Ole Miss and Arkansas are playing football for some reason on Saturday, and the Rebels held an early lead over Bret Bielema’s Razorbacks in the first half. We mention Bret Bielema here — affectionately known as BERT in this territory of the internet — because his team dialed up this play late in the first quarter of Saturday’s proceedings.
Arkansas tried a complicated trick play with 2 offensive lines, and guess what, it didn’t work
The Hogs need to probably work on this scheme.
That there is four lineman in position in front of their backup quarterback Cole Kelley, who’s standing in for normal starter Austin Allen, who suffered a shoulder injury earlier this season. That there is also three linemen sidled up outside to the left in something like a pork-heavy bunch set presumably blocking for ... nobody?
At the snap, the ball immediately goes to the back slashing in from behind his presumed blocking set, and he tries to turn upfield into an Ole Miss rush of three linemen and one linebacker who has nothing to do with the play. Ole Miss somehow wins this three-on-four battle and and blasts Arkansas for a two-yard loss on first-and-10. Arkansas either didn’t execute this thing properly or the Rebels simply defended the hell out of it. Whatever the case, this play was an utterly hilarious failure.
This play and scheme holds weird shades of the Indianapolis Colts’ similar gimmick back in 2015, when they couldn’t even explain to themselves what exactly was happening with the on-field product. THEY LINED UP ONE BLOCKER. ONE.
College football — or rather, football — remains the weirdest of endeavors. To the point that Arkansas pulled out this bit of trickeration in the second half that failed miserably on a fourth and short play.
The goal here is to lure Ole Miss’ linebackers into the line of scrimmage then burn them over the top, but that’s decidedly not what happened. Kelley instead draws his eyes away from the rush for too long then gets annihilated by a blitz from the right. So it goes.
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