Arkansas Sports 360 - ArkansasSports360.com

10/22/2011 at 7:00pm

Image by Mark Wagner

Defensive end Jake Bequette closes in for a sack on Ole Miss quarterback Randall Mackey. Bequette finished with one sack and six tackles in the 29-24 Arkansas victory.

OXFORD, Miss — As the Arkansas Razorback faithful have learned this month, as they saw earlier against Texas A&M, the Hogs can play poorly enough early to find themselves with mountains to climb over the course of a game. And yet, even if the Hogs don't quite have some Sir Edmund Hillary in them to scale the most majestic of peaks, they have enough fortitude to climb up some average hills.

Arkansas did that again Saturday at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, falling behind the bedraggled Ole Miss Rebels 17-0 in the first half. The Razorbacks even gave Houston Nutt's fourth Ole Miss team a chance to say "what if" at the end, giving up a touchdown pass after a 29-point Razorback scoring spree, and then letting the Rebels' Jamal Mosley recover an onside kick just 57 yards away and with 1:21 showing on the clock — plenty of time — to somehow overtake the Hogs.

But freshman end Trey Flowers sacked the Rebels mercurial quarterback, Randall Mackey, for a loss of 11 yards on first down — one of the few times the defense brought Mackey down on a scramble. Sophomore safety Eric Bennett then stole Mackey's deep pass on the next play to finish the Rebels, who looked like anything but a team that had lost nine straight SEC games.

"I wish we had the third quarter back," Nutt said.

Arkansas scored 19 of its points in that period, and the Rebels went extremely conservative in the play-calling, with the exception of two deep throws.

On one of those, however, Ole Miss freshman Donte Moncrief had a couple of steps on the secondary but didn't have the ball controlled before Bennett and freshman corner Tevin Mitchel sandwiched him and the ball came loose for an incompletion at the Hogs' 25. Moncrief had two touchdown catches, including the one with 1:23 to play on a fade route over Arkansas senior cornerback Isaac Madison.

Nutt said of the third quarter, "There were a couple of series on defense that we didn't do anything. I wish Donte Moncrief would have caught one more ball. I think that would have put us over the edge. We needed something in the third quarter to give us confidence. We needed to go ahead and finish it."

Nutt, while he was Arkansas' coach for 10 years, wasted a lead of 17 points or more only once. That was in 1998 in Knoxville when the Hogs blew an 18-point lead against eventual national champion Tennessee. But Arkansas fans can relate to what he said about not finishing what would have been a monumental upset for the Rebels' program. It would have likely put an end — at least for a while — to all the negativity surrounding his program, as well as questions about his job status in his fourth year.

It would have made Arkansas fans wonder what the heck was going on with Bobby Petrino's program, too, fresh off an open date. No question they still will wonder why Arkansas' defense takes nearly a full half to adjust and to play harder. Go back even through the Hogs' 6-0 run to finish the 2010 regular season and the Sugar Bowl loss to Ohio State and notice how the UA defense appeared unprepared early on for what was coming.

What made it doubly tough for Arkansas in the first quarter-and-a-half Saturday was that the offense seemed stuck in mud, too. (Ole Miss has an artificial turf, in case you were wondering why the Hogs' legs looked so slow on offense and defense. It wasn't due to field conditions.)

Offensive coordinator Garrick McGee didn't hesitate to place some of the offense's blames at the feet of junior quarterback Tyler Wilson, who was uncharacteristically off with his passing all day, hitting 13 of 28 for 232 yards. "Ole Miss had a great plan, and our quarterback helped their plan." Apparently, both McGee and Petrino indicated, mistakes came early and often from Wilson.

Arkansas on its first three possessions made Ole Miss' statistically terrible defense look like it was Alabama.

Series one started on the UA 9 after an Ole Miss punt that came after the Rebels had eaten up 6:28 of the game without scoring. All three of Wilson's short pass attempts hit Ole Miss hands. The second one came dangerously close to being intercepted.

The next series, following a 43-yard Ole Miss field goal by Bryson Rose, was stopped at the Rebels' 49 on successive no-gain carries by short-yardage man Broderick Green.

"That was a stupid call," Petrino said later. "If it doesn't work on fourth down, it's always a bad call."

The Rebels went 51 yards in 5 plays, scoring on Mackey's 31-yard pass to Moncrief. Suddenly, an apathetic Ole Miss crowd was ignited. Ole Miss covered another 80 yards in 11 plays in abusing the Hogs' defense. Counter fakes by Mackey were causing Arkansas' ends on the opposite side to be leveraged inside, letting Ole Miss running backs regularly pick up huge gains. Hog defensive backs weren't fighting off blockers and no one was tackling well.

It's a familiar first-half refrain these days for Arkansas. "I didn't game plan the first half well at all. That's all on me," Hogs defensive coordinator Willy Robinson said.

Then Arkansas' Dennis Johnson made everyone wonder why he hadn't played until halfway into the second quarter, and why Arkansas had not run more and passed less early, when he scooted 52 yards on a third-and-14 draw play. That put the Hogs finally on the scoreboard and on their way to 29 straight points.

The defense made the adjustments to Ole Miss' counters and personnel units and came out dominating in the second half. Mackey, brilliant with a 10-for-12 first-half passing performance, began missing. Arkansas, which gave up 12-yard chunks over and over in the first half on first down, finally stopped the Rebels' first-down plays. For a few moments, when the Hogs' offensive speed of Johnson, Joe Adams and Marquel Wade took over and Ole Miss seemed to realize it was, after all, Ole Miss, it looked like Arkansas might run off to the three-touchdown win everyone expected.

Adams, whose 37-yard lunging catch of a Wilson pass set the quarterback up for a 1-yard touchdown sneak, turned a basic short swing pass into an across-the-field 67-yard run to set up another Wilson 1-yard scoring run. Wade, doing his best imitation of Adams, ran 37 yards on a reverse that had the Hogs rolling again, but Johnson's one mistake of the day was fumbling a half-yard from the goal line. Still, Arkansas' Jerry Franklin dumped Jeff Scott 3 yards deep in the end zone for a safety, and the Hogs drove with the ensuing free kick to a 23-yard Zach Hocker field goal. The lead was a comfortable 29-17 with 11:31 left and seemingly growing.

Then, Arkansas' offensive rush stopped just as quickly in the fourth quarter as Ole Miss' momentum had slowed midway through the second. There was just enough time for the Rebels to make it interesting, and they did.

But, at the end of 60 minutes, a maybe overrated (No. 9 in the BCS standings) Arkansas was 6-1 and Houston Nutt's hard-luck Rebels were 2-5 and 0-10 in their last 10 league games. The Hogs, recalling the comeback from 18 points down against Texas A&M on Oct. 1, were left trying to figure out why they start so slow in morning kickoffs for TV, realizing that next week's game at Vanderbilt has the same 11:21 a.m. start as this one.

And Vanderbilt beat Ole Miss 30-7 in Nashville last month.

Tagged: Southeastern Conference, Garrick McGee, Joe Adams, Tevin Mitchel, Trey Flowers, Darius Winston, Marquel Wade, Jake Bequette, Willy Robinson, Isaac Madison, Eric Bennett, Jerry Franklin, Dennis Johnson, Tyler Wilson, Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, Houston Nutt, Bobby Petrino, Ole Miss Rebels