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Last week was a collective exhale for Ole Miss. Its win over LSU — a game that had consequences that extended well beyond the 2026 season — was a relief in many ways. It’s a relief that it didn’t have to fight an unwinnable perception battle that Lane Kiffin was the only reason for the program’s success over the last half decade. It was a relief that the chaotic circus that follows Lane Kiffin everywhere he exists (because he’s the ringleader) had finally left town.

Now, the Rebels have nine football games remaining in their regular season. Eight of those nine will be tough tests, with all due respect to Wofford. But they will be normal football games in which nothing else matters except the scoreboard when the game ends.

Saturday’s game at Florida is the first of those remaining eight tests, and it might just be the toughest.

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A look at the Gators

Florida is 3-0 and is coming off a road win at Auburn last week. The Tigers aren’t very good, but it’s harder than ever to win on the road in the SEC. While it’s very early in the season, and they’ve only played one real opponent, the Gators look better than advertised under first year head coach Jon Sumrall.

I believe that Sumrall would’ve been Ole Miss’ next head coach had Kiffin departed the program like a remotely normal human being and allowed the Rebels to conduct a normal search for a head coach (this was intentional, by the way). Sumrall spent one year on staff as the Ole Miss linebackers coach in 2018. I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but I remember covering the team that year. Ole Miss was terrible, but I remember Sumrall coming in to talk to the media after practice one day, and he was wildly impressive. It’s hard to explain, but he just sounded different. It was obvious that he would eventually be a power four head coach, and a good one at that.

Sumrall won immediately in two years at Troy and did the same at Tulane. His current record as a head coach is 46-12 (29-4). He’s a really good football coach. He also put together a really good staff, including offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner, who he poached from Georgia Tech.

Philo follows Faulkner to The Swamp

Florida quarterback Aaron Philo spent two years backing up Haynes King at Georgia Tech and then followed Faulkner to Gainesville. He won a quarterback battle over Tramell Jones Jr. in preseason camp, though Philo was always considered the favorite to land the job. It became more of a battle because of a late push from Jones.

Philo is a much different player than what you saw with Sam Leavitt last week. Philo doesn’t run very often and isn’t nearly as mobile. He’s also a more accurate thrower than Leavitt is. He doesn’t have the strongest arm but is very accurate on short and intermediate passes and has great pocket awareness. Through three games, he appears to run Faulkner’s offensive scheme at a pretty high level. He’s also got a pretty good stable of pass-catching options to throw to.

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Florida’s offense runs through Baugh

The Gators have one of the best running backs in the country in Jadan Baugh. The junior rushed 220 times for 1,170 yards last season for the Gators. The 15 carries for 61 yards he had against Ole Miss was his third-lowest output of the season, but I struggle to put a ton of stock into that because that was an entirely different Florida team with no head coach that was limping to the finish line.

Baugh is the most important player in this game other than Trinidad Chambliss. He will be a tough assignment for an Ole Miss rush defense that hasn’t been particularly good through three games.

The defense has looked shaky for the Gators

Florida’s defense has looked shaky in the first three games. It allowed 39 points to a bad Auburn offense last week, but some context is required. Those 39 points came on just 373 yards, and 15 of those points were scored in the fourth quarter after the Gators had a three-score lead and the game appeared to be out of reach.

The Gators return five starters from last year’s defense, as well as 17 players who logged 100 ore more snaps, and also added 10 transfers.

Florida, on both sides of the ball, was an interesting program last year because it changed head coaches, but instead of flipping the roster from top to bottom with all new players, Sumrall and his new staff primarily focused on roster retention because of the talent already in the building. Billy Napier wasn’t fired due to do a lack of talent. He was fired for not knowing how to properly utilize it.

It’s hard to tell how good or bad the Gators defense is because they’ve only played one real game. It appears to me that the secondary is the weakest length, and that the biggest advantage Ole Miss will have in this game is Chambliss and the Rebel receivers preying on the secondary. That’s particularly important given the fact that Kewan Lacy is injured. I would be very surprised if Lacy played in this game.

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Five things to watch: Ole Miss vs Florida

This is a really interesting game for a number of reasons. The line on this game has befuddled people all week. Florida is anywhere from a 2 ½ to a 3 ½ point favorite over the Rebels. On the surface, it’s odd to see the No. 4 team in the country as an underdog against a team who just entered the top 25 this week. I would argue that this is evidence that preseason rankings are useless and skew people’s thinking.

It’s also evidence that in this unlimited transfer era of college football, it’s nearly impossible to get a feel for how good or bad teams are in the first few weeks of the season because every team has 25-60 new players. There’s very little continuity. I think even Las Vegas struggles with this to an extent.

I am not surprised to see Ole Miss as an underdog in this game. As great as last week’s win was, I still don’t know what this team is. The defense looked better last week, but still allowed 172 yards rushing. The pass defense looked better, but how much of that was due to Leavitt being an inaccurate quarterback? Ole Miss has the best quarterback in the sport, but hasn’t really run the ball effectively this season, largely due to Lacy being injured. I think this team can beat any one in the country, but what’s their floor? I don’t know, at least not yet.

This is the most important game of Ole Miss’ season as it pertains to the consequences of the 2026 season (not all the other nonsense that came with LSU last week). Even in the preseason, I viewed this one as the proverbial swing game. If Ole Miss can escape Gainesville with a win and enter the bye week 4-0, I would feel comfortable declaring the Rebels as favorites to make the College Football Playoff. Why? look at the three remaining road games left: Texas, Vanderbilt, and Oklahoma. If Ole Miss even just went 1-2 in those games and won their home games, they’d be 10-2 and likely in the Playoff. A 2-1 mark in those games looks way more realistic now with how bad Oklahoma has looked, which would give the Rebels more margin for error.

A loss on Saturday doesn’t kill the Rebels by any means, but it leaves a much more challenging and narrow path to the Playoff. The outlook of the season depending on the result of this game has a wider variance than any other on the schedule, in my opinion.

This is a tough task for Ole Miss in one of the toughest places to play in college football, with a team that’s playing with confidence under a first year head coach, playing in front of a fanbase ready to believe their program is championship-caliber again. It’ll be one hell of an atmosphere and football game. Here are five things I will be thinking about at kickoff.

1. Can the Rebels contain Baugh?

As I said earlier, he is the most important player in this game. The Ole Miss rush defense has been suspect this year while Baugh has been tremendous. And while Florida’s offense has shown the ability to play fast this season, I imagine their strategy this week will be to control the pace of this game through Baugh and the running game, keeping No. 6 in white, the most dangerous player in college football, on the sideline for as much of the game as possible.

If Ole Miss can contain Baugh, it puts more weight on Philo’s shoulders. If there’s been one consistent aspect of the Rebels defense this year, it’s the ability to pressure opposing quarterbacks. Philo isn’t as mobile as Leavitt and prefers not to run.

Neutralizing Baugh and the Florida running game will have a trickle down effect on other aspects of this game.

2. Is the Ole Miss secondary fixed?

The secondary had its best performance of the season last week against LSU after two weeks of alarming coverage busts and communication errors. The performance coincided with the return of starting corner Antonio Kite — who started 12 games for the Rebels in 2025 and was injured early on in the Louisville game — and the season debut of Florida transfer safety Sharif Denson.

“(Denson) came out of spring as our guy, our bell cow back there,” Pete Golding said. “He was going into Louisville as a starter before the high ankle sprain.”

Denson’s return coincided with Edwin Joseph moving from safety to corner, and Jaylon Braxton moving from corner to safety.

“Edwin is probably the most talented player we have back there,” Golding said. “He’s new to the system. A position (corner) near the sideline that we can minimize some of the teaching checks and adjustments. Braxton played safety in this system last year… I thought it was a good flip.”

Was Denson the missing cog that makes the machine operate properly? Saturday will be telling. Philo is a capable quarterback and Florida has a plethora of talented receivers. It’ll be interesting to see whether or not the secondary can back-up last week’s performance.

3. Can Ole Miss run the football?

As I mentioned earlier, I would be pretty surprised if Lacy played in this game. I could be wrong. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time, and for Lacy’s sake, I hope I am, but I doubt he plays. What then for the Ole Miss rushing attack? the Rebels are going to have to have some semblance of a running game. They cannot solely rely on Chambliss to be superman for four quarters. The margin for error with that style of play is too thin.

J.T. Lindsey played pretty well in Lacy’s absence last week. We haven’t seen much from Makai Frazier this year due to an injury. Frazier looks to be back healthy and ready for this game.

The coaching staff talked throughout the offseason about lessening Lacy’s workload after a year in which Lacy ran the ball more times than any running back in the country. The staff talked about how much it liked the depth in the running back room behind Lacy. I think this is the game in which that theory will be tested. The inability to run the ball puts even more on Chambliss’ plate, and there’s already a lot on it. I am very curious to see if Ole Miss can run the football effectively in this game.

4. Was last week an arrival for Traylon Ray?

Ray was the hero of last week’s win over LSU. He caught seven passes for 115 yards and a touchdown. Ray is a great story. He transferred in from West Virginia last season as a receiver. He was moved to corner due to injuries in the secondary. He liked being at Ole Miss and wanted to come back for another year, but hated playing corner.

“Going into the offseason, he’s like,’ Coach, look, man, I would love to come back. I love this place. But I hate corner. I want to play receiver. I’m a receiver. Y’all signed me from West Virginia to play receiver,’” Golding recalled.

John David Baker liked Ray as a receiver, and so he made the switch back.

He was invaluable in the win last week. Was that a one-off? Or is he emerging as the second receiver behind Deuce Alexander that this offense needs? It’s worth noting that Caleb Odom has been awesome for the Rebels so far this year and is the second most viable threat behind Alexander, but Odom is a tight end. When looking at strictly receivers, Ray is an interesting piece of the receiving corps and I am curious to see if another productive game is in store for him.

5. How do the Rebels handle adversity?

Aside from trailing Louisville for parts of two quarters, the Rebels haven’t spent much time playing from behind this season. Ole Miss never trailed against LSU. This is the first true road game for this team, and it’s one hell of an environment test at that. The Swamp is probably the second-toughest place to play in the SEC behind Death Valley. It’ll be a sold out crowd against a confident team with a first-year head coach that has injected some juice into the program and fanbase. Ole Miss caught a bit of a break with this game being a day game, but it’ll be a raucous atmosphere.

How do the Rebels handle it? Chambliss is the best quarterback in the country who seemingly never blinks no matter the score or situation. But it’ll be the first true road environment for this 2026 Ole Miss team, and I’m curious to see how the Rebels handle it, particularly if they get behind early on in the game.

It should be a great game. Thanks for reading. We will have more coverage on Sunday.

As fireworks popped above Vaught-Hemingway stadium on a steamy Saturday night, less than one minute after the final second melted off the clock to cement a program-validating victory for Ole Miss over Lane Kiffin and LSU, Pete Golding did an on-field interview with ESPN’s Laura Rutledge.

Golding talked about being proud of his team for fighting its collective ass off. He called Trinidad Chambliss a fierce competitor. He lauded the team’s focus in an emotional week supercharged by the ego-fueled circus that follows Kiffin everywhere he exists. Not once did he mention himself. The final question of this on-field exchange teed him up to do just that. Rutledge asked Golding how satisfying the win was for him personally, as well as the Ole Miss fanbase. Once again, Golding never mentioned himself.

“I think (Ole Miss Chancellor) Glenn Boyce and (Athletics Director) Keith Carter might have a beer tonight. I do know that,” Golding said.

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The unsolicited mention of Golding’s two bosses was no accident. He continued to espouse his appreciation for them in his postgame press conference. Golding is the antithesis of his predecessor, whose narcissistic personality disorder and social ineptitude deluded him into believing that he alone was responsible for Ole Miss’ success in this new era of college football. Kiffin’s constant fixation on what he doesn’t have and his perpetual desire to be somewhere else is only one small aspect of what makes him such a miserable and exhausting human to coexist with. But it’s perhaps the lone driving force behind his decision to quit on a team bound for the College Football Playoff to take another job opportunity. That, coupled with being a dictionary-worthy definition of a narcissist, prevented him from ever offering any semblance of appreciation of a place that revived his coaching career.

In contrast, Golding offered a refreshingly genuine appreciation of the place at which he currently exists, and the dozens of people who are responsible for the rise of the Ole Miss football program. Golding talked about the consistently high expectations of the football program since he arrived at Ole Miss prior to the 2023 season.

“It’s been in place ever since I got here and it’s not because of me. I remember when I got here, they had just lost five games (in 2022). I remember thinking ‘man, if we can average ten wins a year, they will build statues of us,’” Golding recalled. “After year two (2024), it’s like ‘man, if we don’t go to the natty, it’s a bust. It feels like Tuscaloosa again,’ and that’s the way it should be. Because that is what they have invested into this place, and when you have elite leadership at the top that is vertically-aligned, that’s what it should be. That is the expectation here now and we aren’t going to run from that. To do that, you have to have great coaches, you have to have great players and you have to have the funds to do it. We have the best leadership in the country and we have everything we need.”

He’s not wrong. And it’s what Lane Kiffin never understood and never seemingly wanted to try to understand. Kiffin is one hell of a football coach. He made the Ole Miss football program relevant again. He made Ole Miss football games fun to attend. He held the administration’s feet to the proverbial fire to become vertically-aligned. He was probably the single biggest driving force behind the ascent of this program. But that doesn’t mean he was the only driving force or the only reason for the ascension.

For whatever reason, college football media and fans are incredibly slow to shift their way of thinking. This sport, and really college athletics as a whole, changed drastically on July 1, 2021, when Name, Image and Likeness became permissible, and then unlimited transfers being allowed a couple of years later. In this new ecosystem that is slowly being (loosely) regulated, having competent leadership at the top is the single most important ingredient to the recipe of thriving in this era. It’s arguably more important than money, because there have been plenty of expensive rosters and well-funded programs in the last half decade that have wilted due to dysfunctional leadership. Auburn is the perfect example of this. The Tigers are utterly irrelevant in this modern era. This is partially do to their dysfunctional booster culture and partially due to thinking that hiring former Mississippi State AD John Cohen — a man who set Mississippi State back at least a half decade due to his stance that NIL was an unsustainable fad — was a good idea.

Let Auburn teach you this lesson: competent leadership matters greatly.

Ole Miss has that in Boyce and Carter. They have that in Walker Jones, Denson Hollis, and so many other competent, rational people who have played an invaluable role in elevating this football program — and really every major sport on campus. Ole Miss’ success since 2021 doesn’t happen without Lane Kiffin, but it also doesn’t happen without all the other aforementioned people. The latter group has seemingly always understood that. Kiffin did not, which is why he left Ole Miss for what is perceived as a better job. I am not going to sit here and try to tell you the Ole Miss job is as good or better than the LSU job, because that’s not true. The LSU gig is one of the best in the sport, but how wide is that gap in this modern era?

How aligned is LSU?

It is currently paying over $60 million in buyouts to former coaches, in addition to the absurd amount of money it paid for a man who has never won anything of significance in his entire career. It’s also currently refusing to pay the contractual penalties for two of its players, former Ole Miss players Devin Harper and Princewell Umanmielen, a practice that is commonplace in virtually every other similar scenario.

A buffoon of a governor, Jeff Landry, seems to be running the school. Last year, he apparently looked at LSU Athletics, football in particular, and decided it was a chance to score political points, and began chastising former AD Scott Woodward for such irresponsible spending, and publicly called for his firing while declaring that LSU will absolutely not be wasting money on ridiculous college football head coach contracts.

Once he succeeded in getting Woodward fired, Landry was almost solely responsible for giving Kiffin a seven-year, $91 million deal — because he is a hypocritical conman who never believed anything he said about irresponsible spending. He inserted a yes man as a school president in Wade Rousse, and promoted Verge Ausberry from interim AD to permanent AD. It’s worth mentioning that Ausberry actively covered up domestic violence allegations relating to an LSU football player. How he is still employed by any athletics department, much less being an empty suit and errand boy for the Governor, while having the title of “running” LSU’s athletics department, is completely absurd.

And we were all gaslit into believing all of this was totally normal because “it’s LSU” (I still have yet to receive an adequate explanation for what that actually means other than being totally unfounded bravado and arrogance).

There is no adult to parent Lane Kiffin, and he reports to a governor who once got so mad that LSU stopped bringing Mike the Tiger (like, the live one) onto the field, that he imported another tiger from Florida (named Omar Bradley) to be on the field prior to the LSU-Alabama game in 2024. So, in essence, Lane Kiffin, who possesses the social intellect of a 12-year-old child, and a politician whose entire career has been built off of loud political stunts, are running the largest university in the state of Louisiana. Does that sound like a remotely stable or sustainable situation to you? Does it sound vertically aligned?

What’s that? You answered no? presumably because you are a remotely rational human being? Well, I’ve got news for you. You are dumb and wrong. It’s not a big deal because it’s LSU and LSU is #JustDifferent

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The point is this: erratic and incompetent leaders fail in the modern era of college football. I would describe Kiffin as the former and everyone else involved in this unserious operation as the latter. But for as good of a football coach as Kiffin is, he is an unstable personality, and with no adult to corral the 51-year-old man who spent a year begging everyone to believe he was a changed person, I have serious questions about the viability of whatever the hell this ongoing political experiment at LSU actually is.

Ole Miss, for all of its perceived shortcomings, has good, competent and rational people running the football program, the athletics department and the school. Kiffin’s inability to realize and appreciate that due to him being completely socially inept is what fueled this nine-month saga that I am incredibly glad is over.

After the game, Kiffin’s press conference was pretty somber. For a brief moment, he actually flirted with the concepts of gratitude and introspection.

“There were a lot of emotions driving in on the bus,” Kiffin said. “It was a lot of gratitude for things that went well beyond football. The first time coming into this type of game without my dad, it was a lot. It’s not what I thought it would be… it was a lot of gratitude for this place and the people who changed my life in ways that are way bigger than football.”

That sounds nice, but it’s incredibly ironic coming from a man who told Ole Miss it wasn’t good enough for him. That he couldn’t win a championship here. That it was a second-tier brand that he, because he is the greatest gift to ever encounter this earth, had reached a nonexistent ceiling at Ole Miss. It’s also incredible to me that a man who talks about gratitude to people he treated remarkably poorly for the entirety of his tenure here, and talked about being appreciative of a place he tried to burn down on the way out, could actually say that with a straight face. This is the same man that (allegedly) texted Walker Jones the day of the Sugar Bowl saying that Ole Miss was going to “get the shit beat out of them.”

Earlier this month, CBS Sports reporter John Talty released an incredibly well-written, and, at least as it pertains to Kiffin, unflattering book about Kiffin titled “Lane Being Lane.” You should buy it and read it. It’s well worth your time. One of the excerpts Talty published in the process of releasing the book was about Lane being unable to reconcile the concept of the Ole Miss football program continuing to exist after he left.

Have any of you ever left a job and felt gratitude for it allowing you to be successful, grateful for the people you met while there and your time spent there? I am sure many of you have. It’s a normal part of life. How many of you tried to burn it down on the way out?

Does any of this behavior sound like a man grateful for anything at all? Of course not. It’s complete nonsense from a pathological liar who is addicted to attention.

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Ole Miss masterfully handled what was largely unfair pressure

As I wrote about last week, Ole Miss faced an immense amount of pressure entering this football game. I thought a lot of it was unfair. Ole Miss had to win this football game for reasons that had very little to do with the direct consequences relating to the 2026 season. It had to win to validate that Lane Kiffin was a core ingredient to its success but not the entire recipe.

Fairly or unfairly, if Lane Kiffin came back to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium nine months after abandoning a playoff team he didn’t believe was good enough to compete for a championship and won, the perception of Ole Miss football would’ve drastically changed in the eyes of the general public.

Perception isn’t always reality, but when it comes to college football, it might as well be. And the perception of losing this game would’ve been that Kiffin was the only reason little ol’ Ole Miss ever dared to be relevant, and that now that he’s gone, Ole Miss will return to being whatever people perceived them to be prior to Kiffin — which sounds like a bottom feeder in the Southeastern Conference.

All of this pressure was created by Kiffin, and the embarrassing way the small and petty man behaved the last nine months since his departure, and the never-ending, oxygen-sucking saga that was the build up to this football game.

Despite all of that, Ole Miss thrived. It was the better football team on Saturday night. The Rebels dominated both lines of scrimmage. They had the better quarterback and they had the better game plan. And, most importantly, Ole Miss didn’t allow the emotions of this football game to adversely affect its play.

“We did a great job of keeping the main thing the main thing this week,” Golding said.

And the people who delivered this win all seemingly have an appreciation for the place in which they reside, the place that gave them an opportunity to play football at a high level, and they all seemingly share a belief that they are a big-time program.

“I just got here last year. Ole Miss welcomed me in, and has shown me nothing but love and support,” Trinidad Chamblis said. “I feel like the whole nation disrespects Ole Miss. When they compare LSU to Ole Miss, they always say LSU has more money, better facilities, a nicer stadium, a bigger fanbase. There was more to it than just Kiffin being on the other side of the ball. I am so happy we could get this win for our fans and for the people who support Ole Miss.”

