For a team with SEC and national championship aspirations, the 38-10 loss to Florida was certainly a huge blow to the Ole Miss football team. The Rebels dropped from third to 14th in the Associated Press poll.
“Obviously, it was a disappointing night down in Florida,” Hugh Freeze, head coach, said. “Credit to Florida, they are a much improved football team. They are very good defensively and they made explosive plays on us. We certainly did not play our best. Some of that had to do with them, some of that had to do with us not making plays or not coaching them to play well enough.”
The Florida loss illuminated a lot of flaws in the team that Freeze said he hopes to correct this week.
“It is a great lesson for us. We owned it when we went to Tuscaloosa, and we lost, so now we need to own the loss on the road,” Freeze said. “We have to own it when we lose in difficult places to play against really good teams. The expectations of this program are to compete in those games. I know that and I understand that. So like many other teams, we need to get in here and get to work.”
Protecting junior quarterback Chad Kelly wasn’t a big issue in the previous four games, but against the Gators, Kelly was under pressure for most of the game, a problem which Freeze attributed to injuries and good play by the Florida defensive line.
“This was a different defensive front that gives us a bit more of a challenge. They’re a lot like our guys. They’re extremely quick,” Freeze said. “The environment gave them a distinctive advantage with the get-off that they had. It was very difficult. We had some guys out. Justin Bell, of course, he’s a senior. Javon (Patterson) was real gimpy. We struggled in that environment with their quickness.”
Freeze was open about the current state of the team and said he felt a lot of improvements had to be made to be competitive in the SEC.
“We are not elite right now. We have potential to be much better than the way we played that night, and we’ve shown that,” Freeze said. “We still have a lot of work to do. It’s evident the other night that we weren’t prepared to play our best and didn’t. We got exposed in some places in the secondary that we need to work on.”
The team knows there are a lot of problems that need to get corrected in order to make a run and win the SEC West, but Freeze said he still has hope the team could turn it around and finish the season strong.
“We have the ability to be one of the best teams in the country. I can’t control injuries. There’s no telling what will happen with those. We certainly miss people like Issac Gross Tony Conner, Justin Bell and Laremy Tunsil, but everyone has some of that,” Freeze said. “So you have to continue to build your program to where you can be elite when those things happen. But I am confident. I can’t wait to get to work and back on the practice field to get ready for Saturday.”
