Culture
No one wants to play Ole Miss, SEC QB draft stock updates and more: What’s on Bruce Feldman’s radar
Georgia was the overwhelming preseason No. 1 team. Texas is the highest-ranked SEC team in the College Football Playoff at No. 3. Alabama has more Top 25 wins this season than the CFP’s top five teams combined.
But the SEC team that no one wants to play right now is one that isn’t even in the top 10.
“If you ask me right now which team I’d least want to face, it’s Ole Miss,” said an SEC defensive coordinator of a Top 25 team. “They’re now the most talented defensive team in the league. They have all these difference-maker pass rushers and a true lockdown corner in Trey Amos.
“They just got all these dudes up front. Three guys in the top five of sack leaders in the SEC (Suntarine Perkins, 10 sacks and No. 1; Princely Umanmielen, 9.5 sacks and tied for No. 2; and Jared Ivey, 7.5 sacks and tied for No. 5). That’s crazy! (J.J.) Pegues was a featured guy for them last year; he’s still really good (11.5 TFLs, two sacks) and he’s not even one of their top three! Walter Nolen is also really good. An inside guy with four sacks is pretty dang good. It’s really impressive.”
The other part of this that multiple SEC assistant coaches noted was that Ole Miss beat up Georgia even though the Rebels were without their best player, Tre Harris, a wide receiver who has been dealing with a lower-body injury. Harris’ 141 yards per game leads the country.
Last Saturday the Rebels held Georgia to its fewest points of the Kirby Smart era (10), its fewest total yards in seven seasons (245) and its fewest rushing yards since 2021 (59). Ole Miss leads the SEC in yards per play allowed in games against ranked opponents among the 14 teams who have faced at least two Top 25 opponents. Last year, the Rebels were dead last in the SEC at 7.81 YPP in those games.
To say Ole Miss has a ferocious defensive front is an understatement. It’s why defensive line coach Randall Joyner, a Larry Johnson protege, is making a good case to get Broyles Award consideration. That award is given to the nation’s top assistant, but, of course, Rebels defensive coordinator Pete Golding is also making a compelling case. Ole Miss has 23 more TFLs than anyone else in the SEC (103) and 18 more than anyone else in the country. It also has 13 more sacks than any other team in the SEC.
Four players already have double-digits in TFLs, and Ivey is close at 9.5. Last year, they only had one guy in double digits (Ivey with 11.5) Eight Rebels have at least four TFLs.
A big piece of that impact is due to the commitment Ole Miss made this offseason to upgrading its talent in the trenches through the portal.
Umanmielen, who transferred from Florida, and Nolan, who transferred from Texas A&M, were the big headliners. But other transfers are making a statement: top tackler Chris Paul Jr. (74 tackles, 10 TFLs) from Arkansas; second-leading tackler T.J. Dottery from Clemson; Amos from Alabama; and defensive back John Saunders from Miami (Ohio). Some current leaders transferred three years ago, like the 325-pound Pegues (Auburn), Ivey (Georgia Tech) and linebacker Khari Coleman (TCU).
The 6-foot-4, 255-pound Umanmielen has had 11.5 TFLs and 8.5 sacks in his last six games and has emerged as a dominant force for the Rebels.
“His quick get-off is phenomenal,” a Rebels coach told The Athletic this week. “He sets them up where he wants to counter them, sometimes with a spin move, or he will go speed-to-power rush at times. One of the (Georgia) tackles overset too quickly because he was so worried about Princely’s speed rush, so (Umanmielen) countered him with a spin move and was able to get a sack. He’s very smart and does a good job of studying the opposing tackles. He picks them apart.”
Umanmielen only played one snap in a 29-26 loss to LSU due to injury.
“If we had him, we win that game,” said that Rebels coach.
The 6-1, 210-pound Perkins, a former five-star recruit, has been another nightmare for offenses.
“He’s so freakin explosive. He’s one of the best QB spies in the country,” said the Rebels coach.
“He is stronger than you think at the point of attack for being a lighter guy,” said a rival SEC DC who has seen a lot of Ole Miss on crossover film. That coach has been very impressed with the job Golding has done this year. “They run more games than he used to at Alabama. He’s been really aggressive on first and second downs and he has really cut that D-line loose.”
Suntarine Perkins (4) has been a force of nature for the Rebels. (Petre Thomas / Imagn Images)
What else is on my radar
Trends in the coaching carousel
The coaching carousel often follows perceived trends. This winter is not expected to have a lot of changes, but one thing to watch is whether older, proven winners from lower-levels of football are in vogue. Why? Athletic directors and search company heads have taken note of what has happened at Indiana this year, I’m told.