After the game ended on Saturday night, two different postgame press conferences commenced simultaneously a couple hundred yards apart. One featured a man fielding questions about himself, and his emotions in a game in which he spent nine months ensuring that he would be the predominant storyline. The postgame press conference was about him, because any other alternative isn’t possible with Lane Kiffin. He has an unquenchable thirst for attention that will never be satisfied no matter where he works.

In the other press conference, another man profusely thanked everyone involved in the process of delivering the win, the leadership he answers to, and the fans that support him. It was a stark contrast that served as a fitting final chapter of a saga that was almost solely orchestrated by the man who mostly answered questions about himself.

Ole Miss’ victory on Saturday was a program-validating win. It was a win for rationality and sanity. Hopefully, any rational person will now see LSU for the wildly unserious operation that it is.

It was also a validation of the idea that treating people well is important, that having good people in leadership positions is important, and that no single person is solely responsible for the success of a major college football program in this modern era. That statement usually rings true in any industry or any aspect of life, unless of course you ask Lane Kiffin.

“I couldn’t be happier for Glenn and Keith. I am really grateful for the opportunity they provided me, something they didn’t have to do,” Golding said. “I think it’s a full circle moment for a lot of people, that no player, no person, is bigger than anyone else. This place has been built the right way with some really great people. The trajectory of this place is upward and that is where it is going to continue to go.”

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Ole Miss is one day away from a game that, fairly or unfairly, will define its football program in the eyes of the general public for the foreseeable future.

This game has become so much more than a game, beginning with the moment that Lane Kiffin decided he wanted to abandon a team that was poised to compete for a national championship and become LSU’s next head coach. Lane Kiffin didn’t believe Ole Miss could beat Georgia in the CFP quarterfinals last season. It’s fitting that the Rebels did in fact beat Georgia without Kiffin, after failing to do so in the regular season — though I am not sure how that loss in Athens could be blamed on Kiffin, as that performance from the Ole Miss offense in that loss was a masterpiece from him and Charlie Weis Jr.

Kiffin didn’t believe he could win a national championship at Ole Miss. He believed the program had reached its ceiling. He believed Ole Miss’ NIL cash flow couldn’t sustain the level it was at and would drop to the middle tier of the SEC. He believed LSU offered a better opportunity to win championships — something Kiffin has never done at the power four level anywhere he has been, though he did win two Conference-USA titles while at Florida Atlantic — and he was willing to abandon a team bound for the playoff in order to better position himself to do something he’s never done in his career: win anything of significance.

Kiffin was wrong about Ole Miss’ ability to beat Georgia last season and compete for a national title. The Rebels beat the Bulldogs in New Orleans on New Year’s Day and were one defensive stop away from playing for a national championship.

Is Kiffin right about the long-term portion of the gamble he took to go to LSU? I guess only time will tell. It would be foolish to fail to acknowledge that LSU is one of the best jobs in college football. It’s probably a top-three job, and depending on what coaches value in a job, it could be considered the best job. But in this era of NIL and the transfer portal, where top programs can’t hoard blue-chip talent, how wide is the gap between what are considered elite-level jobs and what I could call very good jobs like an aligned Ole Miss in this modern era? I suppose time will tell on that too, but fairly or unfairly, the first chapter of that saga will be written on the field on Saturday night.

There is what I would describe as an unfair amount of pressure on Ole Miss in this game. I think that case could actually be made for both teams, but given the ringleader of this ego-fueled circus coaches for LSU, it’s harder to make a case for the Tigers. What I mean by unfair pressure for both teams is that, at the end of the day, this is one of nine conference games for each team. Either team could lose this game and still make the College Football Playoff. I think the road for both is ridiculously challenging with a loss. That much is obvious. But I think both teams have the talent to do so. This isn’t a “must-win” in that sense as far as the outlook for the 2026 season is concerned. But it is a must-win for Ole Miss in other senses, which is why I think there is more pressure on the Rebels to win this, and that most of that pressure is unfair.

Kiffin left because he didn’t think Ole Miss was good enough to be an elite program, and if he comes back to Oxford nine months later and wins, it will be a pretty devastating blow to the program’s perception, at least in the short term. If Ole Miss loses this game and then goes 7-1 in its final eight league games and makes the playoff, will people still view this hypothetical loss as catastrophic? No. But the odds of that happening aren’t great. Perception isn’t always reality, but the “not elite and not good enough” label will be a tough one for Ole Miss to shake if the Rebels lose this football game. It’s not fair to Pete Golding, and it isn’t fair to the Ole Miss administration, the fans or the football program, but life often isn’t fair and this is just the harsh reality of this situation. You could argue outside perception is irrelevant. That’s an easy message to accept as fans or players, I suppose, but in this lawless universe that is major college football in 2026, perception matters, a lot. And perception is often reality no matter how cruel or unfair it may seem.

Now, onto some storylines.

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Leavitt listed as doubtful on the Wednesday injury report

Lane Kiffin listed LSU starting quarterback Sam Leavitt as doubtful to play on Wednesday’s initial injury report. He’s since been upgraded to questionable. I imagine most people reading this are Ole Miss fans, and if you are, you are likely familiar with Kiffin’s antics when it comes to the injury report. The SEC began mandating injury reports for conference games in 2024. At the time, Kiffin publicly disagreed with the decision, and in typical Kiffin fashion, has routinely made a mockery of it ever since. At Ole Miss, he once listed 26 players on an injury report. He would often list random players that were unlikely to play as doubtful on Wednesday and then remove them from the report altogether by Friday. There’s technically penalties for behaving like this, but Lane Kiffin doesn’t believe rules apply to him, and again, in this lawless ecosystem, how enforceable is a fine for manipulating the injury report. Kiffin doesn’t and won’t care until his boss, Governor Jeff Landry, tells him he should care, which isn’t happening anytime soon.

There’s nothing wrong with Sam Leavitt and he is not going to miss this game. Don’t fall for it.

I suppose it’s worth noting that a Baton Rouge radio host reported that Leavitt missed Wednesday’s practice with an upper body injury.

If you’ve followed Moscona’s content over the last few months since this saga began, he would openly question what really happened on 9/11 and whether jet fuel can melt steel beams if Louisiana Governor Jeff Landy and Kiffin told him to do so. They give him pets and treats to be a mouthpiece. With that said, I figure there may be some merit to this, but I don’t believe Leavitt is in any danger of missing this football game.

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A lot has been made of the environment on Saturday

This type of nauseating storyline is why I will be very thankful when September 20 arrives and this football game is over. Anything involving Lane Kiffin is a melodramatic, oxygen-sucking circus that makes people behave and opine irrationally. During Monday’s press conference, Pete Golding urged Ole Miss fans to be peaceful, to make it a tough place to play but to be polite, civil and inviting. Around that same time, Kiffin, during his Monday press conference, played the victim and talked about “security apparently being an issue.” He also said his players have no pressure on them due to all of the focus and hate being centered on Kiffin. What a selfless act by a man who keeps such a low profile and shirks off any unnecessary attention. I have no idea why he has the reputation of being a narcissistic sociopath with the social intellect of a seventh-grader. Despite how much he hates attention, he’s willing to fall on the sword and shoulder it for players he is well-known to cultivate deep, personal relationships with. Good lord.

I don’t think the environment on Saturday will be anything beyond a totally raucous SEC Football game. Will there be a thick tension in the air in the stadium? Yes. Will it be weird? Yes. But the 2017 Egg Bowl also fit that definition — not that I am comparing the two. And maybe I am just being an eternal optimist, and I recognize it only takes one nut job to ruin it for everyone else, but I really think it’ll all end up being fine. I understand the angst people have about Saturday. I share some of the same reservations. I don’t think it’s unfounded, but I do think it is a little bit overblown. I think this will be a memorable sporting event for everyone involved because of the tension and environment, and hopefully an entertaining football game, but I just don’t see a riot breaking out or war between the fanbases ensuing.

It’s also rich that LSU is concerned about safety and the environment, considering that if you polled 100 SEC fans on what is the most dangerous and most unwelcoming place to attend a road game, 99 would say LSU and one would be lying, which is fine. It’s not supposed to be friendly. But there is a fine line between intimidating and devolving into a public safety threat. I think this game will be the former rather than the latter.

I am not one to preach to people or tell others how to live their lives, but I suppose it’s warranted here: if you are going to the game, don’t do anything stupid. Go be mad at Kiffin and scream and yell and curse and do whatever you want, but don’t do something you’ll regret. If a fan ends up on tv or in the news in from this game, it’s likely for a terrible reason that resulted in a night spent in jail. Don’t be the guy (or girl).

Umanmielen served with papers at LSU practice facility

Former Ole Miss defensive lineman and current LSU player Princewell Umanmielen was served with papers in the parking lot outside the LSU practice facility earlier this week. If you’ve missed this story, Ole Miss is suing Umanmielen and offensive lineman Devin Harper. Both transferred from Ole Miss to LSU after signing binding revenue sharing agreements with Ole Miss to return for the 2026 season. There was buyout language in these agreements that required both players to pay Ole Miss a sum of money if it broke the agreement.

This whole saga is one of the many subplots in this Ole Miss-Kiffin/LSU soap opera that’s been airing since last November. Neither LSU nor the two players paid the penalty for breaking these agreements, and so, Ole Miss made it known in July it was considering legal action against the two players.

I don’t think I have written about this because the newsletter was on hiatus for a bit before starting back up last month, but my stance is this: Ole Miss has no other choice than to enforce the language of these contracts. These two guys signed binding agreements that sculpted a deal between them and the university in which the university would directly pay them money for their services. This is an important distinction because it is drastically different from an agreement with a third-party collective NIL (think pay-for-play) deal. I am not an attorney and am not going to pretend to be one in this space, but the simple answer to why that is an important distinction is that collectives, in the grand scheme of things, are still in their infancy as financial operations for college sports programs. There really isn’t any sort of legal precedent for how binding, if at all, deals between collectives and players are. We’ve seen deals between collectives and players fall through because collectives didn’t actually have the money to pay the player — think Jaden Rashada at Florida. But to my knowledge, there hasn’t been any legal precedent in court about how binding those agreements actually are. Collectives didn’t exist five years ago and, in this new, lawless-frontier that is major college sports that is still in the process of being regulated they’ve essentially operated in grey area to compensate players — an area that, prior to revenue sharing being allowed, universities couldn’t operate in. In many ways, this is still the case as collectives are now tasked with compensating athletes in ways outside of revenue sharing that effectively circumvents the revenue sharing cap of $21.5 million.

An agreement between a player and a University is an entirely different animal because the university paying a player is not the same as some third-party entity.

Again, Ole Miss has no choice but to enforce this. You can’t set a precedent that a player can sign a deal with your university and then renege on that deal without consequence. Though LSU fans and media have clutched their pearls a bit about Ole Miss taking legal action against the players, as well as the timing of this week’s serving, I don’t think even the most staunch LSU supporter would disagree with the general premise that these guys signed contracts and should suffer the consequences for breaking the contract.

This, of course, could’ve all been avoided if the financial penalties for breaking this agreement were paid to Ole Miss. That burden technically falls on the players, but in other cases similar to this, the school usually pays the penalty for the players, similar to buyout clauses for coaches when a school hires a coach away from another school. Why isn’t LSU paying the buyout? Is it because its athletic department is broke, mostly due to irresponsible coaching hires that has the athletic department owing former coaches at least $54 million in buyout money? Is it because there is no adult at the wheel at LSU running the school or the athletics department, which has left Lane Kiffin unaccounted for and answering to a governor whose lone goal is to score political points while using Kiffin and LSU Football as a pawn in the process? The answer is likely a combination of both of those theories.

LSU is an unserious operation right now. Landry (the governor, not the daughter) and Kiffin are running LSU. The athletic director and president are neutered figureheads who serve zero purpose other than to tell Kiffin and Landry “yes sir” when such an answer is warranted. That thought should ultimately scare any reasonable LSU fan in the long-term, no matter how good of a football coach Kiffin is. Everywhere Kiffin goes ends in flames, and his only supervisor in this current job is a politician.

Portions of LSU media, seemingly lacking any inkling of self-awareness, have called Ole Miss petty for serving Umanmielen papers the week of the game, as if Keith Carter personally flew down there and handed them to Unanmielen while making an L-sign with his hand above his forehead, rather than a process server. Never mind that the players being sued have had 30 days to respond to the suit from August 14 when it was filed, and never mind that this is the latest example of players getting bad guidance from a coach who cares about no one other than himself — with Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavien Harris, who were used as pawns in an experiment to test the limit of the SEC’s power to enforce its own rules, being a previous example — it is supposedly Ole Miss’ fault that the athlete did not respond to the suit in the allotted time period, and the idea that a process server found said athlete at a place at which he spends the majority of his time is petty and small. It’s dripping with irony given who wears the head coach headset on Saturday for the Tigers.

The entire thing is ridiculous and it underscores how unserious and chaotic the current state of LSU is as an athletic department and a university. It’s a good thing they hired Kiffin, who is notably a calming presence in an environment of chaos.

Five things to watch: LSU

Now, to the game itself, which in some ways has become a bit of a side show in favor of all the off-the-field nonsense that Kiffin orchestrates wherever he exists. All of the aforementioned program and perception implications aside, this is a crucial conference opener for both teams and their chances of competing for an SEC Championship and a playoff berth. This game is a fascinating match up of weaknesses-on-weaknesses and strengths-on-strengths.

Here are five things I will be thinking about at kickoff tomorrow.

`1. Can the Ole Miss secondary fix itself

We’ve written about this extensively over the last two weeks. The Ole Miss secondary has been brutal in the first two games of the season. It’s not for a lack of talent. It’s been due to some pretty glaring coverage busts created by poor communication. That has to be fixed in this game, otherwise LSU is going to have a field day throwing the football against the Rebels.

Ole Miss suffered some injuries in the secondary during the offseason that caused some key pieces to miss preseason camp and much of the first two games. The good news is that Sharief Denson and Antonio Kite will be healthy and ready to go for this game. Denson is a Florida transfer who has yet to play for the Rebels. Kite is a returning starter at corner who exited the game against Louisville with an injury. Will the presence of these two solve all of Ole Miss’ issues in the secondary? I suppose we will find out.

Golding made an emphasis this offseason to go out and find talented defensive backs with positional versatility. I am still not just chalking this secondary up as the weakness on this defense. There is too much talent for this unit to be this bad. I think they perform better this week. If they don’t, Ole Miss stands no chance to win this game. Leavitt is not a consistent pocket passer and will throw the football to the other team if you allow him to. What Ole Miss cannot do is give him freebie touchdowns due to coverage busts.

2. the Ole Miss defensive front against the run

The Kiffin-Weis scheme is largely predicated on having a dynamic running game. Those two are masterful in the diversity in the ways their teams run the football. It’s the oil to the car’s engine. LSU’s offensive line struggled to get a consistent push against Louisiana Tech last week, but did rush 58 times for 309 yards against a Clemson team that struggled to beat Georgia Southern last week and is on the fast track to a 4-8 record.

This is what the game comes down to for me, along with the secondary: if Ole Miss can neutralize the LSU running game and put the Tigers in obvious passing situations that require Leavitt to beat Ole Miss with his arm, I don’t think Leavitt is capable of doing that and I think Ole Miss will win the game.

But if LSU has success rushing the football and it keeps the Rebels’ defense off balance and guessing, then this game will be a shootout or a blowout because the Tigers will certainly score a lot of points with an effective running game. You can take that guarantee to the bank.

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3. Ole Miss being disciplined in the pass rush

I think I have made it clear by now, but in case I haven’t: I am not a Leavitt believer. I think he is a good athlete whose mobility masks a lot of the deficiencies he has as a quarterback. At no point in his career, whether it be at Arizona State or two games with LSU, has he shown the ability to be a consistently good passer of the football in the pocket. In fact, he is below average. But where he hurts defenses is with his athletic ability, his ability to extend plays with his feet and make off-platform throws outside the pocket.

Ole Miss’ pass rush through two games has been a mixed bag. It has gotten consistent pressure on opposing quarterbacks, but its discipline when it comes to rushing lanes has been pretty inconsistent. It’s a big reason why Louisville quarterback Lincoln Keinholz — also a good athlete and inconsistent pocket passer — looked as good as he did in the second half in that game in Nashville. Ole Miss has to keep containment when it comes to pressuring Leavitt. If the Rebels can keep him in the pocket and force him to be a north-to-south thrower in the pocket, he alone is not good enough to beat Ole Miss. Now, doing that is easier said than done. But if the Rebels get pressure on him and don’t allow him to get loose on the perimeter, then they will be in good shape.

Leavitt is also not the strongest when it comes to dealing with road environments. Go back and watch Mississippi State’s win over Arizona State last year in Starkville. Leavitt looked genuinely rattled and, at times, looked like he wanted to be anywhere other than playing football inside Davis-Wade Stadium. If Ole Miss gets to him a couple times early, and if LSU has to play from behind, he is not a guy that is going to bring them back into a game by being a superhero.

4. Ole Miss’ ability to run the football

I was surprised that Kewan Lacy played three quarters last week coming off a bone bruise injury that forced him to miss most of the Louisville game. Ole Miss spent the offseason talking about lessening Lacy’s workload — the heaviest in the FBS a season ago. His 306 carries were the most in college football.

Last week didn’t do much to breed confidence in the Rebels’ ability to have a multi-pronged rushing attack with Makhi Frazier and J.T. Lindsey. Those two rushed the ball a combined three times. I am not going to delude myself into believing anything other than that Lacy will have the large majority of the carries this week in a game of this magnitude. But the running game not dropping off when he’s off the field will be important for the Rebels. Even with Lacy, the running game as a whole has been a mixed bag through two games. Ole Miss needs to rush the football effectively against LSU. Trinidad Chambliss is capable of being a superhero for the Rebels if and when he is needed, but there is a thin margin for error when it’s needed and an effective running game will make his life a lot easier. If Ole Miss runs the football well and stays ahead of the sticks, this offense will score more than enough points to win this game.

5. How Ole Miss handles the emotions of this game

The fastest way for this game to go awry for Ole Miss is to extend an LSU drive (or drives) due to a stupid penalty after a third down stop. Lane Kiffin sucks the oxygen out of everything he is involved with. Don’t give him and LSU more oxygen to suck up by letting emotions factor into the game in the form of penalties and blown assignments.

This is going to be a highly-emotional football game. The returning Ole Miss players in particular have a legitimate reason to have a gripe with Kiffin. He essentially told them they couldn’t win a national title and he’d rather not finish the season than pass on another job. There’s a productive way to harness that and there is also an unproductive way to do it. This is going to be a tough test for Ole Miss. The margins are too thin to aid LSU by letting the emotions of this game dictate performance. Ole Miss has the best quarterback and running back in this game. It has more than enough comparable talent at every other position to win this football game. If the Rebels play well, they will win. Allowing anything else to be a factor when it comes to pursuit of winning the game will be a determinant to their chances.

Thanks for reading. We will have more coverage on Sunday.

Even in a 41-9 victory over Charlotte, it was a bit of a slog for Ole Miss, which is understandable given what looms for the Rebels in less than a week as the circus that is LSU rolls into Oxford.

Let’s take a look at what we learned in the win, and what it means for next week and beyond for Ole Miss.

I haven’t formed a concrete opinion on this team yet

I’ll get to the more pressing issues in a minute, but I would first like to offer a general thought on my opinion of this team, which is really a lack of a concrete opinion at all. I think Ole Miss has the best quarterback in the country, a top three running back and has the ability to be one of the most dynamic offenses in college football. I think the Rebels have talent on the defensive side of the football, but have had some concerning mistakes that mostly stem from a lack of communication on the back end of the defense in the secondary. I don’t know what to make of this team after eight quarters of football, with the latter four coming against an inferior opponent in a game in which the Rebels came in banged up at several positions, particularly on the defensive side.

I think it is a bit foolish to form strong opinions about Ole Miss through two games. The defense has not looked great through two weeks, but portions of it have shown flashes of being good, and in some cases, dominant. Maybe I am foolish for thinking this, but I just refuse to believe, at this point, that this defense is going to be bad given the talent it has on the depth chart. There is too much talent in all three phases for this group to be an obvious Achilles heel for the Rebels. We could glance back in a month and I could end up looking like a complete idiot for refusing to believe the defense is bad, and I’ll be the first to admit I am wrong, but I just can’t get there yet.

I think the offense has been fine. I think there are questions at receiver and on the offensive line, but as long as the Rebels have Chambliss taking snaps, they’ll be in every game they play this season.

I bring this up because it seems as if many fans and other media people have had no problem forming concrete opinions about Ole Miss — that the Rebels are bad on defense, clunky on offense, are going to lose next week and are staring 8-4 or worse in the face. Maybe I am just too chronically online, which is one of the few downsides of being in the writing/podcasting/media space, and that’s not actually the consensus opinion. But it just seems like there is a strangely negative opinion of an Ole Miss team that beat a ranked opponent at a neutral site and then handled a terrible group of five team by 32 points.

