Second thoughts on Ole Miss

From the excellent Red Cup Rebellion:

With the type of talent Georgia has, especially the gamechanging talents in Jarvis Jones and Todd Gurley, this sort of statistical overview is nearly useless. Georgia is undeniably the better team between these two, but they are not demonstrably good enough for me to think the Rebels don’t have a puncher’s chance this Saturday.

Any given Saturday thoughts aside, what’s interesting to me in that post is the stats on sacks.  Ghost calls it a “good edge”, but it’s more than that.  Until Saturday, Georgia’s defense really hadn’t been racking up the sacks as might have been expected – a lot of that being due to Jones’ two-game absence, no doubt – but the Dawgs still manage to have a healthy lead over Mississippi’s defense in that regard.  And the Rebel Black Bears have given up almost twice as many sacks this season as Georgia has.  You’ve got to like that combination if you’re Todd Grantham.

Remember that last year, Ole Miss was the team that got Georgia’s defense going in the sack department.

And it seems that Grantham is honing in on his best personnel grouping for quarterback pressure.

But it’s clear that Grantham likes having the two dynamic pass rushers on the field at the same time — often with hybrid outside linebacker Washington also in at defensive end — because of their collective ability to harass opposing quarterbacks from either side of the line.

“[Jones and Jenkins are] the kind of guys that you want to have obviously from a setting-the-edge standpoint, from a run standpoint and then from a pass-rush standpoint,” Grantham said. “Those two guys have got a pretty good pass rush, a pretty good twitch, get-off, and it allows them not to be able to say that they can totally go to this guy. If they do, it’s going to leave somebody else one-on-one.

“By doing that, though, a guy like Cornelius Washington went inside and that was really big for us. I thought Cornelius did good inside, so at times we had as many as three outside backers in there, maybe four every now and then.”

No matter how fast an offense the opponent runs, good things tend to happen when you disrupt the quarterback.  Hopefully, there’ll be a lot of disruptin’ going on tomorrow.

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UPDATE:  It seems Ghost got his sacks totals backwards.  But check Ole Miss’ split stats out.