Curt Cignetti has led the Hoosiers to a 10-0 start. The 63-year-old began his head coaching career in 2011 at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in the Division II PSAC (Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference), where he spent six seasons before moving on to FCS Elon in the CAA (Coastal Athletic Association), where he went 14-9. Cignetti was then hired at James Madison, where that program elevated to FBS under him; JMU went 11-1 last year in the Sun Belt. Cignetti follows in the success of Lance Leipold, a former Division III coach who has won big everywhere he’s been while moving up.
Cignetti’s established ways in running a program have paid off in Bloomington. It’s why Skip Holtz, who has spent over two decades as a head coach outside the Power 4 and is now winning big in the UFL, could be in play for the Southern Miss and Rice openings. Same for Sam Houston’s K.C. Keeler, a 65-year-old who has won two FCS national titles. Keeler took a team that went 3-9 in its first season in the FBS in Conference USA to a 7-2 mark that began with a blowout win at Rice in August.
Keeler, I expect, will be in play for the Rice vacancy as well as USM.
SEC QB draft stock
Georgia QB Carson Beck’s draft stock isn’t the only one in an interesting spot. LSU QB Garrett Nussmeier, a redshirt junior who spent much of the previous two seasons on the sidelines watching Jayden Daniels, had begun to emerge as the top quarterback prospect in the 2025 class, according to our NFL draft expert Dane Brugler. But that changed since halftime of the Tigers’ loss to Texas A&M last month.
Nussmeier, the son of Eagles QB coach Doug Nussmeier, ranks No. 30 on Brugler’s latest Top 50 Big Board. “With only 10 collegiate starts on his resume, Nussmeier would be wise to return to school,” Brugler wrote.
GO DEEPER
NFL Draft 2025 Big Board: Travis Hunter takes No. 1 spot, 4 QBs in updated top 50
In recent weeks, defenses have continued showing him different pictures and giving him different looks, whether that meant to show six up and bring pressure, or drop out people off the edge.
Nussmeier has thrown five INTs in the last two games — both double-digit losses. Still, his arm talent is tantalizing.
“I do think he’s the most talented,” a long-time NFL scout told me. “If I were a GM, I would pick him over all these guys. He just needs to play a lot more. I think he’s seeing things that he’s never seen before. He’s got 11 starts and it’s starting to show. (Texas A&M coach Mike) Elko did some stuff to him, and he looks confused.”
“I think he’s as good as any of them,” another SEC DC said. “He is way more aggressive than Carson Beck. He is a true gunslinger, where he’s like, if my guy is covered, I can throw him open — and 70 percent of the time he’s gonna be right. He’s also cost his team at times because they are so much more one-dimensional than Georgia is.
“This kid is probably taking a beating right now. This kid is like Brett Favre. He’s a freaking gunslinger. If he figures it out, in another year or whatever, he can have a really great career. I’m telling you: In big moments, in two-minute drives, you’re like, ‘Holy shit, this dude is good.’”
GO DEEPER
What happened to Carson Beck? Coaches and scouts on Georgia’s “struggling” QB
A wild-card QB prospect
The biggest wild card in the 2025 NFL quarterback draft class is Louisville’s Tyler Shough. The 6-5, 230-pounder began his career at Oregon before transferring to Texas Tech before transferring again to Louisville. He’s thrown 20 touchdowns and five INTs this season and has thrown nine TDs and just two picks in four games against Top 25 opponents.
“The guy with the best tape in terms of the physical tools is Tyler Shough,” said an NFL scout. “When you watch him compared to the Riley Leonards, Will Howards and Kurtis Rourkes, throw Mark Gronowski in there, Shough’s arm talent looks head and shoulders better. I know there are some age and durability questions about him. He’s never finished a season, so knock on wood, I hope he makes it through this year. He can really chuck it. If you were to tell me four years from now that he’s been able to stay healthy and is a winning starter in the NFL, I wouldn’t be shocked by that.
“It’s a weird (quarterback) class.”
(Photo illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Wesley Hitt, John Bunch / Icon Sportswire via Getty)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
-
Health1 minute agoQuitting smoking could offer a major benefit beyond heart and lung health, study finds
-
Sports4 minutes agoRoman Reigns domesticates Jacob Fatu to retain World Heavyweight Championship at WWE Clash in Italy
-
Technology9 minutes agoQR code email scam targets employee reviews
-
Business16 minutes agoMove over, Grogu. Internet culture soars as ‘Backrooms’ and ‘Obsession’ top the box office
-
Entertainment19 minutes agoReality star Matt Brown of ‘Alaskan Bush People’ is found dead, family confirms
-
Politics34 minutes agoDespite Trump’s recent insistence, in-person voting does exist in Los Angeles
-
Sports46 minutes agoYoshinobu Yamamoto helps Dodgers deliver a birthday win for Dave Roberts
-
World54 minutes ago“Crime hotspots”: Why violence at German stations