I don’t quite know what I think of this team yet. I still like the pieces on the roster on both sides of the football, despite the team not playing great football collectively in the first eight quarters of the season. I think forming a strong opinion on the Rebels is premature. Next week is an entirely different story. I think we are going to learn a lot about Ole Miss on Saturday night against LSU and I think the next four quarters of football for this team will perhaps be the most telling four quarters of the 2026 season.

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The secondary was a problem, again.

For the second consecutive week, the Ole Miss secondary had a couple of obvious coverage busts that left receivers wide open down the field. It may not show in the base-level statistics, as Charlotte threw for just 179 yards in the game, but there were obvious problems in the secondary if you watched the game. And, once again, they stemmed from either communication issues — guys not knowing what to do or what coverage Ole Miss was in. That’s a problem that you hope would’ve been mostly fixed after week one, particularly against such a weak opponent, but those issues remained. The secondary is probably the single biggest reason there is angst going into next week’s match up with LSU.

“We’ve got to learn from other guys’ mistakes. Everyone doesn’t get a ‘my bad.’ When we see it on tape, we have to have the ability to correct it” Pete Golding said. “We are going to continue to rotate guys and find five guys on the back end that do shit right. Because, right now, we don’t have five.”

Golding seemed particularly frustrated with the secondary for the second consecutive week. Antonio Kite and Sharif Denson did not play in this game. Both guys are starters. Kite left the Louisville game early on with an injury and Denson has yet to play this season with an injury that, to my knowledge, has only been disclosed as a “soft tissue injury”. Missing two starters is a tough thing to overcome. But against an opponent like Charlotte, it should not matter. Continuing to have major busts against an opponent like that is alarming. Golding has mentioned that the secondary is reeling from injuries, and that not having those two guys out there has hurt the Rebels, but again, it shouldn’t have mattered on Saturday — not that Golding was making excuses, he’s said multiple times that it is not an excuse or an acceptable outcome.

I also wonder if having those two out there would actually solve the coverage-bust problems. I understand the concept of starters being better players than back-ups, but the entire secondary seems to be lost at times and communicating poorly. Is having two starters back is going to fix that? It’s not as if the secondary is giving up explosive plays because it lacks the talent to cover the receivers. It’s guys being in the wrong place and not knowing what to do.

It sounds like both Kite and Denson should be back next week, which will help, but I am not sure if their presence alone solves the secondary’s problem. I wrote about this last week, but Golding had a very interesting quote after the Louisville game in which he talked about injuries in the secondary during preseason camp, and that guys were rotating to different positions a lot, but that it didn’t keep Golding from calling the defense as if the secondary was at full strength.

“In these big games, you have to be very multiple to have a chance to win,” Golding said after the win over Louisville. “It’s very easy to go vanilla early on to let them have a crutch. I wasn’t going to do that because that is not who we are going to be, and that is not what it takes to win championships. There were some of those things from a coaching standpoint to clean up as far as who is in the game and have they shown us the ability to do that or not. But, to me, you aren’t going to know until you get into it… Getting a couple of guys banged up in the back end didn’t help. Sharif (Denson) didn’t play, who has started all of camp. (Antonio) Kite goes out of this game early. I should have done a better job in the second half, to be honest with you, to not put too much on them, which I probably did.”

That’s all well and good, and I understood what Golding was saying at the time, but after another week of coverage busts that clearly stems from confusion on what to do, what coverage their in, or properly communicating either or both of those things, at what point do you simplify it so the secondary feels comfortable that it knows what do on every play and feels confident enough to execute it?

Golding added a lot of talent from the transfer portal to bolster what was already a decent secondary in 2025 that returned enough guys to feel good about. Golding has talked a lot about positional versatility in the secondary. He seems to like the idea of guys being able to play at multiple spots. He was really high on Florida State transfer Edwin Joseph, who was recruited to Tallahassee as a corner, but spent most of his career there playing nickel corner (slot corner) and safety. Denson played nickel and corner at Florida, and versatility was seemingly one his best attributes as a portal recruit. Joenel Aguero played nickel and safety at Georgia. Golding seems to really like the idea of being able to move guys around. But if you don’t have five guys on the field that know what they’re doing at all times, what good is positional versatility?

I wonder if Ole Miss goes back to the proverbial drawing board this week when it comes to the secondary and simplifies things a bit in the name of trying to put your best five guys out there, and allowing them them play freely and confidently rather than thinking about what they’re supposed to do and what coverage they are in. Ole Miss is about to face a quarterback in LSU’s Sam Leavitt that will turn the football over — he threw three interceptions against a terrible Louisiana Tech team — but will absolutely torch the Rebels if he is given wide open throws via coverage busts.

It sounds like they already tried to simplify some things coming into this week, at least to some degree

“I thought, this week, with this game plan being very simple, I was hoping to see a bigger improvement,” Golding said. “That is something we are going to have to go to work on tonight.”

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Kewan Lacy played.. a lot

I opined last week that after Lacy left the Louisville game with a bone bruise, that he wouldn’t take the field again until the LSU game. I didn’t see what Ole Miss gained from playing Lacy against Charlotte. Lacy carried the football more times than any running back in college football in 2025 (306 carries). What good would come of putting more tread on the tires against a team Ole Miss was going to obliterate?

Well, I was wrong. Lacy played and took essentially all the meaningful carries for Ole Miss in this game. Lacy toted the football 13 times for 87 yards and scored two touchdowns. Makhi Frazier carried it twice and J.T. Lindsey registered one carry.

I can’t really say I understand this one. I guess if Lacy was healthy and wanted to play, then he was going to play. We often over-analyze the risk of injuries in sports to the point of forgetting that these are world-class athletes who are highly-competitive people, and that football players do in fact want to play football. I just figured Ole Miss would take a more conservative approach to Lacy in this snoozer of a game. It was even more surprising to see the two running backs behind him have a combined total of three carries. I am not second guessing John David Baker or the Ole Miss coaching staff, I just found this kind of strange.

“There’s a part of this that’s getting guys in the flow of the offense,” Golding said. “Early in the season, there are so many new guys, you have to find some continuity within the group. Our goal was to go out there, really get rolling, and have some decisions to make going into the second half. I thought we were going to be able to do that, but our defense went out on the first drive in the second half and allowed points, which made it a three-score game. That didn’t allow us to do some things earlier that we would’ve liked to.. We wanted to get No. 5 (Lacy) rolling and get him going to allow him to enter conference play healthy.”

As long as Lacy is healthy, I suppose this isn’t really a big deal. But of all the guys with minor injuries entering the game, Lacy was the one I least expected to play.

There’s also another component of this. While I don’t want to assume a ton based on the carries dispersal against Charlotte, the coaching staff said for most of the offseason that they anticipated Lacy’s workload to be lighter this year due to more depth in the running back room. And while 13 carries in this game isn’t some insane number for Lacy, this game was not at all indicative of newfound depth in the running back room. This is something worth monitoring over the next couple of weeks as the Rebels enter the SEC schedule.

Cunningham had his first real moment as a Rebel

I wrote about the receiver room a few times in the preseason and did so again last week. It’s a mostly unproven group behind Deuce Alexander, who was excellent in the season-opening win over Louisville. Auburn transfer Horatio Fields had a nice game against the Cardinals, but Traylon Ray was the only other Ole Miss receiver to record a catch (2) in that game. Ole Miss is going to need more than that a receiver behind Alexander. There are intriguing options, like Syracuse transfers Johntay Cook and Darrell Gill. Sophomore Caleb Cunningham is another option and is probably the most fascinating of all of them.

Cunningham was a highly-rated four-star recruit from Choctaw County High School. Ole Miss landing him over Alabama and Mississippi State was a major recruiting win. He was injured for most of his freshman season. Golding mentioned in preseason camp that Cunningham was healthy and was finally looking like the guy they thought he would be. Cunningham didn’t play in last week’s win in Nashville.

“Managing some of the soft tissue stuff, there were very specific roles and packages that didn’t come up,” Golding said when asked about Cunningham after the win over Louisville. “That’s definitely a focus moving forward. We have got to get Caleb more involved as he gets healthier because he is an explosive player.”

That answer made me wonder how healthy Cunningham actually is. I wrote last week that if Cunningham is healthy, he would certainly play in this game, which he did. Cunningham had six catches for 65 yards in his first extensive action in an Ole Miss uniform. Six catches against a hapless Charlotte team is obviously not enough to declare Cunningham on a path to stardom, but it can only be seen as a very positive sign for both Cunningham and Ole Miss.

“Caleb’s a big receiver out there,” Chambliss said. “I feel like he can do a lot for us this year. He’s a big target, and I love throwing to a big guy. He’s got great hands. I am excited to get him going.”

Cunningham’s emergence could be a season-changing development for the Rebels if he becomes top-end SEC receiver. Again, we are a long way from that. But if Cunningham hadn’t played much in this game, it would definitely be a cause for concern.

He had his first real moment in an Ole Miss uniform on Saturday. Are there more coming in the near future?

Some other notable injury news

Golding said Ole Miss came out of this game pretty clean on the injury front. Here are a few injury situations to monitor entering the week.

- Right tackle Tommy Kinsler IV didn’t play in this game. He exited the win over Louisville in the second half with what appeared to be a leg injury. The right tackle position was the biggest question mark and potential point of weakness for this offensive line entering the season. Kinsler, a Miami transfer, beat out LSU transfer Carius Curne for the starting job. It was interesting, however, that when Kinsler went down in Nashville, it was Connor Howes that replaced him and not Curne. From what I could tell, Curne did not play in Saturday’s win until late in the second half. I don’t think the staff trusts Curne to play with the consistency needed to be a tackle in the SEC.

It sounds like Kinsler will be back for the LSU game, which is great news for an Ole Miss offensive line that, like most offensive lines in this current era of college football, lacks depth. Howes has acquitted himself well in place of Kinsler, but if Kinsler remains out, the Rebels are one more offensive line injury away from being in a very precarious spot.

- As I mentioned earlier, Denson should play against LSU. The staff was hopeful to have him available for this game, but they ultimately decided to give him some sort of injection that will ensure he will for sure be ready for “Tuesday” (Ole Miss’ most demanding practice of a typical game week). It sounds like he will “for sure” be available against LSU, as Golding put it.

- Golding said they were “hopeful” that Kite will be available for LSU but that they likely won’t know “until the end of the week”. I have covered football long enough to know that this type of phrasing usually means the guy is a longshot to play in the game. I hope I am wrong. If Kite can’t go, that means you will see a lot more of true freshman Dorian Barney and sophomore Dante Core — neither of whom have played many college snaps.

- Linebacker Keaton Thomas played in the win. He suffered a foot injury against Louisville. Seeing him back on the field is certainly a good sign for an Ole Miss defense that desperately needs a good performance next week.

- Tight end Caleb Odom did not play in this game. He apparently suffered a minor injury in the win over Louisville that, in full transparency, I didn’t catch at the time. I had no clue he was injured. He had a nice game against the Cardinals and will be a big part of this offense. Golding talked about Odom’s absence in a way that insinuated that he would be back next week, which is a good sign.

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Deuce Knight played and looked pretty good

Golding said that his ideal scenario entering this game is that Ole Miss would play well enough in the first half to bench all of the starters at halftime and that Deuce Knight would start the second half for the Rebels. It sounds like the line of demarcation was a four-score game. Because Ole Miss led 27-0 at halftime, then allowed a field goal on Charlotte’s first offensive possession of the second half, followed by a three-and out from the Ole Miss offense. This sequence to begin the third quarter sounds like it threw a wrench in the Rebels’ plans to rest starters and play younger, less-experienced players.

Knight finally entered the game in the fourth quarter. He led an eight-play, 70-yard touchdown drive that culminated in Knight hurdling a Charlotte defender en route to a rushing touchdown. He flashed the tantalizing athleticism that made him a highly-touted four-star recruit out of high school. Knight is a Lucedale, MS, native who signed with Hugh Freeze and Auburn out of high school. Knight actually started a game last year for Auburn in what was a disastrous final season for Freeze on The Plains. He is a gifted athlete, at 6-foot-5, 225 lbs., and a tremendous thrower of the football.

If Ole Miss can keep him in the program after next year (I say that just as a qualifier as I would for any player on the team in this portal era, nothing more), he’s got a chance to be a star one day.

Horatio Fields, who played with Knight at Auburn last year, said in his postgame press conference that Knight told his teammates earlier this week that he was going to hurdle someone if he got in the game. So, apparently, he is a prophet in addition to being an incredible athlete.

It was a small sample size against a bad team, but I must admit, I was a bit in awe of Knight. I’d like to see more of him at some point this year.

Now, the circus arrives

The game that every college football fan in America has had circled for the last nine months is upon us. LSU returns to Oxford with a narcissistic sociopath of a head coach who possesses the social intellect of a 16-year-old child.

I am both glad this week is here and looking forward to September 20th when this game has passed, as it will mean we can cover the remaining nine games on Ole Miss’ schedule in a much more normal fashion, and that the oxygen-sucking melodrama that is the ‘Lane Kiffin returns’ storyline is in the rearview.

We’ll dive more into this game, why it feels like so much more than a game and all the other subplots later this week.

Golding and Chambliss were asked about it on Saturday night after the win over Charlotte. Both wisely downplayed it.

“Just super excited for SEC play, and to be able to do it at home for the crowd,” Golding said. “Tonight was awesome — good to get back in the Vaught and just feel that energy, felt like we picked up right where we left off from Tulane (last December). Good to get back in front of the fans, the students were awesome, good to have that juice. And it’s for real now. It’s SEC play. Every game counts for two. We wanted to come in, have a really good week, and focus on ourselves. We still have a lot to clean up, and then we’ll have to be at our best.”

Chambliss echoed the sentiment. Neither mentioned Kiffin by name.

“It’s going to be a crazy weekend in Oxford, but it’s just another game,” Chambliss said. “Everything going on outside of football really doesn’t matter to us. We are just worried about football.”

I think you’ll see a similar approach from Golding and Ole Miss throughout the week, which I think is wise. I am sure Kiffin will say something inflammatory on more than one occasion this week because of his unquenchable thirst for attention, but I don’t think you’ll see Ole Miss take the bait, at least not publicly.

We’ll have more coverage this week. As always, thanks for reading.

Ole Miss is a day away from a tune-up game against Charlotte before the ego-fueled circus that is Lane Kiffin and LSU arrive in Oxford in eight days.

This obviously feels a bit silly to come up with five thought-provoking things to watch on a week like this, in a game like this. Ole Miss is going to destroy Charlotte. The 49ers are terrible. They lost last week at home to Citadel as 21-point favorites, on the heels of a 1-11 season in 2025. Charlotte has only been a football program for 14 years. The 49ers actually have a pretty fascinating and mostly tumultuous history in that short span — from spending two years at the FCS level before quickly jumping to the FBS, to some very odd coaching hires, it’s an interesting story. I did a podcast with a Charlotte writer earlier this week chronicling all of that, if such a thing interests you.

Anyway, Ole Miss is going to annihilate Charlotte. The game is what it is. But even on weeks like this, there are some things you can reasonably look for to try to learn something about the Rebels.

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1. Is the defensive communication better

As we discussed earlier in the week, Ole Miss’ lack of communication was a killer in the win over Louisville. The Cardinals had nine plays of 20 or more yards, and essentially 75 percent of their offensive output came on these plays. The vast majority of these plays were enabled by some pretty alarming busts from the Ole Miss defense, particularly in the secondary. I suppose that’s both good and bad. It’s good in the sense that it never appeared to be a talent or depth issue, but bad in the sense that, well, good defenses shouldn’t have those types of communication and execution errors as frequently as Ole Miss did. I thought Pete Golding summed it up pretty well earlier this week.

“You get concerned as a coach when it is a contested play. They go up and they make the play over your guy and they do that consistently,” Golding said. “Their Jimmys are better than our Joes. That’s a bad feeling as a coach because it doesn’t matter what you call. That wasn’t what this was. Sometimes, you’ll do new things in a game to stop an opponent. That wasn’t what this was either. Some of these were day-one camp calls. It was a lack of execution and focus at some critical points. That’s something we have to work on.”

“That was the best part about what went wrong on that tape. It doesn’t matter if you are playing Louisville, Charlotte or Delta State. If you call ‘three cloud’ and they don’t roll to cloud, it’s a touchdown. I don’t give a shit who you play. That was the best thing about it, on both sides and really all three phases, if you do that, you aren’t going to like the outcome.”

I am not going to sit here and tell you that when the Ole Miss defense dominates an abysmal Charlotte offense that you should feel much better about the Rebels going into next week’s game against LSU. But I think some of what Golding says has merit. If there is a coverage bust or two in this game that leaves a Charlotte receiver running wide open, that’s a very bad sign. As Golding mentioned, some of those mistakes this defense made last week would’ve been touchdowns no matter the quality of the opponent. Does that part look any better and get cleaned up this week?

Ole Miss played a lot of guys in the secondary last week. Six players played at least 24 snaps. That’s in part due to Antonio Kite exiting early in the game with an injury and Sharief Denson not being healthy enough to play at all ( I have no clue what his injury is). Golding mentioned during preseason camp that guys were rotating around to different positions due to the secondary being banged up. Does Ole Miss shrink its rotation at all in this game — in the few snaps of consequence before the deficit balloons and clear-cut back-up players get in?

I am curious to see if the defense looks better from a communication standpoint, particularly on the back-end and whether or not as many players play meaningful snaps.

2. Is the tackling any better?

This one is probably less definitive than the first point because it is at least slightly more dependent on the quality of the opponent. Part of good or bad tackling hinges upon how fast and strong the opposing ball carrier is. The guys toting the football for Charlotte this week will not be a remotely similar test to who the Rebels see for the rest of this season. But with as poorly as Ole Miss tackled at times in last week’s win over Louisville, I do think this is somewhat relevant. The Rebels missed 19 tackles against Louisville.

“This week is about us. It is faceless, it is nameless,” Golding said. “If we don’t get that corrected, we are going to be playing some real guys coming up, and if we do those things, we aren’t going to like the result. It came at the right time. Now, the focus is back on us, the attention to detail, training our eyes, taking the correct angles… all the things that had nothing to do with anything else.”

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3. Do we see more of the same from the pass-catching corps?

Between wide receivers and tight ends, five players played 37 or more snaps. Two of those were tight ends in Caleb Odom and Luke Hasz. Deuce Alexander was the star of the game. I thought Horatio Fields looked promising and that Odom had a nice game. Three receivers and two tight ends caught passes in the win. Do we see more from the receivers in particular? Syracuse transfer Johntay Cook played but didn’t record a reception. He was targeted once in the end zone but couldn’t come up with the football on a contested play. Fellow Syracuse transfer Darrell Gill didn’t record a catch and neither did Caleb Cunningham.

Cunningham is the one I am most interested in. The sophomore was a talented signee out of high school and a major recruiting win for the Rebels. He was injured for much of his freshman year. At one point during preseason camp, Golding said that Cunningham was “healthy and finally looking like himself again.”

When asked earlier this week about Cunningham, Golding said this.

“Managing some of the soft tissue stuff, there were very specific roles and packages that didn’t come up,” Golding said. “That’s definitely a focus moving forward. We have got to get Caleb more involved as he gets healthier because he is an explosive player.”

I don’t really know what to make of that. I am now curious how healthy Cunningham actually is. If he is healthy, you will undoubtedly see him in this game against Charlotte.

I thought there was some good and some bad in the season opener from a pretty unproven pass-catching corps (other than Alexander). Ole Miss played a lot of two-tight end personnel. Odom was pretty good. Hasz wasn’t that productive in the passing game, but that’s not really a concern for me, at least not yet. Fields and Alexander looked good, but Ole Miss is going to need more than two sturdy options at receiver. Is that Cook? Is it Cunningham? Is it Ray? Is it Gill? I don’t know, but one or more of those four players are going to need to be a consistent factor in this offense. I’m not sure how much we will learn about that this week, but I am curious to see who plays and how much, particularly as it relates to Cunningham.

4. What does the injury situation look like?

We don’t get an official injury report prior to this game because it is not an SEC game. In the Lane Kiffin era, it didn’t really matter even when we got injury reports because Kiffin essentially used it as an opportunity to f**k with everyone. He did not take it seriously at all. I have no clue what Golding’s approach will be to injury reports.

The season-opener was not kind to Ole Miss from an injury standpoint. Two offensive linemen left the game, Delano Townsend and Tommy Kinsler IV. Kewan Lacy got injured early in the game. Alexander left after his second touchdown of the night. Kam Franklin got injured, as did Kite and linebacker Keaton Thomas.

The good news is that none of them sound like serious injuries.

“We are definitely banged up,” Golding said. “The good news is that all x-rays are negative, and MRIs, even Keaton Thomas’ foot. A lot of bumps and bruises.”

I’ll be curious to see who plays and who doesn’t in this game. My guess is that we do not see Lacy again until the LSU game. He was sidelined for most of the win over Louisville with what the TV broadcast classified as a bone bruise. I have no clue how serious or lingering something like that is. If any doctors are out there reading this, feel free to offer your feedback. I’m just some clown with a newsletter. But no matter how serious or not serious Lacy’s injury is, I don’t really know what Ole Miss gains from playing him in this game. You know exactly what Lacy is and what he is capable of doing. He shouldered the heaviest carries load of any running back in Division-I football last year. A week off is probably ultimately a good thing for him.

