Ole Miss wins shootout with South Carolina behind record-breaking offensive performance
It wasn't dominant on all sides of the ball, but Ole Miss' offense was special in its 59-42 win over South Carolina on Saturday.
Ole Miss quarterback Matt Corral now holds the school record for passing yards in a single game with 513 and found the end zone four times through the air and one time on the ground. The Rebels put up 708 yards of total offense in Corral's record day, and he counted this most-recent accolade as a blessing to cherish moving forward.
"Just to have that notoriety in school history, that's really cool to me," Corral said. "God is good. It's a blessing to be in this spot, be around these type of people and have the coaches that I have."
Corral's favorite target on the evening was, per usual, Elijah Moore who hauled in 13 catches for 225 yards and two touchdowns. Moore also saw time at running back on Saturday, getting 45 yards on six carries.
"He’s just really natural," Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin said. "We wanted to make sure he got involved. We were worried that they’d play man the whole day, so we wanted to confuse them with him in the backfield. It’s hard to align when you do that. Pretty cool for the kid to go back there and average 7.5 yards per carry."
Moore also hauled in a 91-yard pass from Corral that resulted in a touchdown and a celebratory toss of the clipboard by Kiffin.
"I just get excited," Kiffin said. "Sometimes players make a play because someone beats somebody, but when you audible to a play and you beat a scheme and a matchup, I get really excited when that happens."
Although Moore had wide open space in front of him when he hauled in the pass, he had to make sure he kept the right mindset in order to complete the play.
"You’ve got to be confident," Moore said. "You can’t think, ‘Don’t mess it up’ because then you’ll mess it up."
Where the Ole Miss offense excelled on Saturday, the defense was exactly the inverse for most of the game. The Rebels gave up 548 yards of total offense, 318 of which came on the ground.
"I want to be positive because we won the game and made some plays at the end, but, at halftime, it wasn’t a real good locker room," Kiffin said. "We weren’t playing very good at all, but luckily, we made some plays at the end and had a historic day offensively."
Rebel linebacker Lakia Henry was a part of a key sack towards the end of the game that helped Ole Miss secure the win, but he realizes that more is expected of his unit than was seen on Saturday night.
"We’ve got to go back and watch the film, but based on the talks on the sideline, some of the time, we were out of our gaps," Henry said. "That was part of it, but we’ve got to go back and watch the film and see what went wrong."
Ole Miss now sits at 3-4 on the year and is scheduled to travel to College Station next weekend to take on No. 5 Texas A&M. Kickoff is slated for 2:30 on CBS.
