Know Your Enemy: Ole Miss a Good Final Exam for LSU Football in 2020 Season

LSU faces one of the truly explosive offenses in the country this week in Ole Miss and in the same breath one of the worst defenses in the country. The Tigers have an opportunity to salvage a lost season to some degree as a win would bring its record back to 5-5 and avoid being the first program to have a losing record following a championship season.

But first they must take care of business on Saturday and will have opportunities against a porous Ole Miss defense. In order to understand a little bit better about the matchup, we went to the Grove Report to gauge the Ole Miss sidelines.

Obviously we know Ole Miss enters this game with one of the most explosive offenses in college football. In such a short amount of time how has Lane Kiffin changed what this offense has become?

The easiest answer to such a loaded question is that someone finally developed Matt Corral into a real quarterback. Corral arrived in Oxford as a freshman in 2018 from Southern California as a four-star recruit and Elite 11 finalist quarterback. Until 2020, no one would've known that he was so highly regarded coming out of high school, as he simply looked lost on the field as a redshirt freshman in 2019 and would eventually get replaced by John Rhys Plumlee in the last half of last season. Now, he's looks like a mid-round NFL draft pick and is among the top five nationally in just about ever passing statistic.

Last year John Rhys Plumlee shredded the LSU defense for 212 yards. While he hasn’t been as consistent with playing time in 2020, do you expect Kiffin to draw up some more plays for him knowing what he did to LSU a season ago? Also talk a little about the progression of Matt Corral who has really seemed to explode this season.

I wouldn't plan on seeing much of Plumlee at all this go around. Corral has simply been so explosive and so efficient that bringing him off the field, even if just for a few plays, has proved just not worth it over the past month of the season. Kiffin tried using more of a rotation, throwing Plumlee in for the occasional drive, earlier in the season just to make opposing teams gameplan for both Corral and Plumlee, but as Corral has developed into one of the nation's elite quarterbacks, we've slowly seen less and less of Plumlee.

The defense is a polar opposite of the offense it appears. The Rebels are among the the worst in the country and that’s saying something with LSU right there with them. What are the big reasons for the defensive performance and where can LSU have the most success?

Through one month of play this season, the Ole Miss defense was legitimately on pace to be the worst in FBS history, yardage wise. Seriously, that's not a joke. At one point, in back-to-back games, they gave up 400 yards passing one week and 400 yards rushing the next. Things have sort of gotten a little better from the defense on pace to be the worst ever, but you're still talking about a unit that is No. 98 nationally by SP+ and is still dead last in total defense. As mentioned, there's really not one place that LSU can have more success than others, as some weeks they get gashed through the air and the next gashed on the ground, but I would avoid going at Otis Reese. After finally being cleared by the NCAA, Reese has only played one game but had eight tackles and one PBU in his lone game this year after transferring from Georgia.

If you had to pick, who is the x-factor in this game for Ole Miss and why?

The X-factor is what it has been every game for Ole Miss: Can Matt Corral outscore the opposition? Corral and receiver Elijah Moore do everything for this team. They've been in literally every game this season, even Alabama, because of Corral an Moore, who leads the nation in receptions per game and receiving yards per game. How will LSU defense Moore? If they double him, can Corral find tight end Kenny Yeboah or other recievers Dontario Drummond, Braylon Sanders or Jonathan Mingo. If this game becomes a shootout, it's hard to imagine the Rebels losing.

Just give us your early thoughts on how this game goes. Most expect a high scoring affair but just how much in your eyes?

If you asked me this time last week who would win Ole Miss – LSU, I wouldn't have really hesitated to pick the Rebels, despite past history between the two. Then LSU came out and played their best game of the year in The Swamp against Florida and I'm truly scratching my head. If LSU and Max Johnson can move the ball the way they did against Florida, I would certainly expect a high scoring affair from both sides. I would still take the Rebels in this one, simply because if they get into a shootout I trust Corral more than Johnson (or whoever's starting at QB for LSU), but I'm much less confident about this pick than I would have been one week ago.