The Duke Blue Devils, for lack of more ambiguous phrasing, looked outmatched against Ole Miss in Thursday’s TaxSlayer Gator Bowl. Rebels quarterback Jaxson Dart finished with 447 yards of offense and four passing touchdowns as Mississippi built a 52-14 lead with less than two minutes left on the clock.
Head coach [autotag]Manny Diaz[/autotag], after a successful first regular season with the program, gave credit to his opponent after the loss. But the Blue Devils coach thought his team beat itself just as badly.
“A team who is going to be difficult to beat when you’re playing well,” Diaz said. “But to make the mistakes that we made, we preached all year that it’s really doing simple well is what wins. And we made simple mistakes.”
Diaz highlighted third- and fourth-down defense in the opening half with the Rebels succeeding six of their 10 money downs even with a disastrous trick play on the first possession. Dart pulled off a particularly brutal conversion when he found a path to the sideline on a third-and-19 scramble early in the second quarter, shrugging off Duke defenders to somehow reach the line to gain, and he moved the chains on third-and-9 through the air on Mississippi’s third touchdown drive.
The Ole Miss offense held the ball for 19 minutes and 35 seconds of the opening half.
“All stuff that we feel like, fundamentally, we should be able to do,” Diaz concluded about the miscues.