Is Ole Miss this good? Are Mississippi State, Southern Miss this bad?

After 13 hours of watching college football Saturday – and enduring seemingly 21,989 TV timeouts – this bleary-eyed correspondent is left with more questions than answers.

For instance, is Ole Miss, the nation’s fifth-ranked team, really this good? (Honestly, I think the Rebels are.)

Are Mississippi State and Southern Miss this bad? (The season is still a puppy, but, boy, those are two teams that really need for something good to happen. Soon.)

Rick Cleveland

Through three games, Lane Kiffin’s offense averages nearly 700 yards per game, nearly nine yards per play and exactly 56 points per game. Granted, the Rebels have not played a really good football team yet, but these eyes see no weaknesses, glaring or otherwise. Apparently, Wake Forest doesn’t either because the Demon Deacons are paying Ole Miss $750,000 to not play the return game in Oxford next year.

As for Mississippi State, there was nothing holy about Toledo. The Rockets earned a $1.2 million paycheck and dominated the Bulldogs in every phase of the game in a 41-17 victory that was ever bit as one-sided as it sounds. The pertinent question seems not so much how can a 10.5-point underdog win by 24 points on the road, but why was Toledo ever a double-digit underdog in the first place?

Toledo plays in the Mid-American Conference, where the league’s best teams are nearly always competitive with Power 5 conference teams. We saw it a week ago when Northern Illinois won at Notre Dame. That was a week after Notre Dame won on the road at Texas A&M and a week before the Irish crushed Purdue 66-7. That same Saturday, Bowling Green led for much of the game before losing at Penn State. Last year, Toledo lost to Illinois by three points in its opener before winning 11 regular season games and the MAC regular season title. 

My point: Toledo is a well-coached, veteran team, used to success, and no doubt came to Starkville expecting to win. What the Rockets couldn’t have expected was to dominate. But Toledo led 14-0 early, 28-3 at halftime and 35-3 in the third quarter. It could have been worse than the final 41-17.

For State, the worst part is that the Bulldogs were dominated at the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball. There was nothing fluke-y about it. Twenty of Toledo’s 73 offensive plays gained 10 for more yards. On the flip side, Toledo defenders combined for five sacks, six tackles for losses. State ran the ball 27 times for a paltry 66 yards.

That’s particularly sobering when you realize that the Bulldogs’ remaining schedule includes five of the nation’s top seven ranked teams. After Florida, in Starkville, this Saturday, State’s next two games are against the nation’s top two teams, Texas and Georgia, both on the road.

Meanwhile, Ole Miss continued its early season demolition of inferior competition. After clubbing Furman and Middle Tennessee State by a combined 128-3, the Rebels faced their first Power 5 competition and first road game of the season. The Rebels made it look easy. The first possession of the game pretty much set the tone: 75 yards and five plays in 87 seconds, touchdown Ole Miss. It was almost like a dummy drill. Before the first quarter was over, Ole Miss would score three touchdowns, and it easily could have been four.

Jaxson Dart has now completed 73 of 88 passes for 1,172 yards. That’s 83 percent. He throws lasers.

Ole Miss now plays a good Sun Belt team Georgia Southern, at home, before beginning conference play the following week against Kentucky. Road games at South Carolina and LSU follow that. The Rebels will be favored in all.

At Hattiesburg, Southern Miss started fast, taking a 14-0 lead over a talented South Florida team that had played Alabama on even terms for three and a half quarters the previous week. After USM’s quick start, reality set in. South Florida scored the next 28 points en route to a dominant, 49-24 victory. Most disheartening of all for USM: The Golden Eagles’ defensive front was supposed to be the strength of the team, but South Florida gashed USM for 369 yards rushing. Southern Miss now goes on the road to face Rich Rodriguez’s Jacksonville State team, which won nine games and the New Orleans Bowl last year.

Elsewhere:

• Previously No. 1 Georgia, for once, looked human in a 13-12 win at Kentucky.
• Previously No. 2 Texas lost Quinn Ewers but used Arch Manning’s five-touchdown performance to trounce UTSA 56-7 and move up to No. 1 ahead of Georgia. To this observer of three generations of quarterbacks named Manning, the athletic, 19-year-old Arch, whose performance included a 67-yard touchdown run, looked far more like his grandfather Archie than either of his famous quarterbacking uncles Peyton and Eli.
• No. 4 Alabama went on the road to blast Wisconsin 42-10.
• No. 16 LSU outlasted South Carolina 36-33 in a game marred by officiating that was sketchy at best.
• Vanderbilt fell from the unbeaten ranks, dropping a 36-32 decision to Georgia State of the Sun Belt Conference.
• Jackson State trounced Southern University 33-15 for its fifth straight victory over the Jaguars before a crowd of just over 32,000 at Veterans Memorial Stadium.
• Colorado bounced back with a 28-9 victory over Colorado State. Former Jackson State coach Deion Sanders had his son, Shadeur, throwing the ball and padding his stats with a 19-point lead with under two minutes to play. CBS announcers, understandably, were both incredulous and critical. Alas, sportsmanship will never be Deion’s long suit.

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