lot of it to me has been bad luck, to be honest with you.”
Then the line that was the actual news of the availability: “They know their back’s up against the wall and we’re going to get their best shot.”
The best thing Golding said had nothing to do with Texas. Asked what produces consistency, he named good players, stability in system, and the ability to hold players accountable, then said the third is the hard one. “Sometimes there’s a false confidence that’s created based on outcomes. And we look at scoreboards and we won the game, but it really wasn’t based on our body of work and our preparation and the things that we did. We might have got lucky.”
That is a head coach four days removed from 31-3 over a top-15 team telling his roster the scoreboard lied to them.
He also contradicted his own player. Will Echoles said after Missouri the defense had been simplified. Golding: “I don’t know how much simpler it is. Like I told y’all, it wasn’t a new call.” What changed was focus, plus cutting calls the staff decided the players could not run. “Some of them were very simple. We’re just not very good at it.”
Five Guests, One Answer: Get Up Early
Nobody coordinated this. Five people with five different vantage points gave the same answer.
John Fourcade, Monday: “If we’re able to get 2 scores up on them, that’s a plus for us because I don’t think Arch can bring a team back the way he’s been performing.”
Bill Flowers, Wednesday: “the most dangerous animal in the forest is a wounded animal. And the reason why that is because you don’t know how it’s going to react.” He still picked Ole Miss 42-21, the most bullish number anybody gave all week.
Todd Wade, Friday, took the same premise the other direction: “if Texas comes out on fire, I don’t know if there’s anything Ole Miss can do.” He picked 34-31 Ole Miss, and he liked the matchup up front. “Texas offensive line has struggled. They’ve been very inconsistent all year.”
Brad Kellner of Locked On Longhorns covers Texas every day, and he gave the sharpest version of it: “Texas is playing, Stephen, 15 to 20 minutes of elite football every week to where they look like the number one team in the country, a true legitimate national championship contender. The problem is these games aren’t 15 or 20 minutes, and it’s what’s happening in the other, you know, 40 to 45 where Texas just looks lost.”
Kellner picked Texas 27-24 and was honest about why. “My answer is, I don’t know.”
Kellner also brought two numbers no Ole Miss outlet would have had. Texas has been outscored 37-14 in the second half of its two losses, and it has not scored a third-quarter touchdown since week one.
Kevin Rogers of Locked On Bets, taping Friday for Saturday morning, took Ole Miss plus the points and gave the market reason: “Texas is 0-5 against the spread their last 5 games, all as a favorite.”
Willis picked Ole Miss 31-27. Tyler Comas of Ole Miss on SI picked Ole Miss 30-24. Spencer McLaughlin of Locked On College Football took Ole Miss without a score.
Four of the five landed on Ole Miss. All five described the same game: Texas has a window in the first twenty minutes, and Ole Miss has to shut it.
Kewan Lacy Goes Home
Lacy is a Dallas native who played at Lancaster, and Texas did not recruit him. He signed with Missouri and transferred to Ole Miss.
He ran for 127 yards against Missouri and went past 2,000 career rushing yards. He has 29 rushing touchdowns since the start of last season. Makhi Frazier also cleared 100, the first time Ole Miss has had two 100-yard rushers in a game since 2022 against Arkansas. Frazier, on Tuesday: “it felt pretty good to get the first 100 yards in the SEC.”
The run game is the real trend line of this season. 63 yards against LSU. 128 at Florida. 196 at Vanderbilt. 257 against Missouri. Up every single conference game.
Todd Wade, who played the position, explained the jump without mentioning a scheme: “They’re doing a better job with their leverage. They’re getting more movement at the point of attack and sticking. They’re finishing their blocks better.”
Golding on managing Lacy through a nicked-up season: “It’s not like he’s forgot how to play football.” On Lacy putting himself back into the Missouri game after getting hurt: “He’s like, Coach, I’m good. So I think it was really good to see that in a situation that he didn’t have to.”
Patrick Kutas, who blocks for him: “you got a guy that’s going to put everything in to run the ball and help us look good, honestly.”
Bill Flowers went further than anybody: “He is as much of a difference maker, in my opinion, as Trinidad is in regards to how that offense flows.”
And Kutas on Echoles, whom he blocks every day in practice, which remains the best description of that player anyone has given: “He is a very large human that moves very fast, and he is very strong, and he’s very smart. So he’s kind of like all of the top key attributes you need. He’s all maxed out in those areas. So he’s pretty tough to block.”
What We Got Wrong This Week
House rule. We fix it here instead of letting it slide.
- It is Colin Simmons. One L. We said Collin all week, in nearly every segment.
- Simmons had five sacks at Tennessee, not 5.5, and he tied the school record rather than setting it. Shane Dronett had five against Texas Tech in 1990. Texas had 10 sacks as a team that night in a 20-17 win.
- Friday’s Flagship had Texas at 18 team sacks and Simmons at 16.5 tackles for loss. It is 19 sacks and 16 tackles for loss. The 55 percent share holds up, but only against the right denominator.
- Friday’s Flagship also had Chambliss at 146-of-219 for 1,744 yards with five interceptions. He is 142-of-210 for 1,676 yards with 14 touchdowns and four interceptions.
