Plenty of questions still to be answered for the 2024 Blue Raiders

OXFORD, Miss. — After a 52-3 loss at the hands of No. 6 Ole Miss on Saturday afternoon, it'd be easier to list the stats Middle Tennessee Football was better than the Rebels in (sacks, where MTSU won 3-2 and fourth down conversation rate, 1-for-2 vs. 0-for-1) than list all the ways one of the top teams in college football made their presence known in Vaught-Hemingway Stadium.

"For our football team, I thought we learned a lot about ourselves," MTSU Head Coach Derek Mason said. "This is a game that's got to be played. With that, there's opportunities to be better."

The Rebel offense was sterling, with Jaxson Dart completing his first 24 passes of the day en route to a 25-for-27 night under center through the air, tossing 377 yards and a touchdown. Ole Miss might've been even better on the ground, racking up 258 yards on the ground, 6.1 yards per carry, with six rushing scores.

"They found balance early," Mason said. "They were able to keep us off schedule. They stayed on schedule."

And the Rebel defense, while not pitching a shutout like they did a week earlier against Furman thanks to a second quarter field goal from Zeke Rankin, was similarly dominant, racking up nine tackles for loss and holding the Blue Raiders to just 1.1 yards per carry on the ground. Even taking away the Rebels' sack yardage, MTSU only improves slightly to 1.8 yards per carry.

"Their defense was able to pressure us early and get us into long third down situations and really get Nick off the spot," Mason said. "We really weren't able to hold up in protection early... Hats off to that Ole Miss team, and there's a lot of work for us to do."

There's no question the MTSU football program is still in a state of transition. There's plenty to learn about what will work on offense, who can play on defense and every spot in between on a team that's looking to define itself under a new coach and staff. And perhaps the first two games of the season, an FCS home opener that needed some late-game heroics to get a win and a blowout loss to a College Football Playoff contender, have a commonality that can give the program something to build on heading into Conference USA play: this team fights.

"This is a really good benchmark of where we stand as a team," said tight end Holden Willis, who looked like his All-CUSA self with seven catches for 94 yards on Saturday. "This is kind of one of those games where you see, do we strain? Do we quit? I feel like there were some hiccups. But overall, we still finished the game trying to fight through."

There was fight in the Blue Raiders last week, driving down the field in less than a minute to score a touchdown with 16 seconds to go to take the lead. And there was fight on Saturday, from the offense in particular, who found some rhythm in the second half on drives that stalled out in the red zone. It's hard to take much away from the result in Oxford, but there's still belief in the locker room on what this team can be.

And as Mason pointed out to the team and media post-game, the rest of the Blue Raiders' schedule, eight CUSA games starting next Saturday against Western Kentucky, along with two more non-conference games against non-ranked teams, will be a much better judge of who this team can be.

"We play in Conference USA, they play in the SEC," Mason said. "We want to compete, we want to beat everybody we play. But the reality is you have to look at the things you did, the things you didn't do and let's make sure that we fix some of those things so we can be better next week when we play a conference opponent for our first conference game."

And the head coach has seen progress in the eyes of his guys this week that maybe didn't show up in the statline.

"I will tell you that this football team got better," Mason said. "There's some things about itself that it learned here at Ole Miss that I think we can take into a schedule that doesn't get easier, per se, but it gives us a chance to be really competitive."

Middle Tennesee State University Athletics

Players Mentioned

Zeke Rankin

Holden Willis

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