Lane Kiffin wants to see improvement in this key area for Ole Miss football vs Alabama
OXFORD — Ole Miss football defensive lineman Isaac Ukwu expects the more aggressive team to claim the victory when the Rebels play Alabama on Saturday.
The winning ingredients, to him, include playing with physicality and controlling the line of scrimmage.
“Whether it comes with block destruction, making tackles, playing the ball in the sky,” Ukwu said Monday. “... I feel like if we can impose our will on the offensive line and then have the linebackers come in and fill the gaps with bad intentions, we can pull out the win.”
Physicality, in particular, has been a key point for Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin this week.
In a defensive performance last week against Georgia Tech that Kiffin has been critical of, he has implied that the Rebels (3-0) were not physical enough.
“We’ve got a lot to work on,” Kiffin said on a teleconference with reporters Sunday. “Didn’t tackle well. Didn’t play really physical, which is surprising because that has not been an issue for the most part in the first two games.”
Georgia Tech accumulated 474 yards of total offense against Ole Miss in a 48-23 Rebels victory at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. The Yellow Jackets sustained long drive after long drive, running 89 plays against the Rebels despite entering Week 3 with relatively average pace of play metrics.
They managed to keep their quarterback, Haynes King, upright for most of the game against what had been a vicious Ole Miss pass rush. The Rebels sacked King just twice.
Kiffin thinks Georgia Tech will turn out to be one of the ACC’s better offensive teams, but he knows defensive improvement is required if the Rebels are to beat Alabama (2-1) on on Saturday (2:30 p.m., CBS) and win inside Bryant-Denny Stadium for the first time since 2015.
“I think guys understand the magnitude of this game, understand we made a lot of mistakes last week and there’s a lot of things we need to improve on,” Kiffin said Monday. “As I mentioned, we’re going into an extremely hard place to play. It’s an ultra-talented football team, so we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”
Ole Miss football set to take on Alabama's Jalen Milroe
The Rebels now know the quarterback they need to focus on in their preparations. Alabama coach Nick Saban announced on Monday that the Crimson Tide will start Jalen Milroe. He’d rolled out Tyler Buchner and Ty Simpson in a surprisingly narrow 17-3 victory over South Florida last week.
Milroe, a redshirt sophomore, completed 14 of his 27 passes for 255 yards, two touchdowns and two interceptions in a loss to Texas in Week 2. He also led Alabama with 44 rushing yards in that game.
“He’s hard to catch, hard to tackle, hard to bring down,” Kiffin said. “He can run physically too, so he’s a big challenge as you saw early in the season.”
David Eckert covers Ole Miss for the Clarion Ledger. Email him at deckert@gannett.com or reach him on Twitter @davideckert98.
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This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Where Ole Miss football must improve against Alabama, Nick Saban
