If you watched Ole Miss beat Missouri 31-3 and came away annoyed at the Rebels for not scoring more, you watched the wrong team.
Ole Miss converted every red zone trip it had into points. That's about as good as it gets for an offense. Missouri was the team that stalled out repeatedly in scoring position, settled for a field goal on its only real chance, and missed a makeable kick on top of it. Blake Craig shanked a 23-yard attempt with the Tigers already down two scores. Missouri's whole offensive day amounted to three red zone trips and three total points. That's the story worth being furious about, and it belongs to Columbia.
Pete Golding's defense deserves the attention here. Three weeks ago, Ole Miss had the worst run defense in the SEC through six weeks, and Florida put a number on that reputation before the bye week that nobody in Oxford wants repeated. Missouri showed up averaging close to 180 rushing yards a game, with Jamal Roberts coming off back-to-back 200-plus-yard performances. Golding's defense held him to a fraction of that on a stack of carries, and held Missouri to just 2.2 yards per rush in the first half. It was the defense's second consecutive dominant performance against an SEC rushing attack, the exact kind of downhill rushing attack that had been exposing it earlier this season.
Give Missouri's offense its due complaint: three points off three red zone trips in a ranked matchup is a legitimate embarrassment, and nobody in that building should be allowed to spin it as bad luck. A missed field goal and a stalled opening drive don't happen in a vacuum. They happen because a unit that was supposed to be one of this team's strengths had no answer for a defense it was supposed to be able to run on.
None of this makes Ole Miss's offense flawless. Trinidad Chambliss missed his first two throws of the game badly, finished under 60 percent passing, and the Rebels dealt with drops, penalties and a fumble that could have kept Missouri in it if the defense hadn't been playing its best game of the season. Pete Golding said it himself afterward: he didn't think his team played a perfect game, but holding an opponent to three points says a lot, and Chambliss wasn't perfect either, but he was glad to have him. That's the read that matters most.
Missouri fans want to argue the final score should've been even more lopsided because their offense couldn't finish drives. Fine, but that argument is about how bad Missouri's offense was. Ole Miss scored on every single trip into the red zone. The inefficiency that decided this game belonged to the team that lost by four touchdowns. That offense had no business posting three points against a defense that had been getting gashed for 300-plus yards on the ground a month earlier.
Golding earned this one. Missouri's offensive staff should be the ones answering for it.
