Ole Miss Football: 3 takeaways from heartbreaking loss to LSU in finale

Ole Miss football was looking to potentially earn a bowl bid and make some noise heading into bowl season against a suddenly-hot LSU team.

Although Ole Miss and LSU weren’t playing for a conference title, they both matchup up on Championship Weekend and drew some intrigue in an old-fashioned shootout.

The Rebels had some turnover issues — or Matt Corral did, I should say — while the run game led the way for Ole Miss. LSU, on the other hand, was led by Max Johnson who had himself a decent game, numbers-wise, and kept the Tigers in the game just one week after upsetting Florida.

Ole Miss looked to be in position to win after scoring 27 of the first 33 points of the second half before LSU finished the game on a 13-0 scoring run to win by five.

What’d we learn from Ole Miss’ tough loss to LSU?

3. This offseason should be all about defense

It’s no secret, Ole Miss’ defense has been a nightmare this season. If the Rebels had even an average or slightly decent defense, we might be talking about the biggest surprise team in the SEC.

Lane Kiffin will need to make sure defense is the emphasis all offseason because we know that the Rebels have no problem scoring. When he hired DJ Durkin and Chris Partridge as co-defensive coordinators this offseason to join him in Oxford, he knew that it would be a major rebuild on that side of the ball, but did he expect this?

Probably not, but he needs to give these two a chance to fix things because Ole Miss wasn’t exactly in a great position defensively when they got there.

Ole Miss needs to improve drastically on defense this offseason if it wants to be relevant in the SEC moving forward.