Lane Kiffin details pain of ‘slow death’ in 43-35 loss to Georgia

ATHENS — Lane Kiffin bemoaned Ole Miss’ missed opportunity at Georgia, to the extent of repeating three times over how his team was up two scores before falling 43-35.

“It’s disappointing to have a shot like this, to be up two scores in the fourth quarter against Georgia, at Georgia, and be undefeated to go to 7-0,” said Kiffin.

That obviously didn’t happen, leaving Kiffin struggling to put Ole Miss’ inability to stop the Bulldogs’ offense into perspective.

“It was a slow death, 34 (Georgia) first downs, that’s hard to do against a service (academy) team,” Kiffin said. “Georgia did a good job today, but that’s not the No. 1 offense in the country.”

But Kiffin was playing against arguably the No. 1 coach in the nation, two-time national champion Kirby Smart, and he knew the Bulldogs would be hard to put down.

“I said it this morning on GameDay, (Kirby) got it from Coach Saban to install belief like, ‘hey, we’re going to find a way,’ and when you play Alabama before, or now Georgia, these two coaches, I feel like you have to win the game,” Kiffin said.

“They’re not going to lose it at the end in the fourth quarter. You have to win the game, that’s why we were aggressive.”

The Rebels were confident, too, with Kiffin telling his team in the pregame to be prepared to have success.

“I told them expect to score on this defense, expect to make big plays, we have a really good game plan,” Kiffin said. “When you score just come back over and get ready to do it again, because we’re going to need a lot of it, and we did for five series.”

But after scoring on their first five possessions to take a 35-26 lead, the Ole Miss scoring stopped, while Georgia’s offense continued to roll, totaling 510 yards with 289 through the air and another 221 on the ground.

“I thought Gunner (Stockton) did a great job keeping plays alive and made a lot of plays with his legs,” Kiffin said. “It really wasn’t one thing, they did everything there, and we did limit explosive plays — there weren’t a ton of explosive plays.”

The Bulldogs had only three plays that went for more than 25 yards: Stockton’s 36-yard pass to Colbie Young on the opening drive, a 26-yard pass to Zachariah Branch in the third quarter and a 36-yard pass to Dillon Bell on UGA’s final scoring drive.

But it was a 2-yard Georgia play that Kiffin detailed most after the game.

“If you go back to where we’re ahead, they have the fourth down at midfield (fourth-and-1 at the UGA 44), they run the fullback on a little dive,” Kiffin said, referring to Georgia running back Josh McCray picking up two yards and a first down when UGA was down 35-26 and driving late in the third quarter.

“And we’ve got them stopped — what happens at that point? Now, we’re ahead, now there’s some momentum, we finally stop them — but then (McCray) goes through our tackles, and great job by him keeping his feet moving.

“I really felt that point was a really, almost a slow motion moment of like, this is the moment here, we have him, we stop him here, this game is really headed a good direction, and he makes a good play.”

Kiffin’s message to his team in the postgame locker room was sobering.

“I told our guys this is exactly what you could want, you’re in the fourth quarter and you’re up two scores at Georgia, a chance to beat them two years in a row,” said Kiffin, whose Rebels beat UGA 28-10 in Oxford last season. “Unfortunately, we didn’t function on offense after five drives of five touchdowns.”

Kiffin did his best to end his press conference on a positive note, pointing out Ole Miss has made progress since its prior trip to Athens two seasons ago, when Georgia won 52-17.

“Somebody asked during the week, is this a statement game? Well, only one team has beat them here in five years,” Kiffin said. “So it’s not like because we lost to Georgia in a one-score game, that we were ahead in by two scores, now all the sudden our program has to be revamped ….

“If you want that feeling, spin back two years ago when we were sitting here and they played like that on both sides of the ball against us, and we had to really change some things in our program.”