I apologize for disappearing. I have been busy painting and otherwise preparing a new house to move into. I've been away from the computer all weekend, for the most part. Anyway, some quick bullets:
- We were thoroughly outplayed, especially in the second half, and we were darn lucky to be in that game. If not for some very questionable officiating in the first half, Ole Miss would have scored a touchdown on the interception that led to the blocked field goal returned for a touchdown for LSU. A 14-point swing would have made that game not very close.
- Jordan Jefferson reverted to his old ways of completely disappearing for a quarter plus. The third quarter and early part of the 4th quarter for Jefferson were horrid, and our offense ground to a half. Fortunately, the defense stepped up and managed to keep Ole Miss from scoring for much of that time.
- We've now lost our 3 best running backs to season-ending injury.
- With a 2-point conversion try from the 1 1/2 yard line, I really don't think a fade to Toliver was the best play there. I'm not saying we necessarily should have run the ball, but the fade did nothing to exploit the advantage we were given by virtue of the penalty taking us 1 1/2 yards closer to the end zone.
- It was the right move to not shut down the offense when we got to the 31 yard line. College kickers aren't that good, and with an offense that was (at that time) moving the ball and about a minute left to play with 2 timeouts, it was the right move to keep trying to go forward.
- The big sack was mostly on Jefferson, but partly on the coaches. He does not have a good feel for the rush, and did exactly what he should not have done. Instead of stepping up, he stepped right, and Ciron Black had successfully maneuvered his man around where Jefferson should have been, but Jefferson moved right into the path of danger.
- The horrible decision to wait 15 seconds to call our last timeout was indefensible. The decision to try to spike the ball instead of rushing the field goal unit out was less so. The field goal unit probably would not have been able to get the snap off. Unfortunately, the proper thing to do in that situation was probably to try to run a play to the end zone. There just wasn't time to do anything else, and that's because of that last timeout. Heck, had we called it immediately, we probably could have run a spike, then a play to the end zone, and THEN kicked the field goal after the big catch by Toliver.