Ole Miss will win on Saturday night, and the reason is almost boring: this team’s floor is higher than anything Texas has shown. Friday’s show made the case straight out of the game notes — the worst day Ole Miss has had all year is still better than the best day Texas has managed against a Power 4 opponent — then stacked three keys, read the market, and landed on a score. Here’s the recap. Hotty Toddy.
The floor Texas can’t reach
Twenty-eight is the number. That’s Ole Miss’s lowest-scoring game of the season — the loss at Florida — and it’s still four points clear of anything Texas has put on a Power 4 team all year (24 against Ohio State, 24 against Oklahoma, 24 against Florida, 20 at Tennessee). Ole Miss is averaging 37.5 a game and has cleared 400 yards of total offense in all six games, 444 a night, against a schedule full of ranked defenses. Texas has sat around 313 yards against its Power 4 slate. That’s roughly 130 yards a game of daylight between the two offenses before you factor in anything else.
And the run game is peaking at the right time: 63 yards against LSU, then 128 at Florida, 196 at Vanderbilt, and 257 against Missouri — up every single conference week, 453 yards on the ground over the last two games alone. Trinidad Chambliss is sitting at a 150 pass efficiency even with the shaky Missouri accuracy he admitted to himself. The defense has 36 tackles for loss to its opponents’ 19 and has allowed just 20 points total across the Vanderbilt and Missouri games. That’s the whole argument.
Colin Simmons is out, and that’s not a footnote
The honest part of the show was giving Texas its due where it’s earned. Colin Simmons being ruled doubtful is a massive subtraction — 10.5 of Texas’s 18 sacks, 16.5 of its roughly 50 tackles for loss, all from one player. As Steven put it, “losing him is the equivalent, in my opinion, of losing Trinidad Chambliss on the offensive side of the ball for Ole Miss.” Don’t understate it.
But subtract him and the math shifts. Without Simmons and his backup, Ole Miss can run its protections the way it wants to — no tight end chipping, no back staying in on every snap — and Chambliss gets to stay inside the system instead of improvising his way out of pressure. Texas’s best remaining rusher is a linebacker, which opens the RPO game and asks real questions of the Longhorns’ front. One player doesn’t shut a team down; one player does change how you have to play them.
Three keys: tempo, third down, and Kewan Lacy going home
Key one is tempo. Ole Miss snaps it every 23.5 seconds — eighth-fastest in the country — and in a stadium with 100,000 people, getting the ball out before the crowd gets set is how you shrink the road. Pete Golding flagged communication as the week’s priority; tempo is how you press that advantage against a front still sorting itself out. Key two is getting Texas into third-and-long, where the Longhorns have gone a miserable 8-of-36 over their last three games. Blake Purchase (6.5 TFL, 3.5 sacks) and Suntarine Perkins are the guys who make those downs ugly.
Key three is Kewan Lacy in the red zone. He’s got 29 rushing touchdowns since the start of last season, second among all backs in the country, and Ole Miss has scored on every red-zone trip this year. He’s a little nicked up but it’s there — you saw it against Missouri. And he’s from Lancaster, Texas, walking into Darrell K Royal Stadium; don’t think that isn’t circled. Keep an eye too on linebacker Luke Ferrelli (team-high 39 tackles and the Player of the Game against Missouri), disruptive tackle Will Echoles, and young receiver Caleb Cunningham, PFF’s top-graded Ole Miss wideout on under half the snaps.
Reading the market
Here’s the oddity. FanDuel has Texas at -3.5 with a 54.5 total, and that spread has not budged since Simmons was ruled doubtful — on Sunday morning, before the news, it was Texas -3.5 with a 55.5 total. The best defensive player on the board goes down and the number holds; the price on Ole Miss just got a touch more expensive and the total dropped a point. Meanwhile FanDuel shows 88% of the money and 86% of the bets on Ole Miss against the spread. When that much comes in on one side and the line still won’t move, the book is telling you it’s comfortable. That’s a line worth squinting at.
The show reads the market, it doesn’t tell you where to put your money. Ole Miss’s +134 money line works out to about a 43% chance to win outright, and the prediction market lands right next to it at around 42%. Do the math on a 3.5-point line and the market is basically calling it Texas by a field goal and the hook. Steven’s number went the other way: Ole Miss 31, Texas 27. The thinking — Texas is too talented at home to be shut out, but without Simmons changing the game, he doesn’t see the Longhorns reaching the 30s, and he doesn’t see this Ole Miss offense getting held under 30. Kickoff is Saturday at 6:30 on ABC.
Also on the show: Todd Wade on the run game
NFL veteran Todd Wade joined to break down how that Missouri rushing night actually happened. His answer was refreshingly unglamorous: “It really comes back to the basics. 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.” He pointed to the open week after the Florida loss as the turning point — more time to fix what was wrong than to heal up — and said the same tenacity showed up on the defensive line, shedding blocks and rotating ends so nobody could just pick on a matchup and run at it. Pass protection, he noted, was never the problem; the run game finally caught up.
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