Ole Miss football has the ingredients to be special. Lane Kiffin has a week to nail the recipe

OXFORD — After Ole Miss football finalized a 48-23 victory over Georgia Tech on Saturday night, coach Lane Kiffin spent his postgame press conference straddling the line between good and bad.

The running game? Much improved. The defense's tackling? Not as good as last week. The offensive line looked better, but he would have liked to see Ole Miss generate a better pass rush.

Quarterback Jaxson Dart said this team, overhauled by the transfer portal in the offseason once again, still feels new. Defensive back Trey Washington said there's another gear to hit for these Rebels.

The central theme: Save for a 73-7 stomping of FCS Mercer in the season opener that showed us nothing besides how high the scoreboard can count at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, Ole Miss has not played as well as it knows it can.

"The only thing you can be is 3-0," Kiffin said. "You can't be 4-0 after three games. I commend our players for that. You got new coaches, you got tons of new players out there. You got some significant, major-impact injuries on offense. I commend them for getting to 3-0. I kind of would have thought it would take some time to get going, so you wanna survive and win these games."

That Ole Miss (3-0) has turned in two incomplete performances against Georgia Tech (1-2) and Tulane (2-1) and emerged with 25- and 17-point wins is telling.

The Rebels, absent three of their top four pass-catchers ‒ including Tre Harris, who has five touchdown receptions in two games ‒ generated very little downfield against a vulnerable Georgia Tech defense in the first half, with Dart throwing for just 49 yards. What the Ole Miss offense did generate came on the ground. A Dart rushing touchdown helped the Rebels head into halftime with a 10-3 lead.

The second half saw the Ole Miss passing offense explode. Dart completed five passes of more than 20 yards after halftime, including three of 40 or more yards.

"You see how we can make adjustments in the second half," Dart said. "The more the game goes on, I feel like the better that we get. I think that as the season will go on, we'll start to gain confidence in each other from the first snap to the last snap."

The defense offered a similar give-and-take. The Rebels were great in the red zone in the first half. Georgia Tech took all three of its first-half drives to at least the Ole Miss 25-yard line and managed only three points. But the underlying numbers weren't great. The Yellow Jackets' 477 yards of total offense is a long way off what the Rebels did to Tulane last week, completely shutting down the Green Wave offense in the second half to spark a comeback win.

"I don't think we were very pleased with how we played defense," Kiffin said.

Ole Miss has done just about everything well this season, but it hasn't yet managed to do everything well at the same time against a competent opponent.

The time to crack that code is now.

A road bout with a suddenly vulnerable-looking Alabama team awaits, followed by an LSU team that throttled Mississippi State 41-14 on the road.

"This is a game that I feel like our whole team is really looking forward to," Dart said. "Especially with how things ended last time we played them toward the end of the game. Obviously, they're 'Bama, so you know what to expect from them. I think all of us, just as kids, we've grown up and seen them at the top. So we're excited for the challenge."

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These are the games that will define what Ole Miss is playing for this season. Can the Rebels contend for the SEC West? Or are they destined to be an afterthought?

We didn't learn one way or the other on Saturday. But we're about to find out.

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: Can Ole Miss football beat Alabama? What we learned from Georgia Tech