What Lane Kiffin said after Ole Miss’ record-breaking blowout win over Vanderbilt

In his first season as Ole Miss head coach, Lane Kiffin is having more luck on the road than at home. Kiffin’s Rebels improved to 2-4 on the year with a record-breaking 54-21 thumping of Vanderbilt.

Lane Kiffin discussed the team effort as well as big days for Matt Corral and Elijah Moore in his postgame press conference.

“Good win,” Kiffin said. “After a disappointing last couple of weeks, especially last week. You come in here. Vanderbilt was healthy and had some time off so we weren’t sure what they were going to do. So I’m really pleased with our performance with our ones.

Despite winning 54-21, Kiffin still saw areas for improvement.

“I wish our 2s would’ve played better,” he said. “We ended up punting once and gave up a touchdown. We’ve got to get better on defense. Those guys have got to play better because we’re going to need them at some point.”

Quarterback Matt Corral and receiver Elijah Moore led the way on a record-breaking day for the Rebel offense.

“Matt and Elijah were lights out. It’s hard to 31 of 34 on air,” Kiffin said. “(Athletic director) Keith Carter and I were just talking about it and he could remember the incompletions. That’s pretty cool if you can remember all the incompletions. It’s good to see that and it was good to see John Rhys Plumlee come in and do some things.

It was good to get Elijah back on track after his one week of not having 10 catches and 100 yards.”

Vanderbilt entered Saturday 0-3. It would have been understandable if the Rebels weren’t focused with a post-loss hangover after last week’s Auburn game.

“Give credit to the players,” Kiffin said of their focus. “And I usually don’t talk about the coaches but I think the coaches did a really good job of that all week, especially this morning. No fans here, for the most part. …

“I thought our coaches did a great job of getting guys to play with great energy. We just said ‘Hey, why don’t you guys have the same energy we had when we played Alabama?’ And I thought our guys did.”

While the offense broke records, Kiffin was happy to see the defense hold an opponent to just 21 points.

“Better,” Kiffin said of the defense’s play. “I wish we had more turnovers. At halftime, I told them ‘Hey, we’re playing well but we’re not getting turnovers.’ I thought we did well against the run. They still completed a lot of passes. The quarterback was 31 of 40 so we’ve got to get better at that.

“We keep moving in the right direction,” Kiffin added about the defense’s improvement. “We’ve still got a lot of work today. We want to get more turnovers, get more stops on third down. I don’t know how it was with the 1s, but they ended up 8 of 14 which is not very good. We’ve got a lot of room to improve but I think we are headed in the right direction.

SDS Staff

Saturday Down South reports and comments on the news around the Southeastern Conference as well as larger college football topics.