Talaysia Cooper Hit Seven Threes, And Coach Yo Still Called Ole Miss A Three Out Of 10

Ole Miss beat UAlbany by 54 on Wednesday night, made 15 threes, got a career-high seven of them from Talaysia Cooper, and then Yolett McPhee-McCuin sat down at the postgame podium and put her team at about a three on a 10-point scale. That isn’t false modesty. It’s the most accurate read anybody offered on this game, because the 95 points were the byproduct. The thing that produced them, the defense, is the only part of this team that already looks finished, and Coach Yo is grading everything else.

The defense wrote the score

Look at the game by quarter. UAlbany, which walked into the Pavilion 3-0, scored eight points in the first quarter, nine in the second and eight in the fourth. The Great Danes shot 15 of 53, made 2 of 15 from three and turned it over 27 times. Ole Miss had 16 steals and committed nine turnovers of its own. Cooper, Jaida Civil and Jada Richard had three steals apiece, and Jade Tillman had four.

McPhee-McCuin went straight to that cause and effect, and caught herself mid-sentence doing it.

“But we were able to defend, I mean score, because we were playing defense.”

Yolett McPhee-McCuin

She was careful not to make it about the opponent. UAlbany had some good wins, she said, and the low quarters weren’t a knock on the Great Danes.

“It’s because our team is now understanding how important it is to defend at a high level.”

Yolett McPhee-McCuin

She also changed the starting lineup, and her reason tells you what she is grading. It wasn’t talent. She said the roster is pretty balanced, but “there are some people that focus on the details a little bit more than others right now.” She said she will keep changing it until she finds a group she wants to roll with into SEC play.

Why the threes don’t change the grade

Ole Miss went 15 of 37 from three, its most made threes in a game since February 2018, according to the school. Cooper scored 29 in 23 minutes on 10-of-16 shooting and 7 of 12 from deep, with five of those threes before halftime. Lauren Jacobs and Maya Anderson each made three. Four Rebels scored in double figures, and Ole Miss assisted on 26 of its 33 baskets.

That’s a big shooting night, and McPhee-McCuin treated it as a starting point. Asked whether Cooper had found her role, she said that was a stretch, then raised the bar out loud.

“If she was where we would want her to be in March, she would have had 40 tonight.”

Yolett McPhee-McCuin

She credited Cooper for working extremely hard over the past few days and for letting the staff coach her and call her out, and said she won’t let her settle. That’s the tell. A coach who thought her offense had arrived wouldn’t need to talk about 40-point nights in March after a 29-point night in November. Shooting comes and goes over a season. A defense that holds a winning team to single digits in three of four quarters travels, and that’s the part she says this group is starting to understand.

Cooper put it the same way. Asked about the seven threes, she didn’t talk about her shot.

“We just got to stay locked in, stay in the gym, continue to put up shots.”

Talaysia Cooper

And on the nights the shots don’t fall, Cooper said, the answer is to play defense. That’s a fifth-year guard who just tied for the fourth-most threes in a game in program history, and her first instinct was to point at the other end of the floor.

A three, and that’s fine

The bigger point McPhee-McCuin made had nothing to do with UAlbany. She said she feels like she is in years one, two and three of a build at the same time. The talent is better, she said, but she is back to teaching the basics: what happens in a huddle, how a team carries itself before a game, the timing of it all.

“The stuff that we’re talking to them about, we hadn’t had to talk about in a long time.”

Yolett McPhee-McCuin

Then she gave the number.

“If 10 is great then we’re probably like at, you know, three hovering around that four. So we have a lot of ways to go which is exciting for me.”

Yolett McPhee-McCuin

Believe her. Three games in, this new roster has one trait it can count on every night, and it’s the right one to have first. Everything McPhee-McCuin listed as missing, like lineup consistency, role clarity and the daily habits of a veteran team, is the kind of thing that improves with reps. Defensive buy-in usually doesn’t, and Ole Miss already has it. A team that’s a three on her scale and still beats a 3-0 opponent by 54 has a lot of room to grow.

The tests get harder from here. Ole Miss (3-0) hosts Louisiana Tech on Sunday, Nov. 15, at 2 p.m. CT at the Pavilion, a team McPhee-McCuin called “a really good opponent,” then goes to Ohio State on Wednesday, Nov. 18. Cooper won’t make seven threes every night. The question for the next two games is whether the defense shows up when the shots don’t.

Quotes from Ole Miss Athletics’ postgame press conferences. Box score figures confirmed against ESPN and CBS Sports.

Photo: Ole Miss head coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin at SEC Basketball Tipoff, October 13, 2026, at the Grand Bohemian Hotel Mountain Brook in Birmingham, Alabama. Mandatory Credit: Butch Dill-Imagn Images.