Jadan Baugh, Florida Ground Game Bury No. 4 Ole Miss 52-28 in the Swamp

No. 21 Florida buried No. 4 Ole Miss under six rushing touchdowns and 302 yards on the ground Saturday night, routing the Rebels 52-28 at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium to move to 4-0 for the first time since 2019. The result, confirmed in the official box score posted by NCAA.com, ended Ole Miss's unbeaten start and snapped a run of 12 consecutive Florida losses to top-five opponents.

Baugh and the ground game take over

Running back Jadan Baugh carried for 3 rushing touchdowns and 142 yards, becoming just the third player in Florida history to top 100 rushing yards in five straight games, joining Emmitt Smith and Fred Taylor, according to the official postgame notes published by Ole Miss athletics. Duke Clark added 126 yards and a touchdown of his own, including a 45-yard third-quarter score in which he juked past cornerback Antonio Kite and safety Sharif Denson. Florida finished with six rushing touchdowns as a team, per the CBS Sports box score. Quarterback Aaron Philo was efficient in a complementary role, going 16 of 23 for 196 yards and a touchdown.

Florida was favored by just 3½ points, and the final margin tied the most points the Gators have scored against a top-five opponent since beating Florida State 52-20 in the 1996 national championship game — a night that also made Sumrall the first coach in Southeastern Conference history to lead a team to 200 or more combined points through its first four games, according to the Associated Press recap carried on the same CBS Sports box score page.

Florida (4-0, 2-0 SEC) jumped ahead 10-0 before Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss had completed a single pass, and while the Rebels briefly cut the deficit to 17-14 early in the third quarter, the Gators answered by scoring touchdowns on five straight second-half possessions to pull away. Defensive back DJ Coleman intercepted Chambliss, and a strip-sack by Jayden Woods forced a fumble that snuffed out Ole Miss's momentum at a critical juncture.

The final score undersells how tight the game felt at its midpoint. Trailing 7-0 in the first quarter, Ole Miss handed off four straight times to backup running back JT Lindsey, who was stopped on fourth-and-1 and gave Florida a short field it converted into more points, according to the same AP recap. The Rebels answered by scoring 11 points across a three-minute span bridging the second and third quarters to trail just 17-14, but Florida's London Montgomery returned the ensuing kickoff 41 yards to set up Clark's go-ahead score, swinging momentum back to the Gators for good. Florida finished the game having outgained Ole Miss 498 yards to 426 and won the turnover battle 2-0, per the box score.

A rough night for the Rebels

Chambliss was far from ineffective individually — he threw for 298 yards and a touchdown while adding 44 yards and two scores on the ground — but he also lost a fumble and threw an interception, and Ole Miss failed to convert a single third down in the first half. The Rebels (3-1, 1-1 SEC) were also missing starting running back Kewan Lacy, sidelined by a shoulder injury suffered in last week's win over LSU, which thinned an already stressed backfield.

Chambliss did much of that while managing a left thigh injury he aggravated on Ole Miss's second series — at one point riding a stationary bike on the sideline between drives — before finishing 25 of 34 passing, according to the AP recap.

Lacy's absence stung given his history against Florida: he ran for 224 yards and three touchdowns against the Gators a year ago in Oxford, the AP recap noted, while Lindsey, his replacement, managed 31 yards on 11 carries Saturday. Golding declined to blame the injury for the loss. "This is the greatest team sport ever invented," he said, according to the transcript. "We came with 74 dudes ... This isn't an excuse of who played, who didn't play ... This one wasn't on Kewan."

Ole Miss head coach Pete Golding, in his first full season leading the program after replacing Lane Kiffin, did not soften his assessment afterward. Golding's full remarks were captured in a postgame transcript published by The Rebel Walk.

"That was an old-fashioned butt whupping right there, man," Golding said. "There was a lack of courage, in my opinion, at times, that we were picking and choosing. That's an elite back, and you've got to go chest-to-chest with him whether you like it or not."

Golding was more expansive earlier in the same transcript about where the game went wrong. "Third down was a struggle defensively, losing leverage, having missed tackles, explosives in the run game and in the pass game," he said of the first half. He added that Baugh's rate of broken tackles entering the week was, in his words, "number one in the NCAA. We watched every one of them."

Golding said tackling would be the top priority during Ole Miss's upcoming bye week, adding that personnel changes were possible. "We get to choose who plays," he said. "It's our responsibility to make sure we're doing the things" needed to fix it.

A signature win for Sumrall's rebuild

The victory is the most significant of Jon Sumrall's brief Florida tenure. Hired to replace Billy Napier, who was fired in October 2025 and is now the head coach at James Madison, Sumrall inherited a program that had lost 12 straight games against top-five opponents dating back years. Beating a top-five team in Week 4 of his first season represents an early proof point for a rebuild that also brought in new coordinators Buster Faulkner (offense, from Georgia Tech) and Brad White (defense, from Kentucky).

Sumrall was careful afterward not to overstate the moment. "We have not arrived," he said. "We have so much room to grow and get better. It's not just what you do, it's how you do it — we're trying to look like an outfit that practices and prepares and does things with attention to detail." He also framed the win in more ambitious terms: "We came here to win championships. It's not asleep, but it ain't fully awake yet."

What it means going forward

The loss is Ole Miss's first of the season after wins over then-No. 24 Louisville and then-No. 7 LSU to open Golding's tenure, and it drops the Rebels from the unbeaten group in the College Football Playoff conversation heading into a bye week before an Oct. 10 visit to Vanderbilt. Florida, meanwhile, faces an immediate step up in competition, traveling to No. 19 Missouri next Saturday before a stretch that includes South Carolina, Texas and Georgia — a schedule that will quickly test whether Saturday's performance was a breakthrough or an outlier.

For now, the Gators have their first win over a top-five opponent in years and their best start in nearly a decade, while Ole Miss and Golding have two weeks to retool a defense that was overwhelmed at the line of scrimmage in Gainesville.