Georgia week got the full crossover treatment on Thursday’s Locked On Ole Miss, with Steven Willis bringing in a guest who spent time on Mark Richt’s Georgia staff and now hosts on the Locked On network to break down a top-10 heavyweight that comes down to one thing: the trenches. No Kewan Lacy, a quieter road environment to work in, and a run-it-and-stop-it chess match. Here are the parts worth keeping from the show.
It’s a 1980s football game in disguise
Steven’s read on the whole weekend set the table: “This is a 1980s-style football game that’s disguised as a modern spread offense. It’s all run the ball and stop the run. Whoever can do that is going to win the game.” Everything else flows from the line of scrimmage.
The numbers frame the collision. Georgia’s defense has piled up 26 sacks in eight games — more than the 20 it had all of last season — while Ole Miss hasn’t allowed a sack in three straight and sits at around five or six for the entire year. The catch for any pass rush is that it’s hard to sack Trinidad Chambliss because it’s hard to rush him: defenders pull up rather than risk him taking off, and his decision-making down the field makes committing even harder.
Life without Kewan Lacy — and a run game with a Plan B
With Kewan Lacy out, the carries fall to Shekai Mills-Knight and Makhi Frazier, and Mills-Knight is the one who changes the math. The big back — listed around 6-2, 6-3 and 230-ish, a “size-speed guy” in Pete Golding’s words — went for 71 yards and a touchdown against Auburn and gave the offense a downhill dimension it hadn’t shown.
The bigger development was the willingness to grind. Ole Miss strung together 17-play and 12-play touchdown drives against Auburn, the kind of slow, methodical football this offense has largely avoided for years. Call it a Plan B: if a defense takes away the explosives, the Rebels now look capable of simply running it to the end zone. The honest caveat is that they still haven’t run it consistently well all season, and Deuce Alexander has to bounce back after a rough night.
The names you’re not watching: Mills-Knight and Keaton Thomas
Beyond the Chambliss headlines, Steven’s two players to watch were Mills-Knight on offense and Keaton Thomas on defense. Thomas, the Baylor transfer linebacker, is the “eraser” — a sideline-to-sideline athlete who can chase down screens and misdirection. Against a Georgia offense that lives on screens and inside runs, having linebackers who can erase space behind Ole Miss’s front could swing the game. Worth noting: Steven went with Thomas here over Tah’j Butler.
Paths to victory, a coin-flip model, and a nuclear SEC scenario
Steven pushed back hard on the idea that Ole Miss has a bad run defense. The season stat line says one thing; the film says another. The Rebels gave up a rash of explosive runs in the first three weeks but have tightened up since, holding recent opponents to rushing totals as low as 29 and 63 yards. Stats don’t tell the whole story.
How close is it? The show’s in-house “Loom Model” rated the game a near-dead heat — about a tenth of a point of separation in power rating, or, in plain terms, a coin flip. The score predictions split the difference: Steven landed on Ole Miss 27-21, trusting the Rebels to run it just enough to let Chambliss be Chambliss, while the guest went the other way, forecasting a higher-scoring night and Georgia winning something like 34-31 by wearing Ole Miss down up front.
And the nuclear scenario worth filing away: if Ole Miss wins Saturday, LSU wins its game, and both run the table from here, the SEC Championship becomes Ole Miss-LSU. Win out and the Rebels are sitting at the top of the conference no matter what else happens.
Hotty Toddy.
Join the Everydayers on Discord: https://discord.gg/KF3dtcQJhC