Deliberate Ole Miss offense executes when necessary

COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- Total number of plays used to be as good of a judge as any of the effectiveness of the Ole Miss offense.

That may be changing, after the No. 3 Rebels ran all of 54 plays during a 35-20 win against No. 14 Texas A&M on Saturday.

That's the lowest number of plays run since Oct. 15, 2011 against Alabama (52), but the Rebels averaged only 2.71 yards per play that day and 6.3 on Saturday. And this comes a week after Ole Miss snapped the ball 63 times against Alabama, again in a win.

"We wanted to keep the ball and take the pressure off of (the defense) with how good the offense plays," quarterback Bo Wallace said. "That was definitely the plan."

Pace of play is becoming more deliberate, but it's no less effective: the Rebels gained more than a yard per play more than the Aggies. It took Texas A&M 88 plays and 455 yards to score the same three touchdowns that Ole Miss did on 54 and 338, and do not forget that the last two came after Ole Miss had backed off.

"I was scared to death to throw it in the second half, just because I felt like we had it in hand," coach Hugh Freeze said. "We had some stuff in the passing game that made me feel kinda sloppy in the end."

Wallace was the driving force behind the offense, completing 13-of-19 passes for 178 yards and a touchdown while running for 50 yards and two more scores on 14 carries. He carried the ball on Saturday more times than he has in a year, and threw it fewer times than he had at any other point in his career (discounting games he left early because of a big lead or an injury).

But it worked: the team's three touchdown drives were five, nine and five plays long, and the longest one went 99 yards.

"We executed perfectly the whole drive, which you have to to complete a 99-yard drive," Wallace said. "Early in the game everything we were calling was working."

Ole Miss did change one thing up on offense: left tackle Laremy Tunsil admitted afterwards that he was pulling more so than he has in the team's first five games. He went up to block near the sideline on a wide receiver screen pass Ole Miss ran several times, in particular.