Defensively, however, with all the issues the Rebels had last week, I have to imagine that if any of the aforementioned injured defenders are healthy, the coaching staff would like for them to play a couple of series to see what this defense looks like in its second game, mostly to see how much of last week’s collection of gaffes can be cleaned up.

I am not sure what to make of the offensive line situation. Ole Miss can win this game easily no matter who it plays. But I figure they’ll want to have the starting unit get some reps in if it all possible. I am curious to see if Kinsler and Townsend play, and if they do, for how many snaps.

It’ll be a fun Saturday of constantly looking back-and-forth from the field to my cell phone as I look at the official roster because it takes me at least three games to memorize everyone’s number.

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5. What’s the crowd like?

This is admittedly a throw-away for my fifth and final item. Hey, cut me some slack, it’s Charlotte. But I am at least moderately interested in this. It’s going to be hot as hell on Saturday in Oxford. A night game should somewhat help mitigate the heat. But with what looms next week, a game that will be so much more than a football game, and a snoozer of an opponent this week, I will be curious to see what the crowd turnout looks like for this one.

It’s the first regular season home game of a new era of Ole Miss Football, even if it might not necessarily feel that way given the unique circumstances surrounding Golding getting the job and how that whole situation played out last winter. I have no doubts about the excitement and investment level of this fanbase. This is a veteran team with a lot of talent. This team has College Football Playoff aspirations. It faces a much more difficult path to get there than it did a season ago, but it has the talent to do it.

Regardless of how the crowd looks, I do not think Golding will go into his postgame press conference and chastise the fanbase for not showing up or staying long enough — mostly because Golding seems like a remotely normal adult who is not addicted to attention and proverbial pot stirring. But I am curious to see what the turnout is in a game that feels like the calm before the storm on September 19.

We’ll have more coverage on Sunday. Have a great weekend.

Ole Miss survived Louisville. That’s probably the most apt description for what unfolded in Nashville on Sunday night. The Rebels needed a walk-off field goal from Lucas Carneiro to seal the win, but nevertheless, Ole Miss is 1-0, beat a ranked team, and now moves closer to a daunting nine-game SEC schedule.

There was some good, some not so good and some outright bad in this season-opener. I can’t really think of a better way to dissect everything that happened than separating the good and bad aspects of the game, so let’s take a look at both in alternating order.

The good: Ole Miss won the football game

This is the type of white-hot analysis that leaves you constantly craving to read this newsletter. Yes, it’s good that Ole Miss won the game. As simple as that sounds, it’s important to note simply from this standpoint: Ole Miss’ expectations would’ve been all but dashed in the season’s first week had the Rebels lost this football game. I’ll spend some time later in this column talking about how, every single year, people overreact to week one games, and I might sound hypocritical saying that after leading with the idea that Ole Miss’ season was dead had it lost last night, but it’s the truth.

With the SEC going to a nine-game conference schedule, and the Rebels’ slate being incredibly more difficult than last season’s, there was no realistic path for this team to make the Playoff with a loss to Louisville. Had Ole Miss lost to the Cardinals, the Rebels would have essentially needed to go 10-1 in their final 11 games, which include road trips to Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida, with home games against Georgia and LSU — not to mention that Missouri and Mississippi State (both home games) will almost certainly be more competitive than each were a season ago.

Pete Golding and Ole Miss entered this season with expectations of making the College Football Playoff, or at the very least, being in the mix in November. Whether you think that’s fair or unfair, it’s reality. Ole Miss returns the best offensive backfield in the sport and spent money to build an expensive roster capable of competing for the SEC Championship and the National Championship. The entire offseason discussion about this team’s goals and expectations would’ve been rendered moot with a loss.

Ole Miss survived and breathed a collective exhale when Carniero’s field goal sailed through the uprights. The Rebels are 1-0 and onto the next challenge.

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The Bad: both sides of the ball played a dud half

Calling a football game a “tale of two halves” is among the most cliché and unoriginal ways a sportswriter can describe a game, but in this case, it’s pretty apt.

The Ole Miss offense was bad in the first half while the defense, for the most part, was pretty good. The Rebels’ offense in the second half was explosive while the defense was horrendous. It all somehow equated to a three-point win against a team that I think will end up being pretty good this year. I think Louisville will be firmly in the mix to win the ACC late into November. The Cardinals have a good defense, two of the best running backs in their league and a talented but unproven quarterback who played exactly like you’d expect a highly-rated recruit who has taken very few live snaps the last three seasons would play.

The Ole Miss offense looked very clunky in the first half of new offensive coordinator John David Baker’s power four debut. In fairness, it was pretty difficult to judge the competence of Baker’s system considering the fact that Ole Miss turned the football over on two of its first five possessions — and really, in terms of killing a drive, three of its first five, because Brycen Sanders’ errant snap on the second play of the game nuked the Rebels’ opening drive.

The defense picked up the offense’s slack in the first thirty minutes, at one point stopping Louisville on three straight drives to the tune of the Cardinals netting -26 yards on those three drives.

But as the offense found its footing, scoring touchdowns on four of its six second-half possessions, the defense faltered, mostly due to poor tackling and communications issues that primarily manifested in the secondary in the form of three or four pretty horrific coverage busts that gifted Louisville a couple of touchdowns.

The good news is that the issues on both sides of the football are fixable and aren’t due to a lack of talent or depth. The bad news is that if these issues are repeated again (beginning in two weeks against LSU), Ole Miss will get run off the field by pretty much every opponent on its schedule not named Charlotte or Citadel.

For Ole Miss, all of this can be rectified, but it can ill-afford to repeat a performance like this.

The Good: Chambliss looked like a bonafide superstar

Ole Miss won on Sunday evening because it had the best football player on the field. Trinidad Chambliss, after a shaky, turnover-riddled first half from the offense, was tremendous in the second half. Chambliss finished the game 21-36 for 336 yards with three touchdowns and one interception. He threw a pair of 62-yard touchdown passes to his only returning receiver in Deuce Alexander, the first of which was an elite-level throw in which he threw the football before Alexander was open, commonly referred to as “throwing a guy open”.

It was elite-level stuff.

Ole Miss led 38-24 with less than six minutes remaining in the game. It should never have had to muster a game-winning drive to put this one away, but it did. And there wasn’t anyone on earth more confident that the Rebels would win the game than Chambliss, who begrudgingly, has a knack for playing his best when the margins are the thinnest.

“I honestly hate games like this. I don’t know why we keep doing this,” Chambliss quipped after the game.

I am a little surprised Louisville didn’t elect to go for two when it scored a game-tying touchdown with 1:28 remaining to bring the score 38-37. I suppose it wouldn’t have mattered in hindsight given the drive Chambliss and the Ole Miss offense orchestrated in the final 88 seconds of the game. What I do know is that I wouldn’t have loved Ole Miss’ chances in overtime with the way that game was trending. In hot, muggy conditions, the Rebels had players dropping like flies on both sides of the football. Louisville certainly had all of the momentum, if you believe in such a thing, after it scored to tie the game. Chambliss led a drive to thwart that momentum and render all other hypotheticals moot because he was the best player on the field and is arguably the best quarterback in college football.

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The bad: two first half turnovers

Like I mentioned earlier, it was really three turnovers because the Sanders bad snap on the game’s second play killed Ole Miss’ first drive.

The best word I can come up with to describe how the offense looked in the first half is clunky. Everything looked difficult. Ole Miss wasn’t explosive at all in the running game, it wasn’t really able to push the football down the field through the air, and a Chambliss fumble and interception derailed any chance the Rebels had of finding cohesiveness in the first half.

John David Baker is going to face a lot of scrutiny this season, some fair and some unfair. It comes with the job he accepted — replacing two of the best offensive minds in the sport in Lane Kiffin and Charlie Weis’ Jr.

Baker of course worked under Kiffin for three seasons at Ole Miss and worked under Weis for two. It’s a core reason why Golding hired Baker — for continuity’s sake. That’s not to say Baker isn’t qualified. He left Ole Miss to become the offensive coordinator at East Carolina in 2024. The Pirates were 130th out of 133 FBS teams in total offense before Baker took over. They were 24th in 2024 and 19th in 2025. He produced incredible results in the two seasons he was in charge at East Carolina. We heard for most of the offseason that this offense was “80 percent the same with some different terminology.” It didn’t really look close to the same for the first two quarters of this game — and I am not saying that just because it looked bad.

If you’ve read this newsletter long enough, you know that I happily admit I am a fairly untrained eye when it comes to the schematics of football. I am not going to bullshit any of you out there by trying to explain things I don’t understand in terms of play-calling and offensive scheme. You can go read that type of (mostly) uninformed slop a million other places.

Instead, I’ll give you my real-time thoughts watching this game: I thought the Ole Miss offense looked conservative and disjointed in the first half. The Rebels barely threw the football down the field and kind of tried to force-feed Kewan Lacy the football with pretty average results. I figure some of that is probably due to the way the Louisville defense was playing the Rebels. What I mean by that is that Louisville was not aggressive at all defensively in this game. The Cardinals had one tackle for loss in the game. It seemed like they wanted to protect against long, explosive plays and make Ole Miss put together double-digit play drives by keeping everything in front of them. I think that’s why you saw Chambliss opting for check down throws at or near the line of scrimmage a lot throughout the first half.

Louisville invited the Ole Miss offense to either get impatient or shoot itself in the foot first half, and the Rebels happily obliged with the latter.

The good: 340 second-half yards with four touchdowns

I covered some of this earlier, but the offense was much better in the second half, which is particularly impressive considering it played the second half without Lacy, who was sidelined with a bone bruise (more on that in a bit).

MPW Postgame show participant Jeffrey Wright posed an interesting theory on Sunday’s postgame show. He essentially wondered if Lacy exiting the game with an injury forced Ole Miss to lean on Chambliss and push the football down the field through the air. It’s an interesting thought considering 261 of Chambliss’ 336 yards through the air came in the second half. As the Rebels offense became “more vertical,” for the lack of a better phrase, in the second half, the offense was more explosive. Louisville was seemingly content with playing its base level Cover 3 pass defense against Ole Miss for most of the night and the Rebels burned them in the second half.

Ole Miss scored touchdowns on four of six drives in the second half. And really four of five considering the last drive intentionally ended with a field goal. That dog will hunt. The first half performance won’t cut it.

It’s game one with a lot of new on the offensive side of the ball. We’ll see how it progresses.

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The bad: second half defense

Ole Miss allowed 32 second-half points to a Louisville offense that looked pretty stagnant in the game’s first two quarters.

Louisville had nine plays of 25 yards or more. The Rebels allowed 386 yards to the Cardinals in the second half. It was a perplexing and frustrating performance for the Ole Miss defense, mainly because none of the issues seemed to stem from a lack of talent or manpower. Maybe I am wrong, but there wasn’t a moment during that game that I thought to myself “Oh, Ole Miss just can’t cover these receivers Louisville has. They’re too small and too slow.”

or

“Ole Miss can’t really do much about Cardinals running back Isaac Brown. The Rebels just don’t have the horses to put up a formidable run defense.”

The Rebels’ issues against the Cardinals were almost entirely due to terrible communication that led to at least three and (I think four) horrific coverage busts that gifted Louisville three touchdowns. Thankfully, because Louisville quarterback Lincoln Keinholz isn’t a consistently accurate thrower of the football, the most glaring bust didn’t lead to any points — the one in the second quarter when Ole Miss, let a slot receiver run free down the field for what would’ve been a touchdown that would’ve but Louisville up 10-3 had Keinholz not overthrown the receive who did not have a defender in the same zip code as him — I can only wonder how the game turns out if Louisville scores on that play.

There are two ways to look at the issues the Ole Miss defense faced in this game, which I think are two main categories: tackling and coverage busts.

The positive outlook is that coverage busts are pretty easily fixable through practice and film study. The tackling portion can be fixable, too. It was game one. These guys don’t do much tackling in preseason camp due to fear of injury. Sloppy tackling in a season opener is hardly an issue unique to this Ole Miss defense. Again, it’s not a talent problem, which is good.

The pessimistic lens to view it through is that if this is repeated, Ole Miss will be in a world of hurt. The margins are too thin in the Southeastern Conference to be a bad tackling team. Missed communication in coverage could mean guys are being asked to do too much and don’t understand the scheme. Golding had a really interesting quote about this in his postgame press conference.

“In these big games, you have to be very multiple to have a chance to win,” Golding said. “It’s very easy to go vanilla early on to let them have a crutch. I wasn’t going to do that because that is not who we are going to be, and that is not what it takes to win championships. There were some of those things from a coaching standpoint to clean up as far as who is in the game and have they shown us the ability to do that or not. But, to me, you aren’t going to know until you get into it… Getting a couple of guys banged up in the back end didn’t help. Sharief (Denson) didn’t play, who has started all of camp. (Antonio) Kite goes out of this game early. I should have done a better job in the second half, to be honest with you, to not put too much on them, which I probably did.”

Golding mentioned a few times during preseason camp that the secondary wasn’t completely healthy and that guys were having to rotate around — which I figure, in his mind, ideally, would create some positional versatility in the secondary during the season once everyone got healthy — and that he didn’t limit the proverbial play-calling menu on Sunday just because the Rebels were banged up and had guys playing positions without much experience.

I’m not saying he’s wrong in this thinking, and the Ole Miss defense, particularly the secondary, may end up better for it in the end. But what I do know is that the egregious coverage busts Ole Miss had in this game simply cannot be repeated in two weeks when LSU rolls into town, and if they are, the Rebels will get run off the field.

The good: the defensive line is fierce and deep

Before this game became a track meet and the Ole Miss defense let Louisville receivers run wild, I thought there were points in this game in which the Rebels defensive line really imposed its will against an unproven Louisville offensive line that boasted four new starters via the transfer portal (with the left tackle being the lone exception). Louisville had three consecutive first half drives that netted a combined -26 yards. Ole Miss had eight tackles for loss in this game and sacked a mobile and shifty Keinholz three times. Kam Franklin’s fourth-quarter sack on Keinholz deep in Cardinals territory that gave Ole Miss the football back up seven points should’ve been the beginning of the end of this game (even though it wasn’t). I thought this defensive line looked pretty dominant at times.

Golding mentioned throughout the offseason that he didn’t think Ole Miss had enough defensive line depth last season and that guys played too many snaps. Ole Miss rotated a lot of guys on the defensive line in this game and I think I feel confident in saying this staff has rectified the lack of depth issue. Almost all of them looked pretty good too. This staff took a flier on Jaheim Oatis — a highly-rated (Columbia) Mississippi kid out of high school who signed with Alabama (Golding beat Ole Miss for his services in his last year as defensive coordinator at Alabama) who flamed out in Tuscaloosa and at Colorado due to not being in shape — played a lot more than I thought he would and played well in this game. He’s got all the talent in the world, he just needs to harness it and remain in shape.

Anyway, point being, I thought this defensive line looked like the real deal for parts of this game. There was some pass rush and gap-integrity stuff with Keinholz that allowed him to scramble and extend plays with his feet throughout the game that was less than ideal, and there were a few possessions in which Louisville had some success running the football that was somewhat concerning. But overall, I liked what I saw from the defensive line and the depth it boasts.

The bad: offensive line injuries and depth

I thought the offensive line’s collective performance in this game was fine. Ole Miss wasn’t really explosive in the running game. But again, Lacy was out for essentially half the game, so I am not sure how to fairly grade that aspect of things. The pass protection was okay for the most part, I guess, but Chambliss also bails out this offensive line with how ridiculously quick he is exiting the pocket and turning a bad situation into a productive play. His first step to exit the pocket and either run or roll out to make an off-platform throw is truly remarkable.

My main concern with the offensive line is the injuries in the game. Right tackle Tommy Kinsler IV left the game in the second half — a position that was already a major question mark for this unit and this offense entering the season — and was replaced by Connor Howes. What is interesting to me about that is that the battle we heard about throughout preseason camp was between Kinsler (Miami transfer) and Carius Curne (LSU transfer) for the right tackle job. The consensus was that the staff likes Kinsler but didn’t think he was totally in shape (a sentiment echoed on the broadcast during the game: suboptimal) and also loved Curne’s ability but doubted his maturity. Curne was arrested in the offseason for possession of drug paraphernalia and evading arrest. Charges were later dropped.

Kinsler going down with an injury and the staff electing to play Howes over Curne is both telling and potentially concerning. The former is pretty obvious in how it is telling. This staff doesn’t trust Curne. It’s potentially concerning in the sense that Curne was obviously viewed as the most talented or second most talented guy to be the Rebels’ right tackle, but can’t be trusted to play. On the bright side, Howes apparently did pretty well in the 35 snaps he saw.

Left guard Delano Townsend was also injured in this game. It doesn’t sound like it is a severe injury, but this offensive line cannot withstand a rash of injuries. They were a thin unit a year ago that stayed pretty much entirely healthy, which is a significant reason why Ole Miss made and advanced in the College Football Playoff. This unit getting banged up will be a real problem for the Rebels. This is not an Ole Miss-centric issue, either. In this transfer-portal era, pretty much no one has good offensive line depth, which makes the health of this position group paramount for every team’s postseason hopes, Ole Miss included.

The good: some intriguing pass-catcher emerged

Once we got past the offensive slog that was the first half, I thought Ole Miss’ pass-catching corps fared pretty well. Caleb Odom had a nice game. He is a walking mismatch and a really interesting weapon for Ole Miss given his freakish body frame.

I also thought Auburn transfer Horatio Fields looked pretty good, too. He caught five balls for 47 yards. People at Auburn loved Fields. He was just mired in the dysfunction that was Hugh Freeze’s offense in the modern era.

Deuce Alexander certainly showed he can be a No. 1 option too. His breakaway speed is remarkable. After the game, Golding compared him to former Alabama receiver and current Detroit Lion Jameson Williams. That’s a pretty apt comparison and also high-praise from Golding.

The bad: injuries as a whole

One of the many things that made the whole vibe of this game weird was Ole Miss having guys injured, and not just guys, like key players, being helped off the field.

It was a ridiculously hot night in Nashville. Because the Tennessee Titans are an utterly incompetent franchise, they decided to replace their natural grass field with turf a couple of years ago — which only compounded the temperature issue at kickoff.

It seemed like some injuries were cramps, like Alexander leaving the game. Golding said Echoles got “stepped on” and that it wasn’t serious. I don’t know what happened to Townsend or Kinsler but Golding didn’t seem to think any of the injuries the Rebels suffered were that serious, which is good.

And of course Lacy left with a bone bruise. I imagine we won’t see him again until the LSU game in 12 days.

Having this many guys leave the game isn’t ideal, but none of it sounds catastrophic.

Final thoughts

That was as many good-and-bad comparisons as I could muster for a game that provided a lot of content.

Ole Miss is a good football team that beat a ranked team at a neutral site despite not playing very well. Were there some alarming things in this game? Yes, of course. Was it a perfect audition for Golding in the first game in which he’s coaching his own team and is fully in control of the program? No, not hardly.

For those of you chronically online, is the reaction to Ole Miss’ performance a bit over the top in terms of doubt and criticism? Yes, of course it is. And it’s obviously tied to how good LSU looked on Saturday night. It would be naive not to mention and admit that. But that’s the neighborhood Ole Miss lives in as it tries to remain a big-time college football program and prove it is and will remain a consistent contender in life after Lane Kiffin. This is the sandbox you play in now. It comes with increased scrutiny. None of it ultimately matters a ton. Weird things happen in week one of the college football season, and we all overreact every year when they happen.

Ole Miss has issues it needs to clean up, but everything wrong with the Rebels is fixable. They now have two weeks to fix it before the circus from Baton Rouge comes to town.

Ole Miss is one day away from kicking off what is sure to be a fascinating 2026 season. Here are five things I’ll be thinking about when the Rebels and Louisville kickoff on Sunday evening.

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1. Ole Miss running backs vs Louisville’s font seven

Last year, Kewan Lacy emerged as one of the best running backs in college football, and it wasn’t for a lack of opportunity. Lacy carried the football 306 times last season — the most of any running back in college football. I’ve mentioned this before and will re-emphasize now: it’s pretty remarkable Lacy did not miss a game last season with that workload. He never really got visibly injured at all until Ole Miss’ final game of the season against Miami.

Both Pete Golding and John David Baker have alluded to the fact that they don’t want Lacy shouldering that type of workload again this season. Ole Miss landed what I think is a very underrated addition in Michigan State transfer running back Makhi Frazier. They also added UTEP transfer Joshua Dye and return sophomore Shekai Mills-Knight. We haven’t heard much about the latter two in preseason camp, so I figure Lacy and Frazier will see the bulk of the carries. How does that carries split look in contrast to last season when it was essentially a one-man show in Lacy?

Louisville boasts a pretty fierce defensive front headlined by edge rusher Clev Lubin and linebacker T.J. Capers. The weak point of the Cardinals front is likely on the interior of the defensive line. How much success does Ole Miss have running the football in this game and how do they do it? I am far from an Xs and Os savant, but one thing I read and heard repeatedly during the Kiffin-Weis era is that the Ole Miss running game was great in large part because of its diversity — the variety of different ways the Rebels ran the football made the rushing attack a tough one to stop. Will the same thing prove to be true in Baker’s system?

