Florida beats Ole Miss 52-28, and it did not happen through the air or through some scheme nobody had seen before. Jadan Baugh ran for 142 yards and three touchdowns, the No. 21 Gators manhandled the fourth-ranked Rebels, and Florida is 4-0 for the first time since 2019. Twenty-four points. Against a top-five team. In September.
That is not an upset that needs a lot of explaining. That is a team deciding how the game was going to be played and then playing it that way for four quarters.
How did Florida beat Ole Miss 52-28?
On the ground, over and over, until it stopped being a story about one drive and started being a story about a football team. Baugh's 142 yards are the headline, but the three touchdowns are the tell. You do not punch in three scores against a top-five defense by accident or by variance. You do it because your front is winning the line of scrimmage and the other side has no answer by the time the second half arrives.
Fifty-two points is the number I keep staring at. Ole Miss came in ranked fourth in the country, and fourth-ranked teams do not usually surrender a half-century. When a defense of that pedigree gives up 52, something broke early and never got fixed.
| Florida 52, Ole Miss 28 | Number |
|---|---|
| Final margin | 24 points |
| Jadan Baugh rushing yards | 142 |
| Baugh rushing touchdowns | 3 |
| Florida record | 4-0 |
| Rankings at kickoff | No. 21 Florida, No. 4 Ole Miss |
What Florida's 4-0 start actually means
The last Florida team to open 4-0 was the 2019 group, and anybody who has followed this program since knows how long seven years feels when you are the ones living it. There have been coaching changes, quarterback changes, and a lot of Saturdays where the Gators were the interesting underdog rather than the team doing the manhandling.
This was the other thing. This was Florida as the heavy.
from the almanac: florida's last national championship came in the 2008 season, and that team, for all the highlight reels, was fundamentally a group of people who could run the football at you and dare you to stop it. the blueprint has never actually gone out of style. it just gets forgotten every few years until somebody dusts it off.
I want to be careful with one thing, because September is September. Four games is four games, and a top-five scalp in late September has fooled better handicappers than me into anointing a team that turned out to be pretty good instead of great. The schedule ahead in this league is not a courtesy. But 52 points on a top-five defense is not the kind of result you can wave off as a hot day. That is a real performance by a real team.
What comes next for Ole Miss
A reckoning, probably a quiet one, in a film room. A fourth-ranked team that loses by 24 is going to slide in the polls, and the more important damage is internal: the Rebels now know their front can be moved, and every opponent left on their schedule knows it too. Word travels fast in this sport. Everybody watches everybody's tape.
The good news for Ole Miss is calendar. This is late September, not late November, and a team with that much talent has time to fix a run defense if the will is there. The bad news is that fixing a run defense mid-season is one of the hardest jobs in football, because it is rarely one thing. It is usually five things at once.
What I am watching next is whether Florida's approach travels. Baugh is clearly the engine, and engines that carry 142 yards and three scores against elite competition tend to get handed the ball a lot more the following week. The Gators do not need to reinvent anything. They need to keep being the team that shows up and makes the other guys tackle for three hours.
That is a nice thing to be in a league like this one. Just ask Big Mike.
