OXFORD - In assessing the shortcomings of his defense and offering no excuses, a player once told me, “Scholarship players have to make scholarship plays.”

Not much enlightenment I’ve received from athletes through the years has rung more truly. In the buildup and excitement that marked a visit by No. 3 Alabama to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium on Saturday, you can expand on that bit of truth.

Impact players have to make their greatest impact in championship games.

Technically, the Crimson Tide’s 22-3 defeat of No. 20 Ole Miss before a record crowd wasn’t a championship game.

But it was one of those games that you must have along the way to have any sort of championship relevance. In college football dreams die any given Saturday.

Alabama is relevant today because of Mark Ingram, Rolando McClain, Javier Arenas and others. They made big plays.

Ole Miss can begin focusing on trying to win the SEC West in 2010, because, barring some bizarre scenario, a two-game deficit to this Alabama team will be too much to overcome in 2009.

Says wideout Dexter McCluster regarding the race to Atlanta: “Don’t count us out.”

Alabama has a great defense, granted, but if the Rebels’ offense can’t compete any better than this against it, perhaps goals need to be modified to bowl-eligibility.

This season was to be the best chance at a championship for Ole Miss since the days of John Vaught. The Rebels were a very good offensive team at the end of last season. Most of those key players are back.

Early this season, it was easy to put left tackle Bradley Sowell under the microscope, but that’s not what it’s about any more.

It’s about a quarterback, Jevan Snead, once mentioned among the nation’s elite, who is struggling and fast losing the confidence of a fan base desperately wanting to believe what the summer told them.

The Rebels’ other impact players on offense were equally invisible on Saturday, with no end zone appearances for Brandon Bolden, Shay Hodge or McCluster.

Much of what these guys can do depends on the quarterback, and as the first half unraveled Snead badly missed Bolden, Hodge and others who were open and would have moved chains.

Defense wears down

There was no shortage of aggression by the Ole Miss defense, but there was a shortage of stamina.

You can only do so much when your offense can hold the ball for only 8 minutes, 57 seconds over 30 minutes of football.

The Ole Miss defense was forced onto the field with its back to the wall after miscues on offense and special teams gave Alabama the ball with a short field.

The Tide started first-half drives at the Ole Miss 26 and the Ole Miss 5 in the first half but netted just two field goals on those drives.

By the time Alabama got its third field goal it looked like the Tide could be your projected winner. The touchdown was simply running up the score.

For all the struggles on offense, the Rebels were remarkably close to energizing the crowd when it was 19-3, and they were at the Alabama 10 in the early seconds of the fourth quarter.

That’s when Alabama’s scholarship player, cornerback Kareem Jackson, made a scholarship play with an end zone interception on a slant route to Hodge.

“I would have laughed if someone had told me we would only get three points today,” McCluster said.

No one is laughing now.

Parrish Alford (parrish.alford@djournal.com) covers Ole Miss for the Daily Journal. He blogs daily about Ole Miss athletics at NEMS360.com.