I am very curious to see how much success Ole Miss has running the ball and how the Rebels divvy up the carries.

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2. Ole Miss’ defensive line vs a retooled Louisville offensive line

Louisville rebuilt its offensive line almost entirely through the portal. Four of its five starters, with the exception of center, are likely to be offseason transfer portal additions. Over the last few years, we’ve seen with Ole Miss how difficult (and expensive) it can be to rebuild an offensive through the portal. Given what Ole Miss returns and what it added, this should be the single biggest advantage the Rebels have in this game. There is a real opportunity for Ole Miss to change and control the game through its defensive line dominating Louisville’s offensive line. I am not saying that’s a guarantee to happen, but on paper, it is a big advantage for Ole Miss.

Golding has mentioned a few times throughout the offseason that the Rebels were not deep enough on the defensive line last season and that guys played too many snaps. He feels like they adequately fixed this lack-of-depth issue through portal additions and what returns up front.

I think this Ole Miss defense is going to be very good with a chance to be elite. That all starts with the defensive line. Can the Rebels get after new Louisville quarterback Lincoln Keinholz? The Ohio State transfer is much more of a dual threat quarterback than any of Jeff Brohm’s previous three quarterbacks he’s had in his three seasons at Louisville. Keinholz is also the least experienced of the three because he hasn’t hardly played in his three years in college. Can Ole Miss make him uncomfortable and force him into mistakes?

I think this match up is the single biggest advantage the Rebels have in this game.

3. Stopping Isaac Brown

This one also ties back to the defensive line, but also the defense as a whole. Isaac Brown is one of the most underrated running backs in the country. He averaged nearly nine yards per carry last season. He rushed for 884 yards on 104 carries in nine games. A hamstring injury sidelined him for three games.

Brown is a speedy, shifty running back with a smaller frame. He’s got home run speed.

“This kid is special. He is explosive on tape. Super impressed,” Golding said earlier this week.

The Louisville offense will likely run through Brown as he is the best player Louisville has on offense. The Cardinals also have an effective second running back in Keyjuan Brown, but Isaac Brown is the undisputed star of the offense. If Ole Miss can keep him in check, that puts a great deal of pressure on an inexperienced quarterback throwing to a bunch of new receivers behind a shaky and unproven offensive line.

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4. Chambliss vs Louisville’s Secondary

Louisville boasted the best pass defense in the ACC a season ago and returns a talented and veteran secondary this season headlined by Tayon Holloway, the Cardinals’ best and most established corner.

Trinidad Chambliss didn’t make many mistakes last season. He only three three interceptions (though that number could’ve likely doubled in the Miami game alone if the Hurricanes defenders had better hands). Chambliss did a fine job of protecting the football last season. But he’s now throwing to a mostly new pass-catching corps and faces a pretty tough test out of the gate in the Cardinals secondary. Chambliss threw to a lot of wide open receivers last season because of the brilliance of the Weis/Kiffin scheme. That could very well end up being the case in Baker’s scheme, too. But we haven’t seen it yet.

Ole Miss is a touchdown favorite in this game, the quickest way for this thing to go awry for the Rebels is to turn the football over a couple of times early in the game. I know that’s not really earth-shattering analysis, but it’s worth pointing out given that the strength of Louisville’s defense is its secondary and there is a lot of newness on the Ole Miss offense as it pertains to the passing game. I am very curious to see how easily (or not easily) Ole Miss is able to throw the football in game one of the John David Baker era.

5. Golding vs Brohm

This is a fascinating coaching match up given the contrast in expertise and where both men are at in their respective careers. Brohm is an offensive-minded head coach who is one of the best coaches in the country. At Purdue, he went 36-34 and 26-25 in Big Ten play. Since Brohm left, Purdue has gone 7-30 overall, 3-24 in Big Ten play and is currently riding an 18-game conference losing streak. Brohm has won nine or more games in each of the three season’s he’s been at Louisville. The man can coach.

He’s also really good as an underdog. Brohm has won six of his last nine games outright when his team is a touchdown underdog or more. Ole Miss is right around a touchdown favorite over the Cardinals on Sunday.

Golding, by contrast, is of course a defensive minded head coach with a career record of 2-1 as a head coach. Who wins the metaphorical chess match of Brohm’s offense versus Golding’s defense.

Golding’s been handed the keys to a program that’s clicking on all cylinders and returns the best offensive backfield in the sport. This is a massive spot for Golding and Ole Miss in the sense that the Rebels have expectations of making the College Football Playoff. There is almost no path to getting there if Ole Miss loses to Louisville on Sunday night. That might not be a fun sentence for Ole Miss fans to read, but it is simply reality.

That is not really the case for Louisville. Yes, a win over Ole Miss would go a long way to helping the Cardinals’ chances of earning an at-large berth to the playoff, but the ACC is not one of the stronger power four leagues and is not likely to get more than two teams in the playoff, if it even gets that. Louisville’s most clear-cut and realistic path to making the playoff is to win the ACC and get an automatic berth. Now, a win over Ole Miss would certainly help if, say, Louisville went 10-2, didn’t win the ACC, but boasted a non-conference win over the Rebels (assuming Ole Miss still had a good season after this hypothetical loss), but I have to figure that would still be an outside shot for Louisville given how the ACC is perceived as a conference.

Anyway, that was a hypothetical that none of you likely wanted to read or entertain. My point is this: this game is much more crucial for Ole Miss than it is Louisville, and the matchup of head coaches is fascinating to me for the reasons I outlined above.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy the game. We’ll have more coverage on Monday. I am sure there will be plenty to talk about.

Ole Miss is two days away from its 2026 season-opener against Louisville in Nashville. Let’s take a look at the Cardinals.

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Jeff Brohm is great as an underdog

Jeff Brohm is one of the more underrated coaches in College Football. A former quarterback at Louisville in the early 1990s, Brohm got his first college head coaching job at Western Kentucky in 2014, where he spent three seasons, went 30-10 (19-5) and got hired by Purdue. Brohm made the Boilermakers as relevant as they’ve been as a program in over 20 years in the six seasons he was there. At Purdue, Brohm went 36-34 and 26-25 in Big Ten play. Since Brohm left, Purdue has gone 7-30 overall, 3-24 in Big Ten play and is currently riding an 18-game conference losing streak.

Brohm can coach, and is masterful at developing quarterbacks. He’s also really good as an underdog. He has won six of his last nine games outright when his team is a touchdown underdog or more. Ole Miss is right around a touchdown favorite over the Cardinals on Sunday. This will be a tough test for the Rebels. Louisville is a good team that will be a legitimate threat to win the ACC this year. It has a talented but unproven quarterback, a tough and aggressive defense that returns a lot from one of the better defensive units in the ACC a year ago and has one of the best running backs in the country.

“This is no different than an SEC game when you watch them on tape,” Pete Golding said earlier this week. I don’t think he was offering up coach-speak in that instance. I think he was offering his honest opinion.

The next step for Louisville as a program under Brohm is winning the ACC. In Brohm’s first year, Louisville started the season 10-1 and was not totally out of the playoff conversation entering the season’s final week (remember, this was the last year of the four-team playoff), only to lose at home to an unranked Kentucky team to close the season, lose the ACC Championship to Florida State who played a back-up quarterback and then lost its bowl game to USC. The last two years, a couple of mid-season slides have cost Louisville dearly, but this is a program that beat Miami last year, at Miami on a Friday night.

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Isaac Brown is a shifty, dynamic running back

Louisville returns running back Isaac Brown, who ran for 884 yards on 101 carries in nine games last season. He missed three games with a hamstring issue. At 5-foot-9, 190 lbs., Brown has home-run speed and averaged nearly nine yards per carry last season despite his smaller frame.

He rushed for 1,173 yards as a freshman in 2024 at 7.1 yards per carry and won ACC Rookie of the Year and Offensive Rookie of the Year honors. He’s the real deal, and Keyjuan Brown is an experienced complementary back behind him who ran for 700 yards on 96 carries at 7.4 for yards per carry.

The Louisville running game will be a tall test for this Ole Miss defense, particularly when you factor in the mobility of transfer starting quarterback Lincoln Keinholz. More on him in a second.

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Keinholz the next transfer QB project for Brohm

Brohm has been at Louisville for three seasons. He’s had three transfer quarterbacks. In year one, Jack Plummer followed him from Purdue, threw for over 3,000 yards and led Louisville to a 10-win season and an ACC Championship game appearance. In year two, Tyler Shough transferred from Texas Tech, led Louisville to a nine-win season, finished 14th in the FBS in total yards and became a second-round pick. Shough is currently the starting quarterback for the New Orleans Saints. Last year, Miller Moss transferred from USC and continued the steady tradition of Louisville being at least a nine-win team.

Now, his fourth transfer quarterback in as many years is Lincoln Keinholz. Keinholz was a highly-touted four-star recruit out of high school who went to Ohio State. Keinholz spent three seasons at Ohio State and barely played. The most significant playing time he got was at the end of the 2023 season in the Cotton Bowl against Missouri when starting quarterback Devin Brown — who was really the back-up to Kyle McCord, who the program ran off after a regular-season ending loss to Michigan — got knocked out of the game with an injury. Keinholz went 6-17 for 86 yards in a loss to the Tigers.

I have no clue what to make of Keinholz because he’s hardly played any football. What makes him different from any of the previous quarterbacks Brohm has had at Louisville is that he is a true dual-threat quarterback that adds a running element to their offense. I have no clue how much he will run or if that will factor into Louisville’s offense at all, but he is definitely a different type of quarterback than Brohm has had the last three seasons.

Louisville retooled its offensive line in the portal this offseason, which is hardly an uncommon practice in this modern era, but four of the five Cardinals projected starters (other than center) are transfers. Louisville feels pretty good about the interior of its offensive line, but, much like Ole Miss, the tackle spots are question marks. This will be a fascinating component of this game as a stout Ole Miss defensive line goes up against an unproven exterior of the Louisville offensive line with a running quarterback in the backfield.

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Louisville has a tough, aggressive defense

Louisville has two new minds heading up its defense in Co-defensive coordinators Steve Ellis and Mark Ivey, this comes after last year’s (lead) co-defensive coordinator Ron English took a year off from coaching and Brohm moved on from other co-defensive coordinator (and defensive line coach) Mark Hagen.

The shake-up wasn’t due to performance as Louisville finished 16th nationally in defense and boasted the best pass defense in the ACC. Last year’s philosophy seemed to be: when in doubt, be aggressive, as the Cardinals’ pass rush terrorized opposing quarterbacks.

Edge rusher Clev Lubin returns. He registered 61 tackles, 13.5 tackles for loss, and 8.5 sacks last season, along with 64 quarterback pressures— which was good for 6th most in the FBS.

This defense lost seven starters off of last year’s team, but returns at least one key piece in each level of the defense, and did well with what it added in the portal, particularly in the secondary, to replenish the departures. If there is one weakness in this defense, it is likely the interior of the defensive line. I am curious to see if Ole Miss can exploit this. But this will be a tough test for the Ole Miss offense, particularly for the Rebels’ unproven receiving corps against what should be a pretty good secondary for the Cardinals.

I’ll have more tomorrow on some key matchups in the game, but first I wanted to give you a glimpse at what the Rebels are up against in Louisville.

Ole Miss kicks off its 2026 season in seven days in Nashville where it will take on the 25th-ranked Louisville Cardinals.

This will be one of the more fascinating seasons in program history. Here are eight things I am thinking about leading up to the season opener.

1. This season’s theme is validation

For me, the 2026 Ole Miss Football season will be about validation. Can Ole Miss validate itself as a consistent power in the NIL era, rather than a feel-good story like they were last season? Can Pete Golding validate that last winter’s postseason success was no fluke and that he is an SEC-caliber head coach? Will Trinidad Chambliss and Kewan Lacy validate that they are in fact the best offensive backfield in college football? Can the Ole Miss Football program validate itself as a top-end program in life after Lane Kiffin? Can the Rebels prove that Kiffin was a crucial part of the program’s success over the last six years, but not an irreplaceable one?

Ole Miss has a couple of things working against it. The first is historical precedent. It’s difficult to find an example of any program, traditional blue blood or not, losing the best coach in its modern history and maintaining its standing in the sport. That, of course, lacks context, given what Ole Miss returns at the most important position on the field and elsewhere, the manner in which Kiffin left, and the amount of time Kiffin was at Ole Miss (six years isn’t that long of a run when compared to the tenure length of most other programs’ greatest head coaches).

I think the biggest thing working against Ole Miss this season is the schedule. I think the Rebels are a better and more talented football team than they were in 2025. I am not really sure how that is disputable. But the schedule is remarkably more difficult this season. Last year’s slate included an abnormal total of eight home games and four road games. One of the road games was inside state lines (against a pedestrian Mississippi State team) and another was at a Kentucky team that ultimately fired its head coach and knew going into the season it would be one of the conference’s worst teams. The eight-game home slate wasn’t exactly a murder’s row of playoff contenders either. That’s not to discount at all what Ole Miss accomplished in 2025 and what a remarkable and historic season it was for the Rebels. They fully-capitalized on a fortunate schedule . But I think any reasonable observer can admit that this upcoming slate in 2026 is an entirely different animal than last year. Ole Miss goes to Austin to play Texas, returns to Norman to play Oklahoma, plays a top-25 ACC team in week one in Louisville, goes to the Swamp to play Florida the week after the Kiffin fueled-circus that will be September 19, and also hosts Georgia. It’s going to be a much more difficult return voyage to the College Football Playoff for Ole Miss.

If Ole Miss is able to navigate this daunting schedule and return to the Playoff, it would be a remarkable validation of the program’s standing in this modern, lawless era of college football. It would validate Golding as an SEC-caliber coach. It would validate Baker as an SEC-quality offensive coordinator. It would validate the work of Keith Carter, Walker Jones, William Liston, Denson Hollis and so many others in creating and maintaining the Grove Collective and remaining on the forefront of this constantly evolving college sports landscape. It would validate that Kiffin was a crucial cog in the machine rather than the entirety of the machine. It would also validate a fanbase that has answered the call for six years.

I don’t say all of that to set this season up as playoff or bust. I think that’s a pretty unfair and foolish lens to view the season through. I say that because it’s the reason I find this season so fascinating. I think Ole Miss has the talent to be a Playoff team, but faces a much tougher path in a year in which the college football world seems to doubt the viability of the program’s success in life after Lane Kiffin.

Needless to say, I am incredibly eager to watch this season play out. It will be wildly entertaining no matter how it turns out.

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2. I am curious about the offensive line

Ole Miss returns three starters on the interior of its offensive line with center Bryson Sanders, left guard Delano Townsend and right guard Patrick Kutas. It replaces Diego Pounds and Jayden Williams at the two tackle spots.

Terez Davis, who transferred from Maryland prior to last season, has seemingly grabbed a stranglehold on the left tackle position. Davis was a de-facto swingman sixth lineman for Ole Miss last year that never saw the field much because of the very fortunate clean bill of health the offensive line was blessed with last year. Four of the five starters last year started every game, and Townsend started 13 and played in 14.

“Terez Davis is playing as good at left tackle right now that I can remember anybody playing, to be honest with you,” Ole Miss head coach Pete Golding said at SEC Media Days. “He is a super bright spot, in my opinion, coming out of spring and seeing him move a little bit in the summer.”

Davis is the son of 12-year NBA veteran Ricky Davis. He describes his best attributes as length and power. Those seem like two pretty valuable traits when it comes to playing left tackle in the Southeastern Conference. I will take the coaching staff’s word for it that Davis looks like an above-average SEC tackle.

The right tackle spot is an entirely different story. The two candidates to start here are LSU transfer Carius Curne and Miami Transfer Tommy Kinsler IV.

At the beginning of preseason camp, Golding said that Kinsler has flashed as an SEC player and that camp would be a good opportunity for him to show that more consistently, and that camp will also be good for Kinsler because he is “a little heavier than he needs to be right now to be able to sustain in this league.”

Curne missed spring football due to an injury. Golding said he loved Curne’s ability, but cited a need for more maturity (Curne was arrested in April for drug possession and then speeding to flee arrest. Three of the six charges were ultimately dropped while he pled no-contest to the other three) and also consistency of play that is mostly lacking due to him being injured.

I haven’t seen a single second of practice or a scrimmage and won’t pretend like I have the slightest clue how the right tackle battle will shake out, but I will point out that if the head coach’s biggest worries with the two only realistic candidates to win the job are consistency and body frame for one, and maturity and health (with an arrest mixed in) for the other, that seems suboptimal.

I am also curious about the depth as it pertains to this unit. Ole Miss was fortunate last year to have its starting offensive line for the entire season. What happens this year if there is an in injury or two? Most every program struggles with offensive line depth in this modern era of the portal. I’m just curious to see what happens if a starter goes down at any point this season. It’s one of two main questions I have about the offense. We’re about to get to the other.

3. Can the receiving corps replicate last year’s production?

Ole Miss lost three of its top four pass catchers off last year’s team and five of its top seven. Deuce Alexander returns, with Lacy being the other returner in that top seven. The Rebels have an interesting group of talented but unproven players behind Alexander who will be tasked with replacing that production.

Johntay Cook is a former five-star prospect who didn’t do much in two years at Texas and then was moderately productive last year on a bad Syracuse team. Horatio Fields is another talented kid who was a blue-chip prospect out of high school that spent the last three years mired in Hugh Freeze’s dysfunctional program and offensive system. Darrell Gill caught 31 and 32 passes the last two years at Syracuse.

From there, it’s a few talented high school guys who are young and unproven, most notably redshirt freshman Caleb Cunningham, who Golding said the other day was “healthy and looking like the guy we thought he was” after spending much of his freshman season injured. Samari Reed and Traylon Ray are a couple of fellow redshirt freshmen who could factor into things.

The tight end room could be pretty good. Caleb Odom is a fascinating body-type who has seemingly transitioned to tight end full-time after splitting time between there and receiver last year. Luke Hasz was a guy Ole Miss really liked entering last season, but suffered an ankle injury that required a summer surgery that robbed him of really ever becoming a factor in the offense last year. It’s really tough to be a newcomer and miss a significant chunk of time before and during the season and then make an impact once you regain health (think 2023 Caden Prieskorn).

Point being, Ole Miss has a lot of capable but mostly unproven options behind Alexander. I think this is the biggest question I have about this offense entering this season. As great as Ole Miss has been at receiver and tight end the last two seasons, there was a time early in the Kiffin era in which having enough reliable pass catchers was a real problem. Think about 2021, in which it was Dontario Drummond, the rarely healthy Braylon Sanders, and then.. a bunch of nothing. I’m not saying that will be the case this year, but I am saying it will be a major problem for this offense if it does end up being the case.

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4. How big is the drop-off with John David Baker as OC?

That might read as a loaded question, and maybe there is no drop-off at all, but Ole Miss was top ten in the country in total offense in three of the four years Kiffin and Charlie Weis Jr. worked together in Oxford. That seems like an unrealistic expectation for Baker in year one. Maybe it’s not.

There’s obviously familiarity here with Baker being at Ole Miss for three seasons, two of which he worked under Kiffin and Weis. It’s a significant reason for why Golding made the hire. East Carolina was 130th in the FBS in total offense the year before Baker arrived as offensive coordinator. They finished 34th nationally in 2024 and 15th last season.

Baker is clearly capable. But, to me, this year in particular is much more about consistency rather than how capable he is. From the time he was hired, he and Golding have echoed that the offense is about “80 percent the same” with some different subtleties in terminology among other things. What does that actually mean? Ole Miss returns the best backfield in college football and a solid core on the offensive line. How seamless of a transition is this actually going to be? I don’t ask that skeptically. I, like pretty much all of you, have no clue what it means that the offense is 80 percent the same. Baker also seems to understand the assignment entering the year.

A couple of weeks ago, he was asked about this subject and his approach to play calling, to which he answered “If Trinidad likes it, I like it.” Baker’s performance at East Carolina is likely being overshadowed by the Kiffin/Weiss/Golding program continuity storyline. Taking a bottom-ten offense in the FBS to a top-35 and then a top-15 offense in both years he was there is an incredible accomplishment.

To me, this is what this season comes down to: can Baker, as a play-caller and an offensive schemer be 70 percent? 80 percent? of what Kiffin and Weis were? If so, Ole Miss is going to be one of the best football teams in the country and a bonafide national championship contender. If the Rebels struggle offensively, then this season could be a much different story. The reason I feel so comfortable describing this particular topic as the proverbial hinge that the season swings on is that I believe this defense will be very good and potentially elite. More on them in a minute.

Baker, to me, is the most important component to this year’s team

5. How does Baker handle the running back position

Kewan Lacy toted the football 306 times last season and did not miss a single game. He is, for my money, the best running back in the sport.

