Sugar Bowl Preview - Ole Miss vs Baylor - Challenges of Conference Isolation

[Music] college football nerds here talking ole miss and baylor sugar bowl pretty interesting and fun match-up and maybe not one we expected at the beginning of the year but it's the one we got we don't have like tons of opt-outs everybody's fired up for this game so josh we're gonna talk about it before we do want to remind y'all everybody if you haven't subscribed yet please do so but even more importantly we need your score in the comments so y'all can mix it up and fight with one another and help us out in the algorithm one other way you can help us out is share this wherever you talk about football if it's on a forum if it's facebook twitter if you watch this and you're like you know what i like what these guys are talking about share it wherever you talk about wherever you talk about sports all right josh um the interesting thing for me in this game is that we've got two quarterbacks maybe getting healthy and maybe being the best versions of themselves after having a month off um bohannon said he's going to be playing in this game and he was injured banged up late in the year and you know we haven't seen the full matt growl since maybe early in the season he's been hobbled and then he's been throwing to hobbled people without an offensive line because they're also also hobbled so just right out of the gate if you were going to say who is favored most or who it benefits most for having this month off to get better coming to this match up are you going to say that favors baylor moore or ole miss moore and tell me why it's tough right because bohemian is gonna come back but honestly i'm gonna say ole miss and if you're a baylor fan turning your nose up at that you need to understand the situation i think we i mean i wish i had a stat in front of me but when there was a point this year when they were playing auburn where it was all but like 60 yards in that game receiving went to walk ons they were out all three starting receivers they're starting tight end two starting offensive linemen matt corral was literally playing on two sprained ankles and they had injured running backs i mean they've been decimated this season and when you look at ole miss as a program they have not scorned 40 points this year despite all the lane kiff and hype since the arkansas game and middle of october but the thing is matt corral has not been healthy since the middle of october he sprained his ankle and really couldn't run against tennessee and then you know tweaked it in the following weeks uh really hurt his other one and then was really really hobbled they just have not been the same team and at the end of the year uh they started to show flashes of what they were supposed to be got a little bit healthier the numbers don't always back it up across the board but you could see it i think in this game we're going to see much more of the sort of offense we were expecting to see from them all year and i mean give them credit right you go through and you have a ten and two record first ten win regular season in ole miss history great year for them but they i think the amazing thing is they really did it off the defense because their offense has been beat to hell and i think the time off is going to potentially transform that offensive side of the ball the team that put up 61 on tulane the team that put up 43 in louisville without even really trying to begin the year we haven't seen that team this season since and i don't know that we'll see it completely but i think we'll see something that's a lot more akin to it than the team even at the end of the year when they had guys playing virtually everyone playing for them was playing through injury and i think they'll be a lot healthier in this game or at least that's my expectation i think i agree with you though i do agree that bohannon coming back is potentially a big deal but you know you had some pretty good output from a backup quarterback in a few games this year so i i don't know that that was that it's that big of a deal compared to ole miss especially getting offensive line and skill players back um it's interesting to note that people like ely who could go pro this year who has proven enough that they could really maybe sit out this game like a lot of other people are doing because they've got enough tape out there and there's nothing left to prove but they're all coming back which says a lot in terms of mentality of this team i think you noted that levy is staying and called the plays for this game so that's it seems like everybody on both sides of the ball or both both of these teams are really treating this like in a game that matters which is funny because everybody's told us that nothing outside of the playoffs matter and i completely disagree with that notion these are the kind of matchups that i love to watch hell josh we were watching tulsa and odu earlier today and just because we like football so i'm excited that we don't have opt out city in this game um we've talked a lot about the the isolation of conferences and that being a problem and it's particularly acute this year in the big 12 because yes there's the byu game that baylor had but in pure p5 pure pea pot p5s you've got two top the top two teams in the big 12. oklahoma state and baylor played no true power five and i don't really fault baylor because i think byu is is a legitimate team and i don't think they're bad or anything like that but what it doesn't give us is good cross-connecting data points in terms of comparisons and if you