With two games left, we still don’t know what the story of this Razorback season will be. If the Hogs can finish 2-0 and then win a bowl to get to 8-5, it won’t be considered a huge disappointment, given the difficult schedule and horrible injury luck this team endured.
But missing a bowl still isn’t out of the question. Missouri’s no pushover and that game is on the road. Saturday will go a long way to determining how much fight is left. With Ole Miss coming off a physical and emotional loss to Alabama, the opportunity is there to finish the season strong.
Meet the Rebels
Confused by any of the advanced stats you see here? Be sure to check out the glossary.
Model pick: Ole Miss by 2. We’re tracking right with Vegas on this one.
The Rebels have been the better team all season, but they’re trending in the wrong direction in recent weeks. Ole Miss is more extreme than Arkansas: better on offense (12th), but worse on defense (91st).
Scouting Report
Ole Miss’s offense is versatile and devastating. The Rebs are run-heavy but have an efficient passing attack. They are able to stay on-schedule while also creating big plays. If knocked off-schedule, they are merely decent, but not bad. They aren’t great at finishing drives with points, as Lane Kiffin’s aggressive fourth-down decision-making has caused a lot of their drives to come up empty.
The Rebels have run a bend-don’t-break defense under Kiffin, and that hasn’t changed even though the coordinators have. Ole Miss struggles to knock opponents off-schedule and is generally bad on standard downs, but they don’t give up many big plays and are decent at getting off the field on third down.
When Arkansas has the ball
The Razorback offense has been through two disastrous weeks. Now, with the season on the brink, they’ll finally get a weak opponent to get back on track.
Arkansas’ numbers have taken a bit of a fall over the last two weeks, but at least that came against good defenses. With KJ Jefferson back and relatively healthy, the offense has a good chance for redemption. For those wondering about Ole Miss’s 97th-ranked EPA defense: BYU is 109th. So the Rebels aren’t much better. Those are (by far) the two worst FBS defenses the Hogs will face this season.
You can see the telltale signs of a bend-don’t-break defense here: Ole Miss allows lots of successful plays (113th), lets opponents stay on schedule (109th), and doesn’t do well on early downs (106th). But on the flip side, the Rebels can force turnovers (51st) and don’t give up big plays (47th).
Arkansas’ offense tends to match up well with bend-don’t-break defenses, as evidenced by the 51-point outburst in Oxford last year against a similar Ole Miss D. The Hogs are more vulnerable to defenses that can force negative plays (ahem, Liberty) and are very content to sustain long drives against defenses merely seeking to contain them.
This will be the break-serve part of the game. Arkansas wants to run, and Ole Miss’s pass defense is terrible, so both sides desperately need to win this matchup.
I’ve highlighted what is likely the key stat for this game. Arkansas simply has to stop going backward in the run game. The Razorbacks are pretty good at creating good runs (7th in runs of 6+, 23rd in runs of 10+), but their bad runs are very bad, and that knocks the offense off-track. It’s been an issue all year, even before Liberty.
The Rebels’ ultra-conservative pass defense just tries to keep everything in front. Ole Miss plays zone coverage almost exclusively, which is great news for the Hogs, as Jefferson has been very good against zone this season (not so much against man).
Unless Jefferson’s injury is still serious, I’d be stunned if Arkansas isn’t able to move the ball through the air with relative ease. Big plays will be hard to come by, so the Hogs can’t get cute in the scoring zone and must avoid turnovers. Do that, and scoring 30+ points is very doable.
When Ole Miss has the ball
Arkansas’ defense came out of nowhere to have a huge game against LSU. Was that a function of the matchup, or a sign that the Hog defense has finally turned the corner? We’ll find out!
The Hogs have risen more than 20 spots in the EPA/Play rankings over the last two weeks, but this is still very much a bad defense. And Ole Miss is still very good on offense. If the Rebels were just a little bit better at finishing drives, they’d have a great offense.
