The shovel pass has gashed the Auburn defense all season long.

Saturday night against Ole Miss, however, middle linebacker Cassanova McKinzy anticipated the play coming, left his assignment and stuffed the play for no gain.

McKinzy didn’t fear any reprimand from defensive coordinator Ellis Johnson, who allows his players to improvise as long as they stay within his 4-2-5 scheme.

“I went ahead and played with instinct,” McKinzy said in an interview with AL.com. “I’m pretty happy we actually stopped it because maybe we’ll stop getting it week after week after week.”

That freedom to make plays is much different now than it was when the junior first stepped onto the field for Auburn two years ago under then-defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder.

“It’s a big difference,” McKinzy said. “The verbiage, the play calls are probably like a sentence long. With Coach Johnson, you don’t have somebody on your back waiting for you to do wrong. He expects you to do right. He actually coaches you and stuff, [instead of] like yelling at you.

“He makes you feel comfortable. He makes you feel like it’s all right to mess up. When you mess up you just have to learn from it and keep going. It’s totally a big difference from that defense my freshman year and this defense. You can play faster.”

In his first start back in 2012 at Vanderbilt, he recorded a game-high 12 tackles, a forced fumble and a fumble recovery. James Franklin’s Vanderbilt team beat the Tigers that day, but nothing seemed to be good enough that season.

McKinzy has done enough this season — he’s done more than enough as the leader on arguably the SECs most improved defense — as he currently ranks second on the team in total tackles and has already matched his 2013 mark for tackles for loss.