Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin isn’t too worried about Oklahoma’s offensive changes coming into the 18th-ranked Rebels’ meeting with the Sooners on Saturday afternoon in Oxford, Miss.
“We have a lot of things to work on, which we worked on during the bye,” Kiffin said.
The Rebels have dropped two of their last three drives in the game, rushing for just 137.3 yards per contest.
“I feel like we’ve been out of rhythm here,” Kiffin said of his offense.
But while Ole Miss (5-2, 1-2 Southeastern Conference) was mired in three-point losses to Kentucky and LSU, the Sooners have struggled on that side of the ball all season.
After a 35-9 home loss last week, a team Ole Miss scored 24 on the road in early October, Oklahoma coach Brent Venables fired offensive coordinator Seth Littrell. Tight ends coach Joe Jon Finley will take over the running backs and offensive analyst Kevin Johns will be the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach.
“It was an incredibly difficult decision on many levels,” Venables said on Tuesday. “With a 10,000-foot lens, it wasn’t that difficult. We weren’t playing winning football on that side of the ball and we thought a change would be necessary – a change in leadership, a new voice, a new perspective with a new lens. , strategy, game planning, succession, all those things that go along with that situation.” .”
The Sooners enter this week ranked 128th nationally in total offense (out of 134 attempts), 116th in passing offense and 114th in rushing offense.
“We’ve been awful on offense this year,” Venables said.
Oklahoma (4-3, 1-3) will also be turning to a new quarterback.
Quarterback Jackson Arnold will start against the Rebels, Venables announced earlier in the week, after taking over from Michael Hawkins Jr. at the start of last week’s loss. He completed 18 of 36 passes for 225 yards and a touchdown.
Arnold started the first four games of the season before being benched in favor of Hawkins.
“Jackson came in and played well,” Venables said of Arnold’s performance against the Gamecocks. “He made some really good decisions in the game, he took command from the start, and again, a couple of drops would have made the day a lot better for him individually.”
It certainly won’t be easy for the Sooners to show improvement offensively. Ole Miss leads the nation in fewest rushing yards allowed per game (66.6) and ranks second in points allowed (10.6).
Finley spent the 2020 season on Kiffin’s staff as tight ends coach and passing game coordinator before joining former head coach Lincoln Riley’s staff at Oklahoma.
“He didn’t call the plays here, and he has a different situation there,” Kiffin said. “I don’t think that his performance here before can help us at all to find out what he is going to do.
“Since there’s only a week to call games, usually people just add a game here or there but stay with the same system. You can’t reinvent a system in six days.”
The Rebels and Sooners met once before in the 1999 Independence Bowl, a game Ole Miss won 27-25.
–Field Level Media
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