Ole Miss plays with very fast tempo (second in the nation behind Indiana). They are very run-heavy, allowing them to run a ton of plays and wear defenses out. If you take a break on any snap, they’ll light you up.
The Razorbacks have been good at containing explosive runs, but not at interrupting the run game. That worked fine against LSU, but it will not work as well against Ole Miss, a team more content to just grind out with efficient runs. Still, a huge chunk of Ole Miss’s rushing yards this season are due to explosive runs – note that they are just 85th in line yards per rush, which weights runs in the first six yards gained – so if the Hogs can take those away, Ole Miss’s rushing attack is less scary.
Ole Miss uses its passing game to create explosive plays. The offensive line is had a harder time protecting QB Jaxson Dart in recent weeks, so Arkansas’ ability to get pressure like they did against LSU is going to be key.
That’s where the difference between pressure and sacks becomes key. The Athletic had a good article back in August on Georgia’s defense, which is great at getting pressure but terrible at getting sacks:
The sack is a sexy number and still holds some weight. It’s better to sack someone than not, considering the lost yardage and the chance to force a fumble. There aren’t many highlight videos of quarterbacks just throwing the ball away, and QB pressures don’t show up as a regularly used stat.
But defenses, realizing how much harder it has been to get sacks, have not looked at them as the main barometer for whether they’re getting enough pressure.
Pressure is subjective – does the statkeeper think that the defense sped the quarterback up in any way with the rush? – but it is arguably more important, because it is more consistent game-to-game and is less dependent on a key variable: the escapability of the quarterback.
Case in point: Arkansas sacked Jayden Daniels seven times but only pressured him 10 times. That’s a 36% pressure rate (10 pressures on 28 dropbacks), which is pretty good – LSU’s offense leads the SEC at 16% pressure this year – but what jumps out is that 70% sack-to-pressure ratio. Basically: either Daniels ran into a lot of sacks, or Arkansas’ closing speed was elite. The answer is a bit of both: the Hogs brought speedy guys on the blitz, but Daniels has a tendency to over-rely on his athleticism and runs into a lot of sacks, as we saw Saturday.
Ole Miss has a very good sack rate – 19th-best in the country – but before you think the Hogs can’t get pressure, note that Dart has been pressured on 34% of dropbacks this season. That’s 13th among SEC starting quarterbacks, ahead of only Texas A&M. Dart’s low sack rate is, then, not a product of good pass protection, but of good escapability. Dart isn’t as good of a scrambler as Daniels, but he doesn’t try as often, so he’s far less likely to run himself into sacks.
That’s a lot of info, but here’s the takeaway: Arkansas’ best shot on defense is to get lots of pressure, but sacks aren’t necessarily a good measure of pressure. Ole Miss’s offensive line has struggled to protect its quarterback, but he’s done a nice job of getting rid of the football when under pressure. Sacks may be ideal, but the Hogs can win with pressure even if they don’t get sacks.
Keys to the Game
Get pressure (if not sacks). Ole Miss’s offense is very good on standard downs, but can be had on third downs. The Hogs – horrible on third down all year – were fantastic against LSU, thanks largely to a creative pressure plan that blitzed LSU into trouble. The Hogs will need more of that pressure to have a chance at slowing down the Rebels.
Stop going backward. Arkansas’ run game has been capable of creating good runs all year, but the Hogs’ offense falls off-schedule when the bad runs start losing big yards. Bad reads, stunts and twists, and blown plays have been the biggest issues over the last few weeks. The Razorbacks need to keep maximum pressure on the Ole Miss defense, and being able to stick with the run is key to doing that.
Start fast. Yep, this one again. The Hogs’ offense failed to start fast against LSU, and as a result, they wasted an incredible defensive start to the game, leading just 3-0 after having three drives start past their own 40. But this game figures to be much higher scoring than 13-10. The Hogs might match blows with Ole Miss for 50 minutes, but if they don’t start swinging until they’re down 14-0, it might not matter.
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