Ole Miss’ secondary looked better Saturday night, even if the film will still have a few moments that make coaches wince.
Charlotte wasn’t built to punish every mistake, which helped. LSU, though, is and that’s the part that hangs over everything Ole Miss did and didn’t clean up.
The Rebels didn’t give up the kind of coverage busts that wrecked the Louisville game. They kept Charlotte under 200 passing yards and came away with an interception. That’s progress.
But Charlotte also completed 71 percent of its throws, mostly quick stuff that exposed hesitation, eye-control issues and angles that still aren’t where they need to be.
Pete Golding said the week was tough on the defensive backs, and he wanted to see cleaner football.
“It was good to get back out there. Obviously, it was a pretty tough week on them. We were pretty hard on them. I wanted to see more consistent and cleaner football, and I thought we did that in spurts,” Golding said in his postgame press conference.
Ole Miss kept Charlotte scoreless in the first half, helped by Kam Franklin and Jeheim Oatis’s field-goal block. Golding liked that part. He didn’t like how the team came out of halftime.
“Coming out of the game last week, there was an opportunity in the fourth quarter when we were up two possessions to really close the door and finish the thing, and we didn’t,” Golding said. “We focused on that all week and hit it again at halftime, then came out and they got points on the first drive and we went three-and-out and punted on offense.”
The same theme popped up again when he talked about finishing games. Ole Miss had a chance to close the door late against Louisville and didn’t. They worked on that all week, then opened the second half Saturday by giving up points and going three-and-out.
“That was disappointing,” Golding said. “I also thought there were some critical penalties that extended drives, and right now we’re not good enough defensively to do that.”
The secondary’s biggest issue remains eye control. Ole Miss spent the week preparing for Charlotte’s screen-and-go looks, and still saw multiple defensive backs bite hard on fakes.
“We knew it was going to be a screen, screen-and-go perimeter game, and we have to clean that up before next week,” Golding said.
He saw improvement from Week 1, but not enough.
“At times,” he said when asked if he saw any improvement. “Holding somebody scoreless in the first half is tough against anybody. We gave up 12 explosive plays last week for 340 yards. It’s hard to beat anybody that way, and to beat a Top 25 team doing that, you’re flirting with things.”
The frustrating part was seeing the same mistake show up again.
“I was super disappointed in the same play recurring,” Golding said. “The attention to detail, the eye control and the fact that it was multiple people is the problem.”
Tackling looked better at the point of attack, but angles were still an issue.
“I still think there were some angle issues that were the same as last week,” Golding said. “A couple of those explosive runs were guys overrunning the football, not having gap control.”
He didn’t hide the reality of the situation.
“We’re going to continue rotating guys and continue trying to find five guys in the back end who do shit right because right now we don’t have five,” Golding said.
Charlotte didn’t have the personnel to turn those mistakes into touchdowns. LSU does. That’s the difference, and that’s why Saturday was both encouraging and a reminder of how far the secondary still has to go.