With that said, the odds of him shouldering that workload again, without suffering some sort of injury, is pretty slim. This is another instance of how all the stars aligned last season. My podcast partner Weldon Rotenberg and I repeatedly said last year that Lacy was the most important player on the entire time, because, if he went down for any period of time last season and missed any game of significance, Ole Miss wouldn’t have made the Playoff. I think any rational fan could admit that. He provided a different dimension to the Ole Miss running game that was severely lacking in 2024.

But, last year, he was the only one who provided it. With respect to Logan Diggs, who actually played pretty well for Ole Miss in the Playoff in the few plays in which Lacy was off the field, Ole Miss was toast if Lacy ever missed time — I think the offense sputtering for much of the semifinal after he had the leg injury is evidence enough of that.

This year, I think, is a different story. I really like what Ole Miss did to beef up the running back room. Michigan State transfer Mackhi Frazier averaged 4.4 yards per carry behind a horrific Spartans offensive line last year and is a guy this staff believes will not only mop up the carries Lacy can’t handle, but cement a significantly strong one-two punch.

“I don’t want him to carry the football that much,” Baker said. “To me, there is a difference in carries and touches. I think there is a difference. Running the ball that many times between the tackles, you are going to break, which he did, needing surgery in the offseason. The shelf-life of a running back is so short as is, my sell to him was, you want have the same amount of the carries but you will have the same amount of touches… and now we have a really good running backs room that can take the load off of him.”

I think this was a very good and politically correct answer by Baker, who likely wanted to say “f**k no he will not carry the football 300+ times again. That is insane.”

I think the depth Ole Miss added in the running backs room allows Baker to say that truthfully.

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6. This Ole Miss defense should be good. Can it be elite?

Ole Miss was a decent defense in 2025. It was opportunistic with turnovers at times (Dottery strip against Arkansas in the final drive), good enough in most games against a schedule that featured some pretty pedestrian offenses, and horrendous in a couple of other spots (Georgia regular season loss and the Arkansas win). It was probably the worst of the four defenses that reached the College Football Playoff semifinal.

This year will be a different story as I think the Rebels upgraded at pretty much every position group. The loss of sacks leader Princewill Umanmielen is undoubtedly a loss and was a hole to fill, but Ole Miss brought in several talented and versatile edge options. The secondary should be as deep as its been in a decade or so and I think the linebacking corps is better.

So, can the Ole Miss defense be as good as it was in 2024? A unit that showed up every week and performed, often bailing out an offense that was seemingly at the mercy of the headspace of Kiffin on a weekly basis. If it can be that good, it will give first-year power-four coordinator Baker an extremely handy support system as he navigates being a playcaller in the toughest league in College Football for the first time.

7. The Rebels definitely upgraded at linebacker

Whether it was the smooth and drama-less recruitment of Cal/Clemson transfer Luke Ferrelli, landing Baylor transfer Keaton Thomas or Georgia Tech transfer Tah’j Butler, along with the obvious strength of returning roaming Buck defender Suntarine Perkins, Ole Miss is a lot deeper and more capable in the linebacker room. A lot was made of 2025 green-dot man T.J. Dottery going to LSU, but I think Golding and the defensive staff found a lot to be desired with Dottery’s play outside of being a productive tackler with good instincts. Dottery was a good, productive player for Ole Miss in 2025, but I think it’s telling that the coaching staff did not sweat his departure to LSU a whole lot and immediately pivoted to the (risky and irresponsible) pursuit of Ferrelli — But hey, in a lawless world, sometimes you have to break the seemingly nonexistent laws.

Ole Miss was interested in Ferrelli when he entered the transfer portal from Cal, but Dottery was still with the program. Golding, when asked about his blatant tampering with Ferrelli — who committed to Clemson and was enrolled in classes for the spring semester — and in a class when he was allegedly tampered with, said this:

“The bottom line with the recruitment of Luke, he came here on an official visit prior to the Fiesta Bowl,” Golding said. “I told him, ‘I want you to be our green-dot mike, but right now we’ve got a green-dot mike. And that spot’s not going to be available until we have one available.”

Dottery left, a spot became available, Ferrelli (assumingly) left whatever class he was in at Clemson and headed to Oxford. I don’t bring this up to rehash this whole saga. It was dumb for Golding to text Ferrelli himself, I would be mad if I were a Clemson staffer, and, no, I don’t think Ole Miss will suffer any real penalties for tampering with him. I bring this up to highlight the very matter of fact message Golding allegedly had for Ferrelli when he visited Ole Miss prior to the Fiesta Bowl. If he thought Dottery was some prized, unlosable prospect, he likely wouldn’t have had this attitude.

The Rebels linebacking room will be better and deeper than it was in 2025, which will be a huge plus for the defense.

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8. What is Pete Golding like as an in-game head coach?

Golding has had as unique of a honeymoon phase — to usher himself into a job he seemingly didn’t initially want — as you will ever see in college football. What he did in the seven-week postseason run Ole Miss had last winter is commendable. It’s not just the two Playoff wins, it’s the way he managed the transition of the outgoing staff while hiring his own coaching staff, while also trying to assemble a transfer portal class for next year — all while having a narcissistic sociopath try to derail it at every turn. To me, Golding didn’t prove he is an SEC-caliber head coach solely because he beat Tulane and Georgia, he proved that he has the wit and mettle to be an SEC head coach with how he handled everything else during one of the single most screwed up time periods you will ever find in any industry for a new hire. The calmness with which he navigated last December and January and the pragmatic approach he took to everything is remarkable.

“He’s just a dude, man. He’s so consistent,” Baker said. “His ability to compartmentalize things. I just think about when I got here in December. Everything that was going on inside the building, outside the building, playoffs, the portal, transfer the portal, and oh by the way, you have to game plan a defense. Just being the same person.. There’s not a lot of people who can do that. It confirmed what I thought about him."

Now, does that mean he’s a bonafide top-end head coach that’s surely built to last? Of course not. This is a scoreboard business. Winning and losing his games will decide his fate as the head coach of the Rebels. There are so many small things, either inside or outside of his control, that go on during a game, that will be telling as to whether or not he will last as an SEC head coach. I’ll give you two examples of the point I am trying to make. Right before halftime at the Sugar Bowl, Ole Miss, who was already reeling from a defensive touchdown from Georgia, suffered a breakdown in clock management that led to them being down two scores versus one. At the Georgia 43, Chambliss threw a ball to Dae’Quan Wright near the sideline. Wright cut upfield, was tackled two yards short of the first down marker and couldn’t get out of bounds. Ole Miss had zero timeouts left, and rather than letting automatic kicker Lucas Carniero kick a field goal that would have almost assuredly had Ole Miss down 21-15 at half, the Rebels squandered the opportunity.

Was that actually Golding’s fault? I doubt it. It was likely Wright’s for making a dumb decision and not understanding time and situation. But that ultimately falls on the head coach. Am I bringing this up to point out why I think Golding can’t be a good head coach and that his clock management is terrible? Of course not. I am just pointing out the margins are so thin in this league and in this college football world, that singular mistakes like that from unproven head coaches often, fairly or unfairly, shape legacies.

Don’t believe me? Ask Jeff Lebby. Mississippi State was probably a total of seven plays from going 8-4 last season and ended up 5-7 due to game management incompetence that ultimately fell on Lebby.

Kiffin, for all his flaws, was pretty elite at game and clock management. Will Golding be the same? I tend to think so. But it’s simply unknown at this point with such a small sample size of him being a head coach.

We’ll have more on Louisville later this week as we restart this newsletter. Thanks for reading and subscribing as always. We will talk again soon.

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Ole Miss swept the Lincoln Regional via a trio of games that went down to the wire. The two-victories against Arizona State were one-run contests. A sport in which the margins become razor thin in the postseason, Ole Miss rose to the occasion and made winning plays in the innings that mattered most. Let’s examine what happened and what is next.

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An Imperfect Domination

One of the many funny quirks about this Ole Miss Baseball season is that this team is really not that enjoyable to watch. It is as close to a three-outcome offense as you’ll find in college baseball — home run, strikeout, walk. It is not consistently great in the field, but have enough good fielders to show flashes — think game three against Arizona State was evidence enough of that, in which the Rebels kicked the ball around the field for four innings, only to have Owen Paino and Dom Decker make a handful of Big League-level plays in the 8th and 9th innings to preserve the win and regional sweep. On their best days, the trio of starters the Rebels boast are as good or better than any rotation still playing baseball in 2026. On their worst, two of the three (Elliott and Townsend) have proven to be pretty pedestrian and frustrating to watch pitch versus the lofty expectations they’ve earned to be judged by.

Despite all of that, Ole Miss swept one of the toughest regionals in the 2026 NCAA Tournament. Arizona won 37 games and 19 in the Big 12. The Sun Devils being a No. 3 seed is pretty absurd.

Ole Miss also survived the pressure of a real road environment on Saturday night (and I guess, briefly, Sunday morning, too). I am not a big believer in Big Ten teams being worthy opponents, because (like what happened in this regional) the vast majority of them get into the postseason and continue to prove the Big Ten doesn’t have top-end pitching, and the teams that make the postseason from that conference routinely struggle with high-velocity arms. Taylor Rabe’s approach to handling the Cornhuskers on Saturday was pretty concrete proof of that: 96-98 MPH fastballs on repeat and dare them to time him up. With that said, from a sheer metrics standpoint, Nebraska was a worthy host. And their fans’ support of baseball is the real deal too. The environment on Saturday night when the Rebels faced the Cornhuskers was 8,000 people trying to will a well-supported program to its first Super Regional in nearly two decades.

Despite all of that, how many times this weekend did you, the reader, want to mentally check out of these games? The errors Ole Miss made in the field to exacerbate the command issues Cade Townsend had on Sunday evening were frustrating. The Ole Miss offense handling a first-round pick in Arizona State’s Cole Carlon pretty well on Friday, only to let a very average Sun Devils’ bullpen hold the Rebels scoreless for nearly seven innings after Carlon’s exit — before Ole Miss finally outlasted them with a run in the bottom of the 14th inning — was frustrating.

Watching Ole Miss being willing to die on the vine with Taylor Rabe in the sixth inning on Saturday, with the bases loaded, one out, with the Rebels leading 3-1 — due to a lack of trust in anyone in the bullpen not named Hudson Calhoun and Walker Hooks, whose arms were extinguished the night before — was frustrating.

And on Sunday, Ole Miss letting an Arizona State bullpen arm, Eli Buxton, who entered the game with nearly a 12 ERA, throw 2.1 innings of scoreless relief as the game went to extra innings, each one that passed giving the Sun Devils a renewed sense of belief, was frustrating.

Despite all of that, Ole Miss swept the regional. Quite literally, you couldn’t ask anything more from the group. It was a pretty dominant performance, all things considered. But it wasn’t pretty beautiful baseball.

I don’t really have some grand point in bringing all of that up other than to point out that this team is an incredibly frustrating watch at times. Even when it is performing at peak capacity, it’s not an aesthetically pleasing brand of baseball. I think the coaching staff knows this. At one point this weekend, during one of the forced TV interviews the broadcast requires these coaches to do during these games, Mike Bianco said, to some effect, that “we have some swing-and-miss in our game, to say the least.” I’m paraphrasing a bit, but that quote was telling to me in the sense that Bianco and this staff knows what it is and what it is not.

Despite how frustrating this group can be at times, Ole Miss is now two wins away from making the College World Series, and whether or not you enjoyed the ride to get to this point, it’s the reality. Far more talented Ole Miss teams have come up short of reaching the Super Regional round. I’d argue this is not one of Bianco’s more talented teams. For as much as we discuss what this team is not, it was another Bianco quote in the postgame press conference on Sunday night that I thought perfectly described what this team is.

“This week, and throughout this year, our guys handle ‘hard’ well,” Bianco said. “I think in our conference, you have to in order to survive. We needed that. If we didn’t have to go through what we went through this year, I am not sure we could’ve gotten through this.

““One of the weird things, as I guess I will eat a little crow about, is that I have repeatedly shared with the guys, is that if you don’t play well, you will lose. Well, tonight, we didn’t play well. We made a lot of mistakes. We didn’t make plays, didn’t make pitches, had tough at-bats at wrong times, but credit to the players for being able to overcome some bad play. Townsend wasn’t himself tonight, but man, it may be the gutsiest performance of his career. We talk about emptying the tank. He certainly did that. Wil Libbert was the difference in the game. J.P. Robertson, another great outing. I am just super proud of my guys for hanging in there, making plays, making pitches and hanging in there when it meant the most.”

This is one of the toughest team in the history of Ole Miss Baseball. This group, for all of its flaws, does not flinch in the face of adversity. Rabe’s 6th inning heroics on Saturday night — in an environment so raucous that Ole Miss had issues with Rabe hearing its PitchCom system — is proof of that. Winning two one-run, extra innings affairs against Arizona State is proof of that. Trailing in all three games, only to win all three is proof of that.

This Ole Miss team may be imperfect in virtually everything that it does, but it has the collective mettle to persevere through adversity, even when it is self-inflicted. Given the top-end talent Ole Miss has in its starting rotation and at the top of its lineup, the aforementioned perseverance skill is as valuable of a trait as you can have at this point in the year. It’s a skill cultivated by culture — an intangible that allows less-talented teams to thrive in pressure situations. To better articulate my point, listen to what Bianco said about this group on Sunday night.

“In this sport, you can’t win if you are not a good team. You can have some future Major Leaguers and some Superstar players, but there is too much invested in the power of belief in this sport, like in that last inning.. there wasn’t a guy in that dugout that didn’t believe that that was going to happen.” Bianco said. “I probably shouldn’t say this with my AD (Keith Carter) sitting back there, but our guys would rather bus than fly because they love being on the bus together. That’s one of the cool things that you usually hear from the good teams.”

An imperfect group generated a mostly perfect result.

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Trust in those previously not trusted

Ole Miss won this regional because it got exceptional performances from players that Bianco and his staff previously did not trust. The most obvious example is Wil Libbert.

On Sunday night, Ole Miss trailed 4-3 in the top of the 6th inning. Townsend, who had no command over any pitch that wasn’t a fastball, competed his ass off to complete five innings to give the Rebels a chance. After a leadoff walk to begin the 6th, Bianco went to Libbert. At that point, I simultaneously wondered if Bianco was punting on the game or gambling on an unreliable arm to finally live up to his talent because Bianco still believed that Ole Miss could win the game. The latter obviously ended up being true. Libbert tossed three innings of hitless, shutout baseball, which allowed Ole Miss to tie the game in the bottom of the 7th on Austin Fawley’s two-out RBI double. It also bridged the game to Robertson, who threw two scoreless innings of his own, and held a pretty ruthless Arizona State offense at bay long enough for Ole Miss to again outlast them in extra innings for the second time in three days.

Not to toot my own horn, but I wrote last week about Ole Miss likely not being able to win this regional without some sort of contribution from Libbert in a high-leverage spot. This wasn’t really an earth-shattering opinion. I think anyone who followed this team closely throughout the year likely knew this was the case. He’s a left-hander with a fastball in the upper 90s with a really good slider and a decent changeup. Libbert — who began the year as the team’s No. 3 starter before his struggles demoted him to a bullpen role that was really never clearly defined during the regular season — is a mystifying figure. If you watch him pitch an inning, with the aforementioned traits I just outlined, you’d think he was one of the best pitchers in the SEC. But it didn’t work out that way and he didn’t perform well enough to remain the team’s third starter. I think part of that was due to a lack of confidence. Mind you, Libbert is a Mizzou transfer and has never pitched on a winning team. Pitching coach Joel Mangrum saw something in him, the program spent a good chunk of money to get him to come to Ole Miss, and for most of the year, it didn’t work out.

For Libbert to come into that situation, in that environment, with that much at stake, and pitch the way he did, is remarkable. I think his performance is the single biggest reason Ole Miss won the Lincoln Regional. I won’t spend a bunch of words arguing why I believe that, I’ll just ask any of you reading whether or not you’d have felt good entering a Monday night game against that Sun Devils’ offense with Big 12 Player of the Year Landon Hairston back from suspension. No thanks.

This outing from Libbert will also pay dividends going forward. If my hypothesis about Libbert — who has all the makings of a top-end SEC arm — lacking confidence is true, imagine what this performance will do for him in terms of replinishing his confidence. Ole Miss is going to need Libbert again at some point in the next week or two. And I think that when that moment beckons, a more confident Libbert will toe the rubber..

There was a pretty thin circle of trust as it pertained to the Ole Miss bullpen this year that essentially consisted of Hooks, Calhoun (a large and anxious gap) and then maybe Robertson.

Robertson has had an up-and-down year. He came into the regional final game, supplied two innings of scoreless relief — in an outing in which 34 of the 35 pitches he threw were sliders — one night after he relieved Rabe in the winner’s bracket game against Nebraska. For most of the season, Ole Miss was seemingly one bullpen arm short — in large part due to Libbert’s struggles that forced Rabe in to the starting rotation — but when push came to shove in this regional, the Rebels were not short an arm, but rather won a regional because of the arm(s) that filled that void.

Brayden Randle, the opening day starting shortstop, who sort of became the odd man out in an strange quest to find offensive production in the bottom of Ole Miss’ lineup, had the walk-off hit in the opener against ASU — a game in which the Rebels wouldn’t have had a chance to win the regional without — and went 5-10 in the regional.

Luke Romine played a decent first base in game one after Bianco made a risky decision to pinch run for Will Furniss in the 8th inning of Friday’s win. Romine, who was 2-18 on the season entering Sunday’s game, smacked a one-out base hit in the bottom of the 10th in the regional clinching game that set up Dom Decker’s RBI sac fly that won the Rebels the game and the regional.

The list could go on and on. The point is that Ole Miss won this regional because it was forced to turn to guys that it did not previously trust, particularly in the bullpen, and those questionable players delivered championship-worthy performances.

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The Ole Miss offense is opponent-proof

I can’t take credit for this poignant point. If you happened to watch the MPW livestreams of the game this weekend, you probably heard my esteemed baseball podcast co-host Collin Brister mention several times that this Ole Miss offense — one that can be as potent as any in the sport sometimes and also as anemic as any other offense at other times — is match-up proof. It truly does not matter who is on the mound. I thought this weekend was pretty solid proof of that. On Friday night, Ole Miss faced a future top-20 draft pick in Arizona State’s Cole Carlon, and tagged him for six earned runs in as many innings. The next night, they let a significantly less- talented (but decent) pitcher in Nebraska’s Ty Horn dominate them for about five innings by throwing lower 90s fastballs past them and dotting a couple of decent but not great off-speed pitches.

On Sunday night, Ole Miss let Arizona State’s Buxton, who entered the contest with an 11.70 ERA, inexplicably carve the Rebels for 2.1 scoreless innings.

With that all of that being true, an offense that has rightly been criticized for being too heavily reliant on driving the baseball out of the ballpark to produce runs, scored six runs on Saturday to beat the host team without a single home run. The Rebels scored 18 runs in the Lincoln Regional and only three of those runs were driven in via a home run. This offense, while imperfect and very hard to watch at times, stiffened into the best version of itself when it mattered most.

It doesn’t really seem to matter who is pitching against the Rebels. It can be a first-round pick or a kid who will be working for State Farm at the completion of the season, this Ole Miss offense is as good as it wants to be on any given night. It’s why I am not really that concerned with the pitching matchups in the Super Regional Round against Auburn (more on that later this week). It doesn’t really matter who Ole Miss faces. Your guess is as good as mine as to which version of the offense shows up on a given night. My guess going forward is that the best version will show up given the the toughness this team has repeatedly displayed when the stakes are the highest.

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A wild weekend almost landed Super Regional Baseball in Oxford

The NCAA Baseball Tournament’s opening round remains one of the most underrated weekends on the sports calendar. The amount of upsets, late inning drama, walk-offs and ejections we saw this weekend truly makes for a great, compelling product. College baseball’s stock is skyrocketing in a world in which the consumer can choose what they want to view at all times. In a broken era of college athletics in which money has seemingly weeded out the ability for an underdog or “Cinderella” to exist, college baseball is delivering on the nostalgia the NCAA Tournament can seemingly no longer provide due to NIL.

A quick recap

• Four-seed St. Johns won the Tallahassee Regional by beating host Florida State twice.

• Four Seed Little Rock — who took the defending 2025 National Champions (LSU) to a game 7 in the Baton Rouge Regional last year — swept the Hattiesburg Regional to advance to the program’s first ever Super Regional.

• Four seed St. Mary’s became the first ever No. 4 seed to beat a No. 1 overall seed (UCLA) in a regional opener. The Gails followed that up by again beating UCLA two days later to eliminate them from their own regional. But it was No. 3 seed Cal Poly, who ended up winning the Los Angeles Regional by beating St. Mary’s on Sunday night.

• No. 3 seed in the Gainesville Regional, Troy — a team who got into the field with a record of 32-29, the most losses ever for a team to earn an at-large bid — won four straight games, after losing to No. 2 seed Miami, in its first game, including pummeling Florida on Sunday night and Monday night, to advance to the first Super Regional in Troy history. The Troy Trojans will host the Little Rock Trojans in a Super Regional next weekend. If that Super Regional goes to a game three and Trojan Condoms does not sponsor the “rubber game” of that match-up then the entire Trojan marketing department needs to be fired.