look at the rest of the big 12 they really struggled out of conference including against a lot of g5 and fcs so there's this notion that you know you've got a clean record eleven or eleven and two you've got i think ten and three for ole miss or ten and two for ole miss and how do you reconcile that josh and maybe this is a good time to get in the model how do you reconcile this and compare these two teams at all in terms of a prediction or understanding what to expect in this game given that the conferences were so isolated this year especially in the big 12 and maybe that's not baylor's fault but it does present a challenge and i'd love for you to talk about that sure and while i'm talking about it i'm going to challenge you to see if you can you dug up some stats or records of big 12 teams see if you can dig that up and you can walk through it because i do think it's interesting our model has this game dead even it has a 28 all um mississippi's favored by a little bit when it comes to decimal points but 28 all uh from a yardage perspective baylor about 5.9 yards per play to mississippi ole miss having uh 5.6 and see miss mississippi in my records and i just think mississippi state because i it's it's weird to me to type in ole miss because or type in mississippi instead of ole miss because the way the data gets pulled in the system it always trips me up anyway uh everything across the board here really suggests these are pretty evenly matched teams in a lot of ways the one thing that's pretty different between them ole miss is past offense is a good notch better than baylor's passing offense and then for baylor's part their run defense is a good bit better than ole miss's run defense now interestingly past defense ole miss actually rates higher in our metrics 92 percent of opponent averages baylor's only 95 baylor has not done great this year defending the past they have been kind of dunked on a couple times texas tech had 10.8 yards per attempt tcu had 11.1 byu had 11 yards per attempt now the the funny thing is they won two of those games but several times this year they've kind of get hit popped and they've had some phenomenal games where they've shut people down about oklahoma state they only allowed 5.6 yards per attempt yeah they gave up 260 but they did it on almost 50 pass attempts but it it hasn't been a phenomenal performance from baylor and pasty it's been mostly rusty and that kind of balances a lot of stuff out where ole miss is a more balanced team than i think people give them credit for they've run the ball a lot more than they've thrown this year i'm not sure if people realize that last year was a rush offense really that made them so effective and given and a lot of this really comes down to injuries and perspective and all that right because you've got these two teams you haven't evenly matched up at least in theory but again we've talked about the injury situation at ole miss they they had injuries in the offensive line they had injuries at running back corral couldn't really run the way they wanted to and i think it took a lot of what they wanted to do in the run game out because you can't run the zone read because corral's not a threat to keep it the interior uh rush or uh interior blocking run blocking wasn't as good and it took away certain components of the game not to mention running backs were hobbled that might come into play a little bit more but you know in general i think your take on this game comes down to the fact that our model is comparing you against the teams you did how they did against everyone else and the problem for the big 12 is it's how you did it against the big 12 teams and it's also how the big 12 teams did by and large only against other big 12 teams and so when we talk about isolation that's the problem i mean we're not saying you necessarily did poorly you know beating a highly ranked byu team no the uav game kind of i don't know if it rightly or wrongly puts a stain on that you know boise was a big matchup for how for oklahoma state you know oklahoma goes out and they play a close game against nebraska they don't look great against tulane i mean or tulane tulsa the everything is kind of in this weird place but most importantly we didn't have a ton of marquee games to sort of set a baseline and every model every computer has to have some way of judging one conference to another it doesn't have eyeballs it can't look and say this team is faster what it look and look at is do your performance and it can say you did xwell against team b team b and their conference did why well and so it kind of relates you based on that our model is a little less geared towards that we're very conscious of it but in my mind i'm still bothered by things like arkansas running texas out of the building and texas being a team that yeah they had a bad record but were generally competitive but looked just totally ever matched for the most part against arkansas and so i mean i don't know me personally i have a hard time taking it at face value that these two conferences are even and now usually when i say that i get proven wrong but sometimes i'm not and and this year just like a couple years ago i talked about they didn't have a single i think it was a single win over a team with a winning record out of conference a single p5 with a win over winning record and then they just had a horrible bowl slate when everyone was looking at the acc i really worry the big 12 con as a conference and i'm sorry big 12 fans are all mad at me right now man i gotta say i've seen a lot of the same warning signs