Practice Report: First Fall Scrimmage

OXFORD, Miss. – With one scrimmage plus a week and change of practice under its belt, the Ole Miss football team now enters the thick of the fall camp grind.

Three weeks remain until the Rebels' season-opener on August 31 at Memphis. After the team held its first scrimmage over the weekend, everyone was quick to report that there's plenty of work to be done in those final three weeks.

"We just have to get in good game shape," said tight end Octavious Cooley. "We were tired out there, I ain't gonna lie. But it's nothing we can't handle. We have three weeks left, going to go to work every day. We're going to be ready when the time comes."

In the face of that hard work, a heat index well over 100 degrees can lead to a lot of loafing, as the Rebel coaches put it, but the individual leaders within the program aren't going to allow that to happen.

"Some kids, it's hot, they want to loaf," said quarterback Matt Corral. "They want to just take the easy way out, but that's not what we're going to do because we're not going to win games like that."

In fact, Rich Rodriguez's offensive philosophy is decidedly anti-loafing. The new Rebel offensive coordinator wants his offense to be able to go full throttle and overwhelm opposing defenses. Corral noted on Monday that the goal is to get calls relayed in as little as six seconds, leaving little time for leisure between plays.

"He felt like we were loafing a lot," Corral said. "He wanted us to be faster to get the call. Sometimes we were looking at the ground after the play was over then looking at the call. He wants us to get down there, finish the play, whistle blows, hand the ball to the ref, get the play, get the call."

After one live scrimmage at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, tempo, speed and cutting the loafing will be points of emphasis for Rodriguez going forward. For the defense, that means doing whatever it takes to keep pace.

"We've got to be in better shape defensively," said linebacker MoMo Sanogo. "Rich Rod likes to go fast, so the defense has to get ready fast and go fast. He told me he's going to try to pick up the pace and go twice as fast these next couple of weeks. So we have to pick up our conditioning to match that."

Sanogo and the Rebel defenders also hope the uptick in the workload will help to make one of their weaknesses from 2018 into a strength in 2019. When asked if the defense is fortifying its depth, Sanogo didn't mince words.

"Most definitely," he said. "In the spring, there have been a couple of guys who have had to go down for one thing or another. The young guys are having to step up with the twos and ones a bit. Coach is also pushing that. All the coaches are rotating it and making different guys be in tough situations that they wouldn't normally be in, just to build depth."

Of course, not everyone was loafing during that first scrimmage. There were several standouts on both sides of the football. On the defense, one of the top performers was linebacker Lakia Henry, a junior college transfer who is proving to be one of the team's most reliable tacklers.

"Lakia didn't miss a single tackle, had five or six tackles. He was solid," Sanogo said. "He's learning it. It's his 10th day in the program playing with the defense, so there are some mistakes as you'd expect, but he plays hard, plays fast, plays physical. We like that."

The Rebel coaches also liked what they saw in the offensive backfield. Ole Miss' running back room is shaping up to be one of the deepest and most talented groups in Oxford in a while, and nearly every person in the RB room found some success in the first live run of the Rodriguez offense.

"We had some good runs," said head coach Matt Luke. "Jerrion Ealy showed some things. Scottie Phillips broke a long one. Snoop Conner ran physical. Isaiah Woullard had a few. We put (quarterback) John Rhys Plumlee in a live jersey. That changed some things for him and let him use some legs. He got out of the pocket and scored a touchdown on the perimeter, so that was good to see. You see flashes and you see talent, you just want to see more consistency, doing it over and over again."

After showing those first flashes of the fall at The Vaught, it's back to the grind. With the season-opener rapidly approaching, Luke's Rebels will have to fight through fatigue to get to where they want to be at kickoff on August 31.

"If you're going to go get them in shape, now's the time," Luke said. "You have a little time on the back end as we prepare for Memphis to get their legs back a little bit. Right now is the time to grind through it. This is the tough time. Everyone is nicked up, banged up, battling through it. This is the tough part of camp, you just have to push through it."

To purchase tickets for the 2019 season, visit STH19.com or call 888-REB-TKTS.

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Players Mentioned

Snoop Conner

Octavius Cooley

Matt Corral

Jerrion Ealy

Lakia Henry

Scottie Phillips

John Rhys Plumlee

MoMo Sanogo

Isaiah Woullard

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