But film has been hard to come by on Boise State. The Broncos haven't played a game under new head coach Bryan Harsin or their coordinators, and Ole Miss head coach Hugh Freeze admits the unknowns have him more anxious than usual.
“It’s been the hardest game for me to prepare for that I remember," Freeze said. "I’ve had to do this one other time, but when you opened up you didn’t have new coordinators and you had some common opponents and people you could call. In this case, it really hasn’t been that way. It has been rather difficult to pinpoint our first down calls."
The problem of scouting Boise State is compounded by the fact that they're from across the continent. The Rebels don't share common opponents, and the coaching circles don't intersect. There are no coaching buddies to call. So the Ole Miss coaches find themselves in the uncomfortable position of making educated guesses as to what the Rebels might see by looking at film of what the Boise State coaches ran at other schools with other players against other teams. Not the best scouting technique, but it's all the Rebels have to go on with neither team having played a game yet this year. The most reliable scouting won't happen until after kickoff.
"It will take some adjustment as the game goes on to find out kind of how they want to play us," Freeze said. "It’s not the easiest thing. From our defensive side, it might be a bit easier, but it’s still not as comfortable as you would like for it to be. Coach Harsin has been an offensive guy so you would think that it will have his flavor to it, also. His coordinator is coming from Stanford. You would think you would have a mixture of that. We’ve tried to prepare for all of that. It is a bit more difficult than if a staff was returning for sure.”
So how does an offense plan for the unknown? It sounds like Freeze will use the always reliable KISS method.
“You don’t want to call plays that don’t have a good chance of succeeding," Freeze said. "We’ll have some grade plays, which to us those are go-to plays regardless of what they’re in. Those will try to win first down and get them into some tempo. It does weigh on your mind. How fast you really want to go until you figure out what they’re doing? We’ll get a feel for them. We definitely want to get into tempo. We’ll have those calls that we feel good about and that are good, sound things against whatever they’re doing. Hopefully we’ll get some of those called early and have some success in rhythm.”