this year where they're out of conference uh schedule and how that's really not showing up in the model yeah and there's this notion of like how we predict things or how we look at things versus how things ultimately end up you know i said that alabama could win against georgia but we're predicting georgia to win because there's nothing that alabama has shown that would say that they're going to beat georgia and the big 12 this year is the same thing they played they only played eight power five teams out of conference only played eight two of those had a winning record so they played the entire big 12 played two power five teams with a winning record they lost both of them by double digits both of those games and and so at some point at least in terms of predicting things and i want to give this caveat because like i always say this 2018 clemson played a bunch of nobodies they played absolutely nobodies and just ran through the playoffs they just murdered alabama it was no problem so you can play a weak schedule and still be a really good team so that's not necessarily baylor's fault that the rest of the big 12 couldn't beat anybody but in terms of modeling and understanding how good you are amongst the teams that you played like your runner up in the big 12 played missouri state tulsa and boise out of conference they beat missouri state by one score tulsa by five boise about one point you know that's the runner-up in the big 12 this year so yeah it looks great when you circle the wagons in conference and you play other big 12 teams who haven't played anybody somebody's got to win that game to baylor's credit they won 11 games this year they found ways to win against i think oklahoma state is a good not great team they found a way to win that game without their starting quarterback these are all good things in terms of finding ways to win it doesn't necessarily impart any knowledge or predictability on how they're going to play against ole miss and to your point that you've been the banging the drum all year that arkansas game has to mean something texas lost to the top three teams in the big 12 by one score each they were dragged by the one good team they played out of conference so i don't want to belabor this point too much but that's just kind of our thought is like how do we do anything with the big 12 this year and like you said we always get proven wrong at the end of this because we we we die on these hills and then we are proven wrong and we could be proven wrong in this game um but in terms of looking at match-ups like put the put the out-of-conference stuff aside put the the the we don't know stuff aside in terms of just what you've seen from baylor this year if we're going to talk about what might give ole miss problems because we know about this offense and we know about them getting healthy and all that what is something baylor does that you really might be concerned if you're an ole miss fan going into this game i think the thing that baylor does that's concerning is they run the ball a lot i mean when abram smith and greg bohannon are going they i mean they they can mount up a lot of carries on a football team and you know there's games where they've hit 40 to 50 plays on the ground at a high club byu 47 carry 6.4 per uh oklahoma 47 carry 6.3 per and the problem for ole miss is they do run this 335 which is a little light in the front not uncommon in the big 12 so it's not like a shock for them but they have struggled at times with teams that run the ball a lot alabama did it to them in particular early in the year and they shored up a lot of stuff i mean ole miss has some transfers they got campbell at linebacker who's a really good guy but they still they're light and and they can get moved on um and you know like you can end up in games that are kind of shootouts just because offensively you know and the arkansas game is a good example you can wear on ole miss and i think that takes a toll on them so the biggest thing that i think bagler has an advantage with is over the course of this game if bohannon is truly healthy and they're willing to run them that's a big if i think it does give them a little bit of an advantage because they may be able to just continually keep the sticks and like moving move the ball up the field and score and if that if they're moving the chains a lot i think ole miss's defense could kind of give out um but the flip side then i think the the hard part to predict and do you know what i'm going to go ahead and get my score production i think we're about at this point i have this game i have this game at 34 to 24 game ole miss and for me ole miss was the one team and i had told this to you and you can back me up when you get on and believe it or not we really don't lie to you guys when we do these previews ole miss was the one team i said you do not want to draw in the postseason because they were better than they looked all year and if you draw too many conclusions you don't understand how banged up they were how much healthier they're going to be at the end of the year and i felt like how underrated they were and i feel like ole miss's offense is going to be a lot better in this game than they have been since mid-october but the question really in my mind is how good is baylor defensively are they able to get disruption against ole miss like they've been able to get at certain times this season and how much can you hold them in check now i don't think they will and i think this game is a little more lopsided than even vegas thinks which i find interesting but you know