Disappointed Saturday, for sure, on a lot of fronts. Our staff hurts for the Ole Miss family. When you love a place and you want to give it great job it's disappointing when you don't do the job. We must shut out the negativity and stay true to our core values. This is a great teaching moment and an opportunity to rally together in this building. There is adversity, and we have to handle it -- injuries and the loss. We have five opportunities left. That's 300 minutes, and we have to prepare daily and play with passion. It starts with A&M. Extremely good athletes on both sides of the ball. Defense is playing at a much higher level. They are a good test for us. I'm glad to have them at home. It's great to get a night game.
Third down defensively I've evaluated every play and it's very frustrating. It doesn't matter what you know. It matters what the players know. Five different occasions we had the perfect call and play didn't get made. Are we communicating it effectively? Is it a lack of focus? We have to work on it. Sometimes they get you, but when you get the right call you have to get off the field. Offensively we have to figure out what we can do and execute it.
30 missed tackles on Saturday. The last few weeks we laid off the indo to rest our legs and we may need to go back to that and lengthen practice to work on tackling. The missed tackling, along with the five missed opportunities, made for a long day.
Treadwell is as good as any receiver I've ever coached. Donte was the best we'd had, and Laquon is right there with him. He's arguably the best I've coached out of Donte and Mike and Dex and Shay.
We'll see Saturday night if the passion is there. I assure you we'll prepare them to have that. It's an individual decision. I'll do anything to make sure that occurs. Every man has to decide what his role is going to be. We have to motivate them.
When you miss tackles, your fundamentals are bad. That's the only way to say it.
Injuries are an issue. Elston, Gleeson, Polk and Nkemdiche are concussion protocol. Conyers is ACL tear. Several others are day to day. You have to keep getting the ones ready you have.
Breeland played with tremendous effort on Saturday. He was a young kid who played extremely hard. He played too many snaps but played at a very high level. 70 snaps.
Move Fahn back to right with Laremy at left. Bell will go to center now. Taylor and Sims at RG. Still at center. LG is Aaron and Javon.
Jeremy Liggins will keep working at both roles.
Allen or Murray would change a good bit of the approach.
There weren't a lot of soft zones on third down defensively. We just didn't make the plays.
Everything goes into the poor rushing stats. Some is personnel, some is scheme, some is the other defenses. We called 15 run plays that had completed balls on them. If you hand those off you would get positive yards. But the read is to throw it. We count those in rushing. But that doesn't take away from the fact that when you have to rush it we have to be better. We have to be better than we are.
Always looking at true freshmen who might could help this point, but no news to report.
Robert would like to play on offense again. He went to see Freeze to ask about, but Freeze didn't commit to more offensive snaps for him.
Always second guess on some of the coaching decisions from Saturday. In hindsight the first one -- the fourth down in the red zone -- was a missed assignment that caused the hit in the backfield. The QB sneak on fourth down was a bad call but we didn't want to give it back to them right then.
Social media, man, that's a whole different animal. I love Tee and he called me yesterday and we had a good conversation. I know what was said to him and how I pleaded him to stay. I'll leave it at that. He's a good kid, and I'll speak with him again.
CJ Johnson ran some last few days.
Gates graded out in the 60s but the effort was really, really good.
Freeze knows Sumlin from high schools days. Met through Noel Mazzone. Kevin was great resource for Freeze until they got to same division.
Success is way to return the swagger to the defense, as long with some motivation and excitement in practice. It'll help to get CJ or Tony back. We have to get back to being the landshark defense.
Chad has played well. He's been a positive. He's ultra competitive. In the red zone there's still a lot of learning. He's unsure on some tags. We have to keep coaching him. We missed a route down there and had to kick a field goal. That happens sometimes, but he's been a positive.
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