Ole Miss deserved its loss to LSU on Saturday night.

The Rebels led a defensive struggle in Death Valley until LSU scored its first touchdown with 5:07 left.

But the offense couldn’t execute with the game on the line in the fourth quarter, alternating between failed play-calling, failures in communication and poor clock management. It cost the team an unbeaten season and a No. 3 national ranking.

LSU went ahead 10-7 on a 4-yard touchdown pass from Anthony Jennings to Logan Stokes, but the loss isn’t the defense’s fault.

The Ole Miss offense did nothing but get in its own way after that as it handed the Tigers a victory on a silver platter. The Rebels had not one, but two possessions following LSU’s go-ahead score, yet those possessions ended with a turnover on downs and Bo Wallace’s first interception in SEC play this season.

The first of those two possessions began with five minutes remaining and all three timeouts left, yet for whatever reason the team elected to run the ball multiple times.

The Ole Miss offense has boasted one of the worst rushing attacks in the SEC this season, and the same held true Saturday night. Take away one 30-yard run by Cody Core, and the Rebels ran for just 107 yards on 33 carries, an average of just 3.2 yards per rush. The Rebels couldn’t run the ball on LSU all night, yet that’s how they elected to approach a late-game drive with an unbeaten record on the line.

With time winding down and the game hanging in the balance, the run-heavy play calling ate up an unnecessary amount of clock. Ole Miss ran the ball on four of seven plays on the drive, gaining a mere four yards on those runs while eating more than three of the five minutes remaining on the clock. The drive ended with a turnover on downs as the run game failed to pick up a third-and-1 and a fourth-and-1, leaving Ole Miss three points behind with fewer than two minutes left on the clock.

Ole Miss stopped LSU on three straight runs, called its three timeouts and got the ball back with 1:19 left in the game, bringing us to the Rebels second mismanaged possession in the final five minutes.

Ole Miss took to the air this time, moving the ball from its own 25 to the LSU 25-yard line in a span of 1:10, converting a fourth-and-8 and getting a gift pass interference penalty from LSU.

The Rebels faced a third-and-2 with nine seconds remaining, and head coach Hugh Freeze was indecisive: run one more play or kick the potential game-tying 42-yard field goal? Freeze eventually elected to kick the field goal, but he was too late. The game clock hit zero well before Ole Miss was ready to snap the ball.

The embarrassing delay of game penalty turned a 42-yard kick into a 47-yarder.

With a freshman kicker in Gary Wunderlich, Freeze decided he’d rather risk running one more play to create a shorter field goal than to allow Wunderlich to boot the ball from 47 yards away with the game on the line.

Freeze made it patently clear in his post-game comments that he told Wallace to either take an easy completion in the flat or throw the ball away on the final play before the field goal.

Best-case scenario, Ole Miss could have made Wunderlich’s kick a little bit easier. Worst-case, Wunderlich would have had to kick the ball from 47 yards out. A difficult kick, but within his range.

Instead, Wallace disobeyed his coach and heaved the ball toward the end zone, where LSU’s Ronald Martin easily intercepted it to seal a Tigers victory.

Did Wallace lose track of the time, score and situation? Did Freeze not articulate the plan well enough to his senior quarterback?

Somewhere on the Ole Miss sideline there was a disconnect, just another in a long series of fatal errors in the final five minutes of the game. The Landshark defense held yet another opponent to 10 points or fewer, but this time the Ole Miss offense was so bad the defense couldn’t compensate.

The Rebels are still a national title contender, but there’s no way they’ll win any championships with that kind of late-game execution. The play-calling made no sense, the clock management was horrendous and the Rebels’ composure was non-existent.

The Rebels will have to play much better teams than LSU in the SEC championship and College Football Playoff, and it won’t get to play those games at home like they did in the win over Alabama on Oct. 4.

Ole Miss controlled this game for most of the night, but it deserved to lose after saving its worst play of the night for the game’s biggest moments.