- Lacy is not two touchdowns from Brandon Bolden. Bolden finished with 27 and Lacy is already at 29. The next name up the list is Quinshon Judkins. We are confirming the exact placement with Ole Miss rather than guess at it twice.
- The Army running back with 31 touchdowns is Cale Hellums, and he is a quarterback. We called him Kel Helms and called him a running back.
- Texas’s four straight weeks at No. 1 is not its longest run at the top since 1977. Texas held No. 1 for five consecutive polls in 2024.
- Tennessee did not score 10 against Alabama. Alabama scored 10. Tennessee won 26-10 at Neyland. That came on Saturday’s Locked On Bets segment and the point being made still stands, but the number was backwards.
- Ole Miss’s red zone touchdown rate is 87.5 percent, not 89. The Rebels are 24-for-24 scoring and 21-of-24 for touchdowns, and the 87 percent figure we used Thursday was the right one.
- Spellings, with the official rosters as the source of record. It is Brycen Sanders, Jehiem Oatis and Kam Franklin for Ole Miss. For Texas it is Trevor Goosby, Raleek Brown, Derrek Cooper, Emmett Mosley V, Rasheem Biles, Dylan Sikorski, and backup quarterback KJ Lacey, who is not related to and should not be confused with Kewan Lacy.
Two things we said that we could not stand up this week, so take them as the speaker’s and not as fact. Brad Kellner credited Biles with three interceptions this season; Texas has three interceptions as a team all year, and Biles’s two pick-sixes came last season at Pitt. And the third-down splits we read Friday, 8-of-36 over Texas’s last three games, come out of the Texas game notes. We confirmed the Tennessee leg of it, 3-of-12, and nothing else. Texas is 35-of-84 on the season, 41.7 percent.
On The Mic This Week
- Pete Golding, head coach (Monday). Sixteen minutes that gave us the week’s spine: Arch Manning as a top pick, Sarkisian as the best play caller in the country, and a false-confidence warning aimed at his own locker room.
- Patrick Kutas, offensive line (Tuesday). On sliding to center mid-game, on why the mental load there is the hard part, and the definitive scouting report on Will Echoles.
- Makhi Frazier, running back (Tuesday). His first 100-yard SEC game, and what it is like to split carries with Lacy and block in front of Echoles.
- John Fourcade, Ole Miss legend (Monday). Gracious about Chambliss passing him on the career passing list, and blunt about Texas: “Texas is wounded dogs, they’re at home. That scares me.”
- Tyler Comas, Ole Miss on SI (Tuesday, Rebel Squad LIVE). The Heisman case for Chambliss if Missouri was his floor, and the sharpest framing of what a win is worth in the playoff math.
- Bill Flowers, Ole Miss legend (Wednesday). The wounded-animal warning, Lacy as a difference maker on Chambliss’s level, and 42-21.
- Brad Kellner, Locked On Longhorns (Thursday). The best reporting of the week from the other side: Texas’s second-half collapse numbers, the interior offensive line problem, and the KJ Lacey reps.
- Todd Wade, NFL veteran (Friday). The technical read on why the run game took off, and a warning about Ryan Niblett in the return game.
- Spencer McLaughlin, Locked On College Football (Friday). On Chambliss: “you can’t stop him. You can only hope to contain him.”
- Kevin Rogers, Locked On Bets (taped Friday, out Saturday). Handicapped the full SEC slate and took Ole Miss plus the points.
- Chris Beard, basketball head coach (Thursday). On the Alabama exhibition in Birmingham, the rebounding problem it exposed, honoring Andy Kennedy before Tuesday’s UAB game, and the eligibility situations for two players still working through court dates.
- Patton Pinkins, basketball (Thursday). Took the rebounding on himself: “rebounding is a choice.”
- Budd Clark, basketball (Thursday). Unbothered by the exhibition loss and already onto UAB: “I see myself impacting in winning ways.”
Where It Stands
Ole Miss is 5-1 and seventh in the country, averaging 37.5 points and 444.5 yards, over 400 yards in all six games. The defense has given up 20 points across the last two weeks. Missouri came in at 35.8 points per game and left with three and 39 rushing yards, only the second time in a decade Ole Miss has held an SEC opponent to three or fewer.
Luke Ferrelli leads the team with 39 tackles, Keaton Thomas has 37 and Tah’j Butler 33. Blake Purchase has 6.5 tackles for loss and 3.5 sacks. Suntarine Perkins is fifth in school history with 20 career sacks and fourth with 35 tackles for loss. Lucas Carneiro is 9-of-11 on field goals with a long of 57 and 26-of-26 on extra points, with Peter McStravick handling kickoffs while Carneiro’s foot heals.
Terez Davis and Brycen Sanders were questionable on the first availability report. Kutas came off it entirely. Edwin Joseph is still out.
Then Austin, and then it does not get easier. Auburn comes to Oxford on October 31 having just beaten the No. 1 team in the country 27-24 in Athens. Georgia is in Oxford on November 7. Oklahoma is a road game on November 14. Wofford, then the Egg Bowl.
Everydayers, the number that matters Saturday night is the one we opened with. Ole Miss’s worst offensive day this season is 28 points. Texas has not scored more than 24 against a Power 4 team. One of those two things has to break.
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