Ole Miss win over Tulsa leaves Lane Kiffin highly disappointed in performance

Ole Miss may have defeated Tulsa this weekend in their final non-conference matchup of the season, but head coach Lane Kiffin was not pleased with the performance of his team, especially in the second half. The Rebels were up 35-17 at halftime, but let Tulsa creep back into the game with ten unanswered points, with the final score being 35-27.

“Would’ve been good to have this at halftime, would’ve been a good press conference,” Kiffin joked opening up his press conference. “Unfortunately we didn’t play well in the second half, especially offensively. We didn’t play well at all in the first half defensively, so that’s not a good thing. We did win so we’re 4-0 which is the best that you can be from a record standpoint at this point, but kind of more similar to the first game of the year where we played really well early and then didn’t.”

Ole Miss had a similar, underwhelming second-half performance in week 1 versus Troy, as Kiffin was disappointed in how his team played coming out of halftime following doing so well in that department in the two previous weeks.

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“And I thought we had overcome that by the way the last two games had gone of having really big leads like this one at half time and coming out,” Kiffin said. “And obviously we didn’t do that today and tried everything, but gotta figure out something better. I’m sure they started, like a lot of people probably like a lot of our fans, like alright this one’s over, let’s get ready for the next one with a great team coming in here.”

Kiffin did see a silver lining in the play of his team, and believes their problems could be much worse in the grand scheme of things, as they’ve more than proven their offense and defense can play quite well this season so far.

“So unfortunately that happened, the good thing is you take parts where you say okay well we’re really good on offense, we’re really good on defense, we just weren’t consistent at it. So that’s better, we’ve all been around teams or games where you don’t feel good about a side or both sides of the ball. So now we’ve just gotta put it together, which again we did a week ago, but every game’s independent of the other and every week is brand new, so got work to do and get some guys back healthy too that missed today,” Kiffin said.

Kiffin was also asked how he planned on putting together the individually strong performances of his offense and defense together in practice so it can translate to games on Saturday, which he is not overly concerned about.

“Well I’m not gonna overreact because we just did it two weeks in a row, maybe it’s a good thing. I try to look at things and if we were sitting in here and we would’ve played another half like that and we would’ve been 200 to whatever, 20-something, combined score this season, it’d be hard to keep kids attention and they’d hear everywhere how great they are,” Kiffin said.

Hopefully, the Rebel’s recent second-half woes have gotten their attention, because they will definitely need to play a complete game in their next matchup against No. 7 ranked Kentucky at home.

“They definitely should be listening after that, I mean you would not think we wont the game in that locker room at all. And so at least I think they’re to understand, we want to be great, then we gotta knock people out when you have a chance, we had plenty of chances including the end of the first half we let them go down and score a field goal,” Kiffin said. “And the third quarter, should’ve come out and put it away.”