you never know i find it incredibly hard to judge this match up and honestly i'm really curious to hear your pick and your thoughts because i'm i feel like i'm sort of scrambling in the dark to figure this out myself i think this could go a couple of different ways but what i keep looking at when i see baylor is i see texas a m i see a solid defense a solid team that can stub their toe offensively enough that when you're facing a team that is an elite offense they're going to punish you for it maybe not every time but at some point that damn is going to break and so i think that baylor is a team that will score some points in this game but i also think they're going to bog down some and that's what happened to texas a m texas a m could never really get going offensively and it gave ole miss enough opportunity for eli to bust a 53-yard run or for you know crowd to do enough offensively to score some points i don't think that in if baylor had a little more offense i think that that would limit the pressure that their defense is going to take from ole miss's offense um but because of that i do think that ole miss wins the game i don't think ole miss covers though i think that this is a feel each other out kind of game sort of like album cincinnati in that regard um and i'm really stuck on this feeling that until kiffin proves otherwise he's going to make enough boneheaded 4th down decisions to cost them 6 to 10 points he did it again against against a m that's a perfect example they could have won that game going away and because he early made some bad decisions it cost them some points so i've got 31 24. i would not be surprised to see ole miss run away with this game but i also would not be surprised to see ole miss lose this game because while i see baylor as texas a m they could also be arkansas you talked about running bohannon if they're committed to running bohannon and arkansas had a lot of tools offensively that exploited that 335 and they were this close to winning that game right and they put up buckets of points um and i think baylor's better defensively than arkansas um the saving grace for ole miss in that game was they were able to score just a little bit more and just rain down points every time they needed it i don't think they're going to be able to do that against baylor so if baylor offensively looks anything like arkansas did and can exploit that defense in any way the way they did baylor's going to win this game but i've got 3124 this is a tough game for me to predict um as we close this out though josh maybe it's bohannon coming saying that he's going to be able to play but in general is it interesting to you that i think ole miss opened as a three-point favorite and now it's moved to baylor laying one one and a half like is the movement in this line indicative of kind of the same kind of not knowing how to peg this game that that we're having yeah i think so the lines move back and forth i'm sure there was something to the fact that people didn't know initially whether matt corral would opt out or not um looks at this point like all mrs key players are probably going to play as of the time we're recording this but you don't know and that's why the line's moving a lot i really think of all the major games that i've looked at or i'm interested in this is the one that i feel like i have the least feel on it and i feel like the line is close just because i don't even think vegas feels like they have a feel i don't think the public does and sometimes vegas is just probably happy to have even money on either side because they don't know what the way it's gonna go um and you know i think that's by and large where vegas goal is and then there's other times where and they entice you to pick the one that looks like the obvious team to win and then everybody takes a bath that was that's happened a couple times this year ucla lsu which i picked ucla to win and then georgia alabama where i did that uh i did a twitter space with um josh pate and we were basically all talking about uh the fact that that game sure felt like a trap pad at the end of the week um this one i i think is just a total crap shoot i don't think anyone knows i think we're going to know something at the end of this game i think texas tech mississippi state's going to be telling but right now i don't i don't think anybody has a good feel i don't think we really have a good way to know how these teams match up and i think it's going to be really fascinating to watch this is one that i'm almost certainly going to be tuning into uh and i'm excited to watch it all right that's it for us ole miss and baylor let us know in the comments what you think this score is going to be and obviously we're doing other previews we've got um utah and ohio state that we're gonna do for the rose bowl and we've done two playoff games so keep an eye out for those if you like what you heard so far here and you've already shared us somewhere and you want some more of us those things will be out there and the podcast links are also in the description if you want to listen and not watch thanks so much y'all have a great bowl season god bless [Music]

Channel: College Football Nerds

Views: 7,547

Keywords: baylor vs ole miss, ole miss vs baylor, sugar bowl, college football, preview, prediction, hype, matt corral, matt corral highlights, gerry bohanon, sec football, big 12 championship, baylor vs oklahoma state, lane kiffin, ealy, drummond, espn, playoffs, bowls

Id: KZ5y7EtQywg

Length: 22min 50sec (1370 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 21 2021