• Georgia Tech, a program that has not made a Super Regional since 2006, lost two straight games on Sunday night and Monday afternoon to a very average Oklahoma team to end its season. The Yellow Jackets were probably the best team in the country for most of the season, but had a bad 24 hours and are now extinct.

Now for the main and last nugget: the Milwaukee Panthers upset Auburn in the first game of the Auburn Regional, then won the winner’s bracket game against UCF and were one win away from making a Super Regional that we now know would’ve been in Oxford. Milwaukee started the season 5-23, before finding form, finishing 26-31 and winning the Horizon League Tournament to earn an automatic bid into the NCAA Tournament. They had two chances to defeat Auburn for a second time, go to the Super Regional Round and deliver the first Super Regional played in Oxford since 2009. Auburn predictably demolished them in both games. Ole Miss’ hopes of hosting a Super Regional, for all intents and purposes died the moment Milwaukee beat UCF in that winner’s bracket game on Saturday night. If you’re Ole Miss, you want a program like UCF to have two chances to beat the Tigers, not Milwaukee who was predictably out of pitching and whatever offensive magic juju they had that made them look like the 1927 Yankees for two days.

What the Panthers did, or almost did, would’ve been one of the most improbable upsets in the history of college sports had they beaten Auburn again to eliminate them. But they didn’t.

And now the Rebels are headed to Auburn, two wins away from Omaha.

We’ll break down the matchup later this week, but I’m not sure how you can dislike this team’s chances as it continues to prove it can elevate to the moment when it matters most.

The Ole Miss Rebels are headed to Lincoln, Nebraska as a two-seed in the Lincoln Regional hosted by the Nebraska Cornhuskers. How did Ole Miss get here? And what are its chances of getting through this regional? Let’s take a look.

Ole Miss was a win away from hosting a regional

Based on the field the NCAA Tournament selection committee released on Monday, and more specifically the 16 host sites it released on Sunday night, I am fairly convinced that Ole Miss came up one SEC win short of hosting a regional in Oxford. The Rebels compiled a 36-21 (15-15) record. They finished the regular season with a 16 RPI.

Fourteen of the top 16 RPI teams earned regional host spots. The two exceptions? USC and Ole Miss, both of whom, in my opinion, had fatal flaws in the eyes of the committee. USC’s fatal flaw was that it was 1-11 in Q1 games. Ole Miss’ fatal flaw was that it was 15-17 in SEC play in the eyes of the selection committee (the Governor’s Cup + the Tuesday loss to Missouri at the SEC Tournament in Hoover). I think if the Rebels had finished the regular season 16-14 in SEC play, they’d be a host. Because at 16-14 they wouldn’t have played the walking RPI bomb that is Mizzou on Tuesday in Hoover, and whether they won or lost to their hypothetical first opponent in Hoover not-named Mizzou, likely wouldn’t have mattered.

That’s not solely my opinion. The committee told us as much through its actions. Take Arkansas as an example. The Razorbacks went 17-13 in SEC play this year — in most years, that mark alone is good enough to lock any SEC team in as a host, and likely a top-eight national seed. But Arkansas lost five Q3 and Q4 games that hurt its RPI. The Razorbacks entered the SEC Tournament with an RPI in the mid 20s. They won three games in Hoover to reach the SEC Tournament Championship game, bringing their SEC win total to 20. None of it mattered in the eyes of the committee. Their RPI finished at 21 and that apparently wasn’t good enough to host, as the committee seemingly awarded the last two host spots to Mississippi State and West Virginia (yes, I know Kansas is the No. 15 seed but I don’t think that was ever in doubt).

Point being, had Ole Miss won one more SEC game and finished 16-14 in league play, I think there is baseball played in Oxford this weekend. I think the Rebels’ performance in Hoover wouldn’t have mattered. There was a world in which Ole Miss could’ve hosted with a 15-15 record, but losing to Mizzou — a program that does not try to compete in baseball — on a Tuesday in Hoover before the clock struck noon, removed any possibility of that happening.

So, now the Rebels are a two seed in the Lincoln Regional. What is to be made of their draw and what are their odds to make it out of that regional? Let’s take a look.

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Nebraska hosts for the first time since 18 years

The Nebraska Cornhuskers are hosting a regional for the first time since 2008. Head coach Will Bolt, a Nebraska alum, has done a fine job with the program in his six years there. Nebraska’s baseball program had a pretty good run of success in the early 2000s. It made the College World Series in 2001, 2002 and 2005. Bolt was a player on the former two Omaha appearances. It appears the Huskers play in a pretty nice ballpark for a Big Ten program. They’ve had a great year and have seemingly maximized a talented and top-heavy but thin pitching staff, paired with an offense that led the Big Ten in average, hits and OPS. Home run numbers are always a bit of a misnomer with Midwest schools considering the weather and wind for 2/3 of the season is unpredictable and mostly unforgiving.

Speaking of wind, one note I discovered from talking to Nebraska beat writer Michael Bruntz on my podcast earlier this week is that Haymarket park can play like two different ballparks depending on the direction of the wind. If it blows out of the north or the west — which he says is rare this time of year — it will play more favorably as a hitter’s park. If it blows out of the south, which is more likely, it can play larger and more cavernous. That seems significant for an Ole Miss team that heavily relies on driving the ball out of the ballpark. So, wake up tomorrow and check the wind patterns in Lincoln, Nebraska if you want to feel like a true die hard fan.

Arizona State presents a fair challenge for Ole Miss

Ole Miss’ opponent on Friday, the No. 3 seed in the Lincoln Regional, is Arizona State. The Sun Devils went 37-19 and 19-11 in Big 12 play. I imagine Arizona State feels a little under-seeded and figured it would be a No. 2 seed in a regional. The Sun Devils have a first-round arm anchoring their rotation and were the best offense in the Big 12 this season, led by one of the best (leadoff) hitters in college baseball in Landon Hairston.

Hairston was named the Big 12 player of the year. In Big 12 play alone, he hit .392 with a 1.368 OPS with 15 home runs and 42 RBIs. The sophomore boasted a ridiculous .392/.875/1.368 slash line in league play. He’s the real deal.

It is interesting that Arizona State has a soon-to-be first-round draft pick, Cole Carlon (more on him in a second), heading up its staff and the conference player of the year, Hairston, in its lineup, and are still a No. 3 seed this regional.

The Sun Devils finished the regular season with a 44 RPI. They were 7-9 in Q1 games. Four Q4 losses hurt them badly. Arizona State played four SEC opponents this year. It split a two-game midweek series with Oklahoma and then lost to Mississippi State, Texas A&M and Tennessee in one weekend in an early-season tournament in Arlington, Texas at Globe Life Field.

Ole Miss is a better baseball team than Arizona State, but what’s unique about the regional round is that the Rebels aren’t aiming to win a series over the Sun Devils, they’re trying to win a single game — and let’s face it, the loser of this game has almost no shot to win this regional.

The best version of ASU features a left-hander named Cole Carlon, who will be a millionaire come July 11 when the MLB Draft arrives. The Rebels are up against a tough, but fitting and fair test.

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What you’ll see from Cole Carlon

Carlon offers a two-pitch mix: a fastball that lives in the upper 90s and has touched 100-plus and a wipeout slider that is probably one of the most effective pitches in the sport. According to Baseball America, Carlon’s slider generates a 57 percent whiff rate, and he throws it nearly 50 percent of the time. That’s as devastating of a pitch as you’ll see in college baseball.

Carlon is going to be a tough matchup for the Rebels. With that said, looking at Carlon’s game logs, he faced three ranked opponents this year and completed five innings once — which was in the Big 12 Tournament against West Virginia. He went 4.2 against Mississippi State in Arlington and allowed 3 runs on two hits with seven strikeouts and two walks, went 4.1 against West Virginia in March, allowing 3runs on 8 hits seven strikeouts and a walk, and then saw the Mountaineers again last week in the conference tournament and went 5.1, allowing a run on 5hits with 6 strikeouts and a walk. He’s a really good arm, but he’s not Paul Skenes. This is not an impossible riddle for Ole Miss to solve.

It’s also worth noting that Carlon was pulled from his start in the Sun Devils’ regular season finale series against Houston due to feeling “achy” and local reports later attributed the quick hook to dead arm. Carlon threw 79 pitches a few days later against WVU in the Big 12 Tournament, so I suppose there is no cause for concern there, but I wonder if it affects his longevity at all. He’s thrown more than 100 pitches five times this season and just once since April 17.

I think this is a perfectly fair test for Ole Miss because, as good as Carlon is, he doesn’t seem to get a ton of value off of his high-velo fastball. I’m not going to bullshit you and pretend I’ve watched a ton of Arizona State Baseball before this week in preparation for creating content for this regional, but after looking into it, I would figure his fastball is not as effective as the raw velo data would suggest. This Ole Miss lineup, for all of its flaws, hasn’t struggled with velocity. So, I see this going one of two ways:

1. Ole Miss sees Carlon’s fastball pretty well, hits 3-4 home runs, backed by a pretty good Hunter Elliott start and wins this crucial regional opener something like 6-3.

2. The Rebels don’t see his fastball well, look foolish on his elite slider, strikeout 19 times and lose 2-1 after leaving a small village on the basepaths.

Of course, neither of these outcomes could happen, I am just providing my opinion here. But I think a mostly two-pitch guy with a high-velocity fastball and a wrecking ball of a slider is a perfect litmus test for an Ole Miss offense that is entirely too dependent on hitting the baseball over the fence, and has looked elite at certain points of the season and totally incompetent at other points.

I am truly fascinated by this Carlon matchup.

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Elliott to start game one

As of this writing on Thursday evening, Ole Miss has announced that Hunter Elliott will start against Arizona State on Friday night. This is not really shocking to me, though I understand, and in some ways, agree with, the idea to start someone else (Taylor Rabe).

I think this is the right decision. Hunter Elliott won a national championship for Ole Miss four short years ago. He’s the most decorated and experienced pitcher on the roster, despite not being the best pitcher in the rotation this season. Though I generally roll my eyes at this type of analysis, it’s valid to say this: he is the alpha and heartbeat of this team. Not handing him the baseball in this game would just simply emit an unnecessarily odd vibe. He’s the veteran, rugged bulldog. Give him the ball and dare him to lose in the postseason.

I do understand the arguments to the contrary. Taylor Rabe has been the best starter on the Ole Miss pitching staff. In his last two starts, Rabe has pitched 12 innings (six in each), struck out 27 hitters and walked one. He’s coming off a one-hit, 13 strikeout gem at Alabama. The 5 runs Rabe has allowed in his last two starts all came in one inning, against a rugged Texas A&M offense in an outing that was otherwise as dominant as any Ole Miss starting pitcher has delivered in the last three years. And he followed it up with arguably an even better one in Tuscaloosa seven days later.

All other factors stripped away, he’s Ole Miss best shot to win one single baseball game. But Ole Miss has to win a regional, not just one baseball game. And while I understand the (probably more statistically-sound) arguments and theories as to why Rabe should pitch in game one, this simple fact remains: if you lose game one of a regional, you have to then go 4-1 to win that regional. If you lose game two of a regional after winning game one, you still have to go 4-1 in totality to win that regional — the point is this: if Rabe wins game one and Elliott sucks in game two, you’re still in a pretty similar position than if the opposite had happened. I suppose the main difference is that if Ole Miss loses game one — like most other teams in this tournament — its likely screwed. Winning game one I suppose prolongs hope, but the goal is to 2-0 by any means necessary, because I don’t think this thin bullpen has the ability to come out of the loser’s bracket and back end this regional, whether they win game one or not.

And, on the flipside, if Elliott spins a gem and Ole Miss beats Arizona State tomorrow night, is there another two-seed in this field that would feel as good as Ole Miss would with Rabe ready in game two and Cade Townsend waiting in game three if the Rebels win again? I don’t think so. Starting Elliott is the correct decision. If he’s not good enough to give Ole Miss a chance to beat Arizona State, the Rebels were never winning this regional anyway.

A crazy hypothesis of sorts: what to do when Rabe leaves game two?

As I look further into this regional and Ole Miss’ chances to come out of it (which I think are pretty good), I wonder about the hypothetical scenarios that would allow them to do so. One that’s particularly interesting to me is this: let’s say Ole Miss beats Arizona State and wins game one. Then, Rabe is really good and the Rebels lead Nebraska 2-1 in the sixth inning of game two — so Ole Miss is 12 outs away from taking control of the Lincoln Regional and being the overwhelming favorite to win it.

What is Ole Miss’ plan after Rabe? Obviously, the answer to that question is largely shaped by what happened in the Arizona State game. I think it’s reasonable to assume that if the Rebels beat the Sun Devils, one of (and likely both) Hudson Calhoun and Walker Hooks were required to seal the victory. Let’s just assume they both were. In this aforementioned scenario above: what does Ole Miss do if Rabe exits in a tie game or with a lead? Do you go to either Calhoun or Hooks again for the second time in as many days? Do you bank on J.P. Robertson being good? One of those two avenues is likely what Ole Miss will do.

But I’ll offer you a third presented by esteemed podcast co-host Collin Brister: does Ole Miss dare go to Cade Townsend and just figure it out on Sunday assuming he does the job and the Rebels are 2-0? I doubt this happens, but it’s an interesting theory mostly because it’s been glaringly obvious all season that Ole Miss is one bullpen arm short from being a really good-to-great pitching staff. The Rebels spent much of this regular season trying to figure out how to cover 27 innings in a weekend with their rotation + Calhoun, Hooks and Robertson when needed. And they often found themselves stretched too thin.

It’s why Ole Miss pitched Calhoun and Hooks at Arkansas in game two despite having a sizeable lead. Granted, Baum-Walker Stadium was playing like a launchpad that day and I understood and agreed with the decision, but the choice to bring Calhoun into a 7-2 game with 11 outs left to acquire, and then Hooks in a 9-3 game with 5 outs needed, showed a lack of trust in anyone else in the Rebels bullpen to cement a victory.

Anyway, I do wonder what happens if Ole Miss finds themselves leading a winner’s bracket game on Saturday evening and Calhoun and Hooks have already pitched once. For the record, I do not believe Ole Miss would go to Townsend, I was just floating out the theory because.. well why not? And if they did, and it worked, what would then happen Sunday? My guess is Will Libbert would get the baseball with a chance to close out the regional — Libbert is what makes this winding theory that you’ve just wasted two minutes of your life reading a more coherent point: I don’t think Ole Miss can win a regional, super regional or make the College World Series without Libbert contributing to the team.

He’s a left-handed pitcher with an upper 90s fastball, a pretty good slider and a decent changeup. From a sheer aesthetics standpoint, if you watch Libbert pitch, it makes zero sense that he’s not an upper-tier SEC arm. But he’s not. His struggles, coupled with a few injuries have put the pitching staff in a tough spot. If Libbert performed well enough to remain in the rotation, Taylor Rabe isn’t a starter and is a high-leverage reliever. Imagine how differently you’d feel about this pitching staff if Rabe was a relief option in addition to Calhoun, Robertson and Hooks?

Point being, this bullpen is an arm short, and think the most likely person to shoulder the burden of alleviating this shortcoming for Ole Miss is Will Libbert, whether it be in long relief, as a starter in the long-winded scenario I just outlined or even as a starter in a loser’s bracket game to keep Ole Miss’ season alive.

We’ll see what happens.

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Closing notes from the Lincoln Regional

The only real newsworthy thing from the last few days that you should know entering this Lincoln regional is that Nebraska has elected to throw its ace, Carson Jasa, against No 4. seed South Dakota State. This is pretty surprising. I assumed the Huskers would hold him for a winner’s bracket game against either Ole Miss or Arizona State. Jasa is a 6-foot-7 right-hander with an upper 90s fastball, decent secondary stuff and has stepped up for the Huskers in a major way filling a needed void in their rotation. He earned all Big 10 honors. He’s struggled when his command goes awry.

No disrespect to South Dakota State, but there are different types of four seeds. There are teams like Murray State (ouch, sorry for bringing that up), or the PAC 12 Champion four-seed Utah that Ole Miss drew in 2016 that beat the Rebels that led to their early exit from Ole Miss’ home regional, and then there are teams like the Jackrabbits — who are only here because they won their conference tournament. South Dakota State went 12-15 in a six-team league and won the league tournament. They have almost no chance of beating Nebraska on Friday. So, why throw Jasa?

Here’s one theory: entering the season, Nebraska’s ace was supposed to be junior right-hander Ty Horn. The Huskers moved Horn from the rotation to a high-leverage bullpen role in late April, only to move him back to a starting role later in the year. I have no clue who Nebraska would throw against Ole Miss if it were to beat Arizona State. While I think it’s stupid for Nebraska to burn Jasa against a four seed, my guess is they are comfortable throwing a veteran in Horn in game two. The Huskers have an all-conference closer in J’Shawn Unger. I figure the idea behind throwing Jasa in game one is that Nebraska will win going away without any key bullpen arms being used and that the Huskers feel pretty good entering a winner’s bracket game with Horn and Unger ready to rip.

I could be completely wrong about that, and I think it’s silly Jasa is going to pitch against South Dakota State, but that’s my best guess as to why the Huskers elected to do that.

Final thoughts

Do I think Ole Miss can win this regional? Yes.

Do I think at its best, Ole Miss is the best team in this regional? Also yes

Would I bet my life, or any amount of money at all on the Rebels winning this regional? Absolutely not.

You all have watched the same team I’ve watched all year. It’s a maddening group that is not really an enjoyable watch. It’s kind of baffling that a team with a rotation this strong, on paper at least, and an offense with as much firepower as it has, is not playing in its own ballpark this weekend. This team has shown flashes of brilliance and filled in the gaps with mediocrity and ineptitude. These Rebels are capable of beating any team in the country on a given day, and are also capable of losing in uncompetitive fashion.

Which version of this Ole Miss team surfaces this weekend under the brightest spotlight? And for how many games? I am fascinated to find out.

Twenty-nine days ago, Lane Kiffin beamed as he sat in front of a microphone in the bowels of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, moments after his Ole Miss team cemented a 34-26 road win against Oklahoma that positioned the Rebels as surefire favorites to make the College Football Playoff.

The grin was coaxed by his own joke about hating the idea that he’s aging, the quip was prompted by a question about a moment Kiffin had on the field after the game in which he chucked his visor in the air in front of a euphoric crowd of Ole Miss fans in the visitor’s section. Kiffin then yelled something unintelligible that created an entire industry’s worth of message board interpreters.

“I don’t like to say I am getting older,” Kiffin said. “Like I told [the team] last night, ‘as I get older, I want to tell you things that I didn’t do, things that I hope you do differently.’”

After the visor hurl, Kiffin apparently called for his team to come out of the locker room and back out onto the field to soak in the moment.

“Just enjoy the moment. These things are hard to do,” Kiffin said. “I didn’t really have a plan. I just told them to go back out there and say thanks to the fans. But also to enjoy the moment. You are at an iconic stadium against a program that has won a million games here. Take in this moment instead of always trying to get to the next thing — which is kind of what I did my whole life. So, I just try to help them with that.”

It was a poignant moment for Kiffin, who had just led Ole Miss to its most consequential road win in a decade. It was also the latest track on an album of Kiffin’s creation.

One month prior to this scene, ESPN’s Ryan McGee released a (very well-done) documentary as part of ESPN’s E60 series titled “The Many Lives of Lane Kiffin”. The widely-viewed film detailed Kiffin’s almost inverted journey as a coach — from being the head coach of the Oakland Raiders at 31 years old, to being fired by USC at age 38, his enrollment in the Nick Saban School of Coaches Rehabilitation, rebuilding his career at Florida Atlantic and returning to the spotlight at Ole Miss — as well as his maturation as a man and a father. The film was in lockstep with a consistent and calculated message Kiffin has emitted over the last three years — that he’s a changed man who has found peace and contentment in his life, as he’s matured through failure.

Now, four weeks later after that moment in Norman, Ole Miss sits at 10-1 on the precipice of the program’s first ever College Football Playoff Berth. But his words ring hollow and his actions don’t match his words. Kiffin has turned a historic season for the Rebels into a sideshow, an ego-fueled circus to satisfy his unquenchable thirst for attention.

“Take in this moment instead of always trying to get to the next thing — which is kind of what I did my whole life. So, I just try to help them with that,” said the man who sent his family to Gainesville and Baton Rouge this week, days after Ole Miss beat Florida to get to 10-1 on the season.

“I want to tell you things that I didn’t do, things that I hope you do differently,’” said the man whose career has been built on a foundation of chaos and messy break-ups. The same man who, just three years ago, torpedoed the end of Ole Miss’ 2022 season because Auburn courted him for its head coaching vacancy.

After a week of the incredibly cringeworthy interviews, hypocritical quotes and cryptic morning devotionals on Twitter designed to stoke conversation to fuel his insatiable appetite to be desired, the incredibly-aloof Kiffin is showing everyone that his perceived metamorphosis as a man comes with caveats, because when it comes to his inability to appreciate the current place he resides in and the people that comprise it, he’s the same person he was 16 years ago when he left Tennessee in messy fashion. He’s the same person that he was 12 years ago when he was fired as USC’s head coach on a tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport after a road loss to Arizona State to fall to 1-3 on the season. The same person who, when he finally did get another head coaching opportunity at Florida Atlantic, couldn’t behave professionally for Alabama and Nick Saban — the man who gave him his first opportunity to rehabilitate his image and career — long enough to remain the offensive coordinator through the Crimson Tide’s national championship run in 2016.

