The first thing Pete Golding did after a 45-15 win over Auburn was go find the player who did not score.
Asked at the podium what he said to Deuce Alexander in the tunnel, Golding walked through it almost word for word.
“I said, Deuce, did you score tonight? Because I’m always practicing like Deuce touchdowns. Like, he’s my guy. And he’s like, no, Coach. I was like, you know what I’m most excited about? That we scored 45 points and I feel like our most explosive and best player didn’t. I said, that makes me feel really good.”
Alexander had a couple of drops that Golding said “aren’t like him.” He finished with a 57.6 offensive grade, the lowest among the receivers who played real volume. And the head coach’s read on that was not that it was a problem — it was that the offense scored 45 anyway.
“Keep your head up, man,” Golding said he told him. “Let’s learn from this and fight. You know, we’re going to need you.”
“Not living in the past”
Golding opened by describing what the team talked about the night before, and it was a more specific message than the usual bounce-back language.
“We kind of talked last night about not living in the past. We’ve gone through a lot together, made a lot of mistakes, all of us, put it on tape and had to get it corrected. And not to be in fear of the future either and get ahead of ourselves and worry about the things that we can’t control.”
He returned to that frame repeatedly: control the controllables, and specifically “your energy and your attitude and your body language and your focus.”
The part worth flagging is who he said it was aimed at. “I was most proud of some guys that haven’t had success in the past that we got on pretty good,” Golding said. “I made it a point in front of the team, and they came out and really, really responded.”
He did not name them. But the Auburn grade sheet has a short list of candidates, and Suntarine Perkins — who produced two of the three Ole Miss sacks after a month of being the lowest-graded regular in the front — is at the top of it.
On Shekai Mills-Knight: “playing without the football”
Mills-Knight was credited at the podium with a career-high 71 rushing yards. Asked what changed, Golding did not talk about running the ball at all.
“We always knew he could run the football. You could see that. But his development and understanding of the offense and allowing Six and the other guys to trust him to be able to be out there and do what he’s supposed to do — super proud of him for that.”
“Six” is Trinidad Chambliss. The specific thing Golding kept circling was protection and route concepts — the parts of the job a back has to do when he does not have the ball.
“When you just trot a 6’3, 235 kid out there, they’re going to expect you to run them. And so you’re seeing some different looks.”
The grades agree with him, and pointedly so. Mills-Knight’s pass-blocking grade against Auburn was 76.6. Makhi Frazier, who played six more snaps, graded 34.0 in the same column.
The third-down problem, and the unglamorous answer
Auburn converted third downs at will in the first half and almost not at all in the second. Asked what changed, Golding refused to make it sound like scheme.
“They did their job. So it’s very sad. I know it seems like all these new things. It’s not. One of them was a man that went to push alert and screwed it up. One was a missed tackle. One’s a scramble. We’re in zone. We don’t plaster the route.”
Then he generalized it into the most quotable thing he said all night:
“Plays work because somebody screwed it up. Very rarely is it my guy’s just better than you and he goes up over the top and makes the play. More games are lost than won. And so that’s what you’re seeing every week of how did this team beat this team? They beat themselves.”
He then put himself inside the same standard, which is not something head coaches always do at a podium after a 30-point win: “It’s our job to go through from a coaching standpoint. Are we asking them to do things that they can’t mentally or physically do? And I’m as guilty as anybody of that at times.”
Why the run defense held up
Auburn’s leading rusher is its quarterback. He finished with five yards. The team finished with 63.
Golding credited the front six and the week of preparation, then made a more interesting argument — that the defensive result was partly an offensive one.
“I think they always, regardless of the score, felt like they didn’t have control of the game because they were having trouble stopping us… I think they felt like, look, man, if we don’t extend the drive and we don’t score points, their offense is going to score. And I think they get a little pass-happy.”
That is the complementary-football case stated plainly: Ole Miss made Auburn throw it, and then pressured the quarterback 27 times.
On telling Chambliss to cut it loose
“My thing to him is I just wanted him to cut it loose. Playing that position, you got to be very efficient and you can’t press and you got to take what they give you… Us winning or losing is not strictly based on you. This is all of us and it’s a team game.”
Golding said there were “a couple more designed” quarterback runs in the plan, and that Chambliss had been watching highlights of himself from last season. But he was careful to say the running was not the whole of it — he pointed to a throw to Alexander on a play where Chambliss could have tucked it and ran.
“He could have ran it, but he threw a great ball. So he’s doing both, which is how I see it.”
The injury answers
The last question of the night produced the most concrete news, and it explains two of the strangest snap counts in the Auburn report.
Jalyn Crawford played four defensive snaps, one week after a two-interception game against Texas. Golding said Crawford hurt a shoulder in Austin, had no contact all week, was evaluated pregame and given an injection, and tried to play.
“He pushed through and just couldn’t do it efficiently. So we pulled him out.”
Luke Ferrelli played 16 snaps after 52 against Texas. Golding said the ankle has been bothering him for a couple of weeks, that he got nicked again in practice, started the game, “was playing really well, and he got pretty stiff. So it wasn’t worth the risk.”
“Hopefully we can get the guys healthy for this week,” he said.
On Caleb Cunningham, and on patience
Asked about Cunningham’s best game in an Ole Miss uniform, Golding gave the longest answer of the press conference, and it was really an argument about roster building.
“Guys that want to play in the NFL and increase their value of their first contract in the NFL don’t care how much they play as a freshman. Because that has zero impact on where they’re going in the draft… How well are you playing as a junior when you’re draft eligible?”
He described holding Cunningham “in that incubator for a year and a half,” and tied it to system stability — the pitch that the offense will not change underneath a player while he learns it.
“Guys can play too early and they don’t create value for themselves. They lose it and they lose confidence.”
It is a coherent position. It also sits slightly awkwardly against the snap counts: Cunningham played 26 snaps on Saturday and graded fourth on the entire offense, the fourth straight week he has graded near the top of the receiver room on under a third of the snaps.
On Landon Barnes: “they’re not freshmen anymore”
“Once you get to about game 6 or game 7, they’re not freshmen anymore… So we don’t look at those guys as freshmen anymore. So now we have confidence in them to be able to go out there on every down and do their job. Whereas before, when it’s early for freshmen, it’s really, really specific. Like, for him, it was like just third down specific.”
Golding called Barnes “an elite player” who is “very heavy-handed,” good against the run and “an elite pass rusher,” and said his role will keep growing. Barnes played 18 snaps against Auburn and generated two pressures on 13 rushes.
Georgia comes to Oxford on Saturday night. Golding, asked about the third quarter, had already looked ahead without being asked twice: “We’re going to play an elite team this week. And you can’t start slow.”
Photo: Pete Golding, October 31, 2026, at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Petre Thomas-Imagn Images.
Quotes from Pete Golding’s Auburn postgame press conference, October 31, 2026. Snap counts and grades via Pro Football Focus.