Freeze hoping for offensive response Saturday

OXFORD, Miss. -- Ole Miss head coach Hugh Freeze is looking for an offensive response on Saturday.

The Rebels practiced approximately two hours inside Vaught-Hemingway Stadium on Friday, and it was one of the offense's worst days of the spring. At 10:30 tomorrow inside the stadium, Freeze will be hoping for better.

"Hope the (offense) responds, I really do," Freeze said. "I think it's good for us. It happened to us last spring a couple times, and they responded. We'll see tomorrow. They're going to come and fight. I know they're short-handed and we have some linemen out with injuries and some things. We didn't fight today. I thought the blue team had tremendous energy and took the fight to them.

"The coaches will get the message tonight that what we had today was not good. They'll try every way in the world to get them ready."

The offense is missing quarterback Bo Wallace, wide receivers Donte Moncrief and Korvic Neat and offensive linemen Aaron Morris and Patrick Junen. Defensive tackle Issac Gross tweaked his groin on Friday and didn't finish practice. Carlton Martin also didn't participate.

"I hope tomorrow we see better," Freeze said. "We're not going to just put it down and go crazy. We're going to go tight with red zone scrimmage and some red zone scrimmage coming out, and then we'll put it down some at the end. All of it will be live.

"You can only have certain practices that you can go live as much as we will tomorrow. We only had live two real periods, and it has to be less than 50 percent of the practice, but you can still be physical in thud practice. We just weren't today."

In addition to the offense's struggles, the defense had one of its best days.

"D.T. (Shackelford) has been a great addition and Temario (Strong) is doing well," Freeze said. "Woody Hamilton is going to be a great football player. Channing (Ward) is getting better. Got a lot of kids back over there. We oughta be better."