As a decision on his future looms and his chaos-driven circus churns on, it’s worth asking a handful of questions. How did we get here? What happens next?

And perhaps above all else: what is Lane Kiffin actually chasing?

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The beginning of a strange but productive marriage

On December 8, 2019, a chilly Sunday evening, Lane Kiffin stepped off a University jet at the University-Oxford Airport to a sea of fans gathered on the tarmac. The next day there was a press conference inside the Pavilion, at which Kiffin promised to compete for championships. People drank beer on a Monday and celebrated a hire designed to “make a splash” by Keith Carter’s own admission. At that moment, Ole Miss was a desperate program starving to win again. Desperation often increases the appetite for risk. Carter and Ole Miss took one in hiring Kiffin because it meant accepting his grating, self-centered personality and checkered past. It was an odd marriage, but one that ultimately made sense due to their mutual desperation to win at the highest level.

In terms of on-field results, throughout the entire six-year marriage, both sides have delivered on promises. Kiffin has won at an unprecedented clip. Since Kiffin’s hiring, Ole Miss has won more games than any program in the SEC not named Alabama or Georgia. Kiffin went 10-2 in 2021, earned a Sugar Bowl berth and expedited Ole Miss’ return to prominence. After the 2021 season, the Florida and LSU jobs opened. Kiffin wasn’t considered a serious candidate for either vacancy — mostly due to that aforementioned grating personality and checkered past, the very same traits that Ole Miss was willing to deal with — but that doesn’t mean Kiffin wasn’t interested. He would’ve crawled across glass for either job, mostly because Kiffin has always viewed himself as better than Ole Miss, despite the Rebels giving him the opportunity and resources to revive his image and career — and yes, I know Arkansas was a suitor for Kiffin in 2021, but look at their administration (Hunter Yurachek, yikes), how it has handled NIL and its schedules over the last six years and tell me with a straight face that Twitter-Man Kiffin would’ve had the same level of prosperity.

2022 was a pivotal moment of growth for Kiffin, Ole Miss

The success of the 2021 season, coupled with Kiffin acting like a remotely normal human for 24 months and, at least publicly, not looking for the next exit ramp, brought with it other suitors. Ole Miss started the 2022 season 8-1. On November 12, Kiffin blew a 10-point lead to Alabama at home for the team’s second loss of the season — a gut-wrenching defeat to a man, Nick Saban, Kiffin became obsessed with beating in his early years in Oxford. Thirteen days prior to this loss, Auburn fired Bryan Harsin.

Seemingly unable to get over the Alabama defeat, the emotionally and socially-handicapped Kiffin decided that flirting with becoming Auburn’s next head coach — a program that’s proven to be utterly dysfunctional and fading toward irrelevance in the NIL era — was more important than the final two games of Ole Miss’ 2022 season. The temporary dopamine hit Kiffin got from someone new to flirt with took priority over on-field results and his current job. Despite Kiffin begging the public to believe he’s somehow changed and matured, the same tired, chaotic saga is predictably unfolding again.

The Rebels got boat-raced at Arkansas that next week and then lost at home to a Mississippi State team it had no business losing to, and limped to an 8-5 finish. After a melodramatic and eventful Thanksgiving week that now looks tame in comparison to this current saga he’s stirred, Kiffin elected to stay at Ole Miss and not go work for a former Mississippi State baseball coach/AD Jon Cohen, who fell upward into the Auburn AD job and basically described NIL as unsustainable, similar to the tech idiots in the 1990s who described the internet as a fad. Despite Kiffin’s melodramatic bullshit that left the program in limbo, Ole Miss welcomed him back with open arms.

The 2022 Auburn saga ignited the Ole Miss fanbase. Donations to the Grove Collective — an entity that’s been on the cutting edge of this new frontier of college athletics — flooded in. Ole Miss put its money where its mouth was and invested like a big-time program. Kiffin deserves credit for holding Ole Miss’ feet to the proverbial fire in terms of investing in the program at a top-of-the-SEC level. But is hardly the sole reason for the rise of Ole Miss’ football program.

The Ole Miss administration and its fans deserve a lot of credit for positioning the Rebels to thrive in this modern era, not just in football, but in all sports. The work of Keith Carter, William Liston, Walker Jones, Denson Hollis, Zach Scruggs and so many others in founding the Grove Collective, structuring it properly to ensure its long-term prosperity and continuing to adapt to an unprecedented era of college sports, is the single biggest driving force of the rise of the football program, despite Kiffin getting the lion’s share of the credit. Kiffin is the single biggest beneficiary of the Ole Miss administration operating more shrewdly than the rest of the country since July 1, 2021, when NIL became permissible. He’s also benefited from a ridiculously light schedule the past two seasons.

Kiffin is a really good football coach. And to his ever-lasting credit, he’s mostly capitalized on the infrastructure and resources Ole Miss has given him. An Egg Bowl win on Friday would mark 50 wins in five years. That doesn’t happen without Kiffin. It also doesn’t happen without the aforementioned alignment and innovation from the Ole Miss administration. One side seemingly understands and appreciates that. Kiffin does not.

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Real expectations came in 2024, and Kiffin shrank

Seemingly validated as a program after fending off Auburn — a program traditionally viewed as higher in the SEC pecking order prior to this NIL era that fans and media members alike struggle to calibrate their expectations to — Ole Miss capitalized on the momentum of Kiffin staying and went 11-2 in 2023, beat Penn State in the Peach Bowl and then put together the best transfer portal class in college football that offseason to set up a 2024 season that was unprecedented in terms of expectations. Ole Miss was a preseason top-10 team and, on paper, was a favorite to make the newly-expanded College Football Playoff.

Kiffin proceeded to lose at home, as three-score favorites, to a Kentucky team that went 4-8 (1-7), then lost to a mediocre LSU team in a game in which Ole Miss trailed for zero seconds, and capped off the gag job by again losing as double-digit favorites to an average Florida team (as the Rebels came off a bye week!) and squandered a golden opportunity to make the College Football Playoff. Not to mention, Kiffin spent half the season gaslighting the fanbase about the nonsensical usage of running backs, which culminated in the loss to Florida in which Ole Miss ran the football 35 times and only 10 carries went to players who were listed as a running back on the official roster.

The only person to blame for Ole Miss’ failure to make the 2024 College Football Playoff is Lane Kiffin, unless of course you ask Lane Kiffin, who is seemingly allergic to any form of accountability or introspection.

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The surprising success of the 2025 season has inconvenienced Kiffin

Simply put, one of the many reasons this situation has devolved into a farce is simply due to how this 2025 Ole Miss team has defied any sort of realistic preseason expectation.

Think about what the discussion was surrounding this team in July. Austin Simmons, a prodigy of his father’s creation, was the heir-apparent to Jaxson Dart. Despite having an even more favorable schedule than 2024, one that included eight home games, this was viewed as a transition year for Ole Miss as it ushered in a young, talented new quarterback and developed other younger players at other positions on the roster. No one in their right mind could have possibly predicted that Simmons would play seven quarters of football this year and that Ole Miss would ride a former Division II quarterback to a 10-1 record.

In a normal world, we’d be lauding this as Kiffin’s best coaching job since he’s been in Oxford — which it is.

But why aren’t we doing that? Is it perhaps because the head coach himself never believed this to be possible? And now that this impossibility has become a reality, the selfish and aloof enigma that is Lane Kiffin would rather wash his hands of a team, a program and a school that has answered the call at every turn, rather than see it through? His behavior certainly seems to suggest that.

That is perhaps the most damning portion of this entire saga. Kiffin didn’t think Ole Miss would be here, and now that Ole Miss is on the verge of being one of 12 teams capable of competing for a national championship, Kiffin can’t as easily move on to the perceived greener pastures he’s spent the last three years telling all of you he no longer views as greener.

This is what Ole Miss signed up for when it hired Kiffin

This is what you sign up for when you hire Lane Kiffin. Despite his self-serving media tour begging you to believe he’s a different person, this is who he his and who he has always been. When Kiffin flirted with Auburn in 2022, I wrote a story declaring that Ole Miss is paying the Lane Kiffin Tax. Ole Miss is still paying that tax today as its 10-1 regular season becomes secondary to Kiffin’s ego and addiction to attention.

The Lane Kiffin tax is the nomadic existence that is his entire career. Ole Miss is his longest career stop. This is a man that seemingly thrives on chaos. It’s the Twitter persona not matching his actual personality. It’s the inability to show any form of appreciation to the people and place in which he currently resides. Again, despite what he’s begging the public to believe, his behavior shows he’s the same man. Kiffin didn’t get fired on a tarmac at LAX solely because of a loss to Arizona State to fall to 1-3, he got left on a tarmac because USC was tired of dealing with Lane Kiffin, the grating personality, the narcissism and aloofness that has bubbled to the surface over the last week in Oxford.

Kiffin thought that he could coach this Ole Miss team through the playoff without committing to the program, and then leave for an in-conference foe and everything would be sunshine and roses. He thinks Ole Miss should be thankful for every hour and second he graces its program with his presence, you, the Ole Miss fan, are simply incapable of understanding the genius of a 47-year-old man who spent the night before Thanksgiving in 2022 trolling all of you and tweeting his dog. The fact that Kiffin thought he could coach in the Playoff and then leave underscores the remarkable aloofness and inability to understand social cues and perception that’s troubled him his entire career.

Once he made this obvious discovery, he made a hilariously tone deaf attempt to do his version of damage control. On Tuesday morning, Kiffin appeared on the Pat McAfee show. The 20-minute interview was inauthentic and difficult to watch.

“It was great to get that Saturday night SEC win. Our crowd and our fans were electric,” said the man who, just four days prior, when asked about the crowd at the Florida game being a Blue Blood-like environment, used the moment to take a shot at the fanbase by responding “were you here last week?” referring to the fact that Ole Miss did not have a sellout for a noon kick against the Citadel.

McAfee is a wildly successful modern media figure. He is not a journalist and would likely happily admit that. The decision for Kiffin to go on that show, where he knows he won’t get pressed on anything at all, was calculated. McAfee would welcome the Unabomber on his show to tell his side of the story on mailboxes and technology if it meant more views for his show.

Then, the next day, on Wednesday, Kiffin had his appearance on the weekly SEC coaches teleconference, where he was peppered with questions by actual reporters, which led to several awkward exchanges.

“I’m saying the same thing for six years. I’m not talking about speaking on other jobs. I’m focused on this one,” said a man two days removed from sending members of his family to Baton Rouge and Gainesville.

“Somehow it got spun really negatively. I said it before. If programs want your coach, okay, that should be looked at as an amazing thing and a great thing by your fans. So programs want your coach because you’re 10-1 and whatever. We’ve run three 10-win seasons in a row, which has never been done in Ole Miss before,” Kiffin said. “Is that a good thing that other programs want your coach because your program’s experienced success it’s never had? Or would you rather be 5-6 or 6-5 or something right now and no one wants your coach? I would look at it from that perspective.”

You hear that, you, the Ole Miss fan? It’s a good thing that your head coach won’t commit to remaining with the program that’s 10-1 with a chance to win a National Title. You should shut up and enjoy it while the head coach figures out the best way to leave a place he sees as beneath him.

Again, this is what Ole Miss signed up for when it hired Lane Kiffin. He’s a man who has made a career of being a nomad and has refused to show any appreciation to his current employer. That’s all fine, but it’s more difficult to digest when the man you hired feigns a newfound sense of appreciation for his life and the opportunity he’s been given, only to torpedo the best season in modern history the moment someone else shows him attention.

Think about the absurdity of all of this for a second: the week of the Florida game, Kiffin granted an interview to Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger — who, for my money, is the most talented writer and reporter currently covering college football — who wrote a story last week titled “College football’s most-coveted coach has found a home at Ole Miss. But is Oxford enough for Lane Kiffin?”

In the story, Kiffin called his life “like a movie”. Six days later, after beating Florida, he sent his family to Gainesville and Baton Rouge to explore a new future. Kiffin will piss on your head and tell you it’s raining, and you’ll like it, too, because he’s better than Ole Miss and better than all of you.

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Kiffin now has a decision to make: Am I willing to be a villain again?

Continuing the embarrassing behavior that made the last week such a vapid cry for attention, as Ole Miss entered a bye week before it goes to Starkville for the most consequential Egg Bowl in Ole Miss history, what did Kiffin do? He called his recruiting staff off the road to return to Ole Miss for a previously unplanned Friday practice that left coaches and players in a state of confusion, multiple sources confirmed to Rippee Writes.

After the bizarre, unscheduled practice entering an otherwise routine bye week, Kiffin met with Athletics Director Keith Carter on Friday. I have no idea what happened in that meeting but it led to Carter, who is a smart man, and a shrewd operator, to put out this bizarre statement that Kiffin’s future will be decided after the Egg Bowl.

Again, think about the absurdity of all of this: entering a bye week before Ole Miss goes to Starkville to cement a playoff berth and cap off the best regular season in modern history, the AD had to put out a statement about the head coach’s future and asked everyone not to lose sight of what is most important — winning the game and punching a ticket to compete for a national title. The irony in all of this is that the only person who lost sight of this abundantly obvious fact is the head coach.

According to multiple sources, the parting message Kiffin left his team with on Friday before entering the bye week was to eliminate “any distractions.” One can only wonder how that message resonated with his locker room as they spent the weekend opening social media and turning on their TV to discussions regarding Kiffin’s future.

After last Saturday’s win over Florida, Kiffin was asked about his future at Ole Miss.

“To even talk about it would be so disrespectful to our players and how they played today,” said the man who spent the week doing damage control after sending his family to scope out his potential future. Which is more disrespectful? Turning a 10-1 season the players have spent the last nine months working their asses off in favor of more attention to the supposed adult running the program, or is it more disrespectful to honestly answer a question in a press conference? The world may never know.

So, what is to be made of all of this? This is purely my opinion, but I believe Lane Kiffin wants to be the next head coach at LSU. I think the unexpected success of the 2025 season has inconvenienced this desire and he’s currently grappling with this question: will he actually leave a playoff team to take another job, in the same conference, and is a bitter rival?

To say that it would be an unpopular decision would be an understatement. The fact that he seemingly doesn’t want to be at Ole Miss and is willing to tank a chance at competing for a national championship is bewildering. Trying to understand the enigma that is Kiffin leads to the final question I asked.

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What is Lane Kiffin actually chasing?

Ole Miss has given Kiffin every possible tool he’s asked for to win at a high level. Since Kiffin’s arrival in Oxford, the rules and economics of college football have changed. Hell, Ole Miss is perhaps the best example of the change in college football over the last four years.

Due to NIL and the transfer portal, Blue Blood programs can no longer hoard talent, like Saban did in the peak of the Alabama dynasty. Top-level prospects aren’t going to wait multiple years to get onto the field at Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State or wherever else, when they can go get paid elsewhere and get on the field immediately. The average margin of victory in SEC games has essentially been cut in half over the last eight years, and has shrunk by nearly six points since NIL became legal. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a data-backed trend.

In this modern era where parity reigns supreme, what matters most? Fan investment in terms of consistent NIL, administration alignment, elite coaching and talent evaluation. Ole Miss checks all of those boxes. Are there built-in advantages at the traditional blue blood jobs like LSU and Florida? Sure, but those intangible and unquantifiable advantages seem to be less important in this modern era.

Is he chasing winning at the highest level? Because leaving a playoff team to go start over somewhere else is the antithesis of wanting to win at the highest level.

Is he chasing a traditional blue blood job? Maybe. But the short-sighted nature of that line of thinking is that whatever program he romanticizes that isn’t Ole Miss will put up with the bizarre, narcissistic bullshit that comes with hiring Lane Kiffin. Imagine Kiffin being 4-3 in year three at LSU and tweeting a photo of Mike the Tiger laying in his cage with some fortune cookie-like quote about blocking out distractions. I am sure that will go over very well.

Is he chasing the ability to be loved and appreciated as himself? Ole Miss has allowed Kiffin to be weird, selfish and has stroked his ego at all costs. Hell, the man bought a dog and it became the de facto mascot of the school. The assumption that Kiffin’s idiosyncrasies and grating personality would be as accepted elsewhere is silly.

Perhaps he’s chasing something that doesn’t exist. Lane Kiffin might be perpetually longing for the next thing he doesn’t have.

Or, maybe, he’s not chasing anything at all. Maybe he’s trying to out-run his own insecurities as a coach — the ones that squandered a national title-level roster in 2024.

Maybe he’s trying to outrun the version of himself that he’s spent the last three years telling the public he’s left in the past. Maybe Lane Kiffin is chasing a version of himself he’s not capable of becoming.

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Ole Miss hosts Arkansas on Saturday night at 6 p.m. as the Rebels continue an eventful month of September and try to improve to 2-0 in SEC play. Here are five things I am thinking about before kickoff.

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1. Who plays quarterback for Ole Miss?

The most pressing issue Ole Miss faces entering this game is the health of quarterback Austin Simmons. The redshirt sophomore injured his ankle in the fourth quarter of the win at Kentucky. Simmons popped up on Wednesday’s initial injury report as ‘probable’ and then was removed altogether from Thursday’s updated report. I likely don’t need to remind most of you that Lane Kiffin hates this mandated injury reporting system and does not take it seriously at all. Last year, he’d have 30 players on it one week and two the next week. Given the lack of regulation and penalties in place for not putting out accurate injury information, this report is a perfect vehicle for Kiffin to use to troll a required exercise that he detests, rather than give an accurate update.

Personally, I do not put much stock in Simmons being removed from the injury report. Multiple people with knowledge of the situation told Rippee Writes that Simmons was very limited in practice all week and that there is a serious chance that the Rebels might be forced to turn to back-up Trinidad Chambliss — a senior transfer from DII Ferris State, where he won a national title. If that is indeed the case, how different will the Ole Miss offense look on Saturday? Perhaps we got a small taste of it when Chambliss led a scoring drive late in the fourth quarter in last week’s win at Kentucky to essentially ice game, but that was more of a four-minute offense situation in which the Rebels were trying to gain first downs running the football and were battling the clock as much as they were trying to score.

If Simmons is able to play, he will obviously be compromised. It’s worth wondering how different the offense will look with a hobbled Simmons. It is interesting to me that Kiffin said, point blank, during preseason camp, that the staff did not anticipate using Simmons in the running game much at all. After two weeks and one real SEC test, that is proving to be an inaccurate prediction. Several designed runs for Simmons have been called in the season’s first eight quarters. What changed? Is it due to poor offensive line play? A lack of running back depth behind Lacy? I am curious as to why Simmons carried the ball eight times against Kentucky (not all designed runs). And I wonder how much he will be used in the running game going forward, particularly considering he is already battling an injury because of his usage carrying the football.

I do not know what to make of all of this in terms of who starts on Saturday against the Razorbacks. Maybe it’s Kiffin being coy and throwing what he thinks is a smoke screen. I have reason to believe that is not the case. My guess is that it will be a game-time decision. Simmons will go through warm-ups, get shot up with Toradol or whatever the hell it is they gave Jaxson Dart during last year’s Georgia game, and the staff will decide who gives Ole Miss the best chance to win from there. It will be interesting to see who runs out for the first series.

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2. The offensive line

This will likely be a mainstay in this content item throughout the year until this unit proves it can be an above average SEC offensive line. Ole Miss struggled on the interior offensive line for the second straight game in the win over Kentucky. The Rebels did rush for 220 yards on 4.6 yards per carry, which is a positive sign. Kewan Lacy offers a level of explosiveness that Ole Miss simply did not have in the offensive backfield last year — even with the Ulysses Bentley saga. But a bad snap set the forces in motion for one of Simmons’ two interceptions and the Wildcats were able to consistently pressure Simmons, particularly early in the game.

Arkansas is not a good SEC defense. In fact, it could end up being one of the worst three defenses in the SEC by season’s end. Arkansas has several newcomers on its defensive line and the linebacking corps is pretty solid. The secondary is where the Razorbacks are likely to face challenges on defense this year. With that said, Ole Miss has had offensive line issues against the likes of Georgia State and a Kentucky team that could end up being the worst team in the conference. The offensive line will need to fare better to help whoever is at quarterback for the Rebels on Saturday.

3. Can the Rebels lean on the defense for a win?

I thought the Ole Miss defense was good, not great, against Kentucky. There were mistakes, and the Rebels allowed 20 points against a pretty putrid Wildcats offense, but when it mattered most and when the game hung in the balance, the defense got back-to-back stops to seal the win.

The test the Ole Miss defense will face on Saturday will be fairly unique in terms of anything Pete Golding’s defense has seen over the last year. Arkansas quarterback Taylen Green is a 6-foot-6, athletic quarterback who is a much better runner than he is a thrower of the football. Ole Miss did not get a full dosage of Green in the Rebels’ blowout win in