No. 1 LSU Not Talking About What's at Stake This Weekend Against Arkansas, with a Trip to the SEC Championship on the Line

After LSU's 58-37 win over Ole Miss Saturday, coach Ed Orgeron could sense his team wasn't all too thrilled with the way it played.

The gaudy offensive stats from both the Tigers and the Rebels were a simultaneously good and bad result. LSU had accumulated 714 yards of total offense while Ole Miss had hung 600 yards on the Tiger defense.

It resulted in a 21 point SEC road win but the player's in the locker room, particularly on the defensive side of the ball, were far from 'elated' as Orgeron would go on to tell his team.

"I try to see the feeling of the football team. I knew they were a little disappointed," Orgeron said. "I think that would have just added fuel to the fire. I thought they needed to be picked up a little bit. To compliment them on a win, not take for granted winning. I don't think we had a hangover. Played well in the first half. They made some plays. I wanted to give them confidence, how much I believe in them."

The defense seemed to be out of position throughout the entirety of the second half, allowing Ole Miss quarterback John Rhys Plumlee to rush for 212 yards and four touchdowns, the first time an opposing quarterback had that kind of success against LSU since Cam Newton in 2010.

Orgeron said the coaching staff spent three hours going over just four plays from the Ole Miss game on Sunday, studying intently on what they can do better to put the players in positions to succeed.

"First thing I do is look at myself," Orgeron said. "I coached the defensive line with those guys, too. I look at the way we went in practice last week. I look at what we showed them in practice, what we didn't show them in practice. I look at coaches, what we can get better at."

Orgeron said he'd never put any shortcomings on the players as he feels the scrutiny should start and end with him.

"I for one called the run stop on that first long run in the second half that didn't work," Orgeron said. "We're trying to be a little too aggressive. There was a new run play, an arc read on the four technique that they showed, creating lot of space, gave us some problems. Had a couple guys out of position."

The players felt exactly the opposite on Saturday night with JaCoby Stevens saying there's only so much the coaches can do. At the end of the day it's on them to execute.

"We need to go back and look at the film and do a lot of soul searching,” Stevens said. “A lot of it actually wasn’t Xs and Os, and that’s a problem. It’s the mentality of the defense.”

Safety Grant Delpit was one of many that struggled mightily on Saturday, taking wrong angles and missing tackles due to an ankle injury that has bothered him since the Auburn game. Orgeron said Monday that ankle is still 'very sore' and that he likely won't practice much this week.

"Obviously that ankle is very sore, not getting reps hurts sometimes," Orgeron said. "Making tackles in open space hurts sometimes because he can't bend or run like he wants to. We're going to give him a couple days off this week and hopefully he can get healthy for this weekend."

Delpit hasn't practiced much at all since injuring the ankle in the fourth quarter of the Auburn game, which could also lead to being a step slow. The natural question is to ask why not just sit him. The truth is there aren't many options behind Delpit at the moment, with Todd Harris out for the year and a few players deciding to leave the program altogether.

The Tigers have already had to start moving cornerbacks over to safety, with Cordale Flott and Kristian Fulton both seeing snaps there during the Ole Miss game. Orgeron even tried convincing a few of the wide receivers to consider moving them to safety.

"I asked them, they obviously wanted to stay at wide receiver positions," Orgeron said. "When you see Cordale Flott, a freshman corner, playing safety, never played that position before, not much anyway. We can't be as multiple as we want to be."

Orgeron assures these issues will be addressed this week in practice. With two games left in the regular season, LSU is playing for its first SEC Championship appearance this weekend, but Orgeron said the team doesn't mention it.

"Obviously it's something when you come to LSU that you want to do. Our players want to do it. We don't talk about it, we really don't," Orgeron said. "The next game up. We said we're going to look at where we're at at the end of the season. We want to win every game, that's one of the things we did want to do. Arkansas is our next game. This is game number 11. Our goal is to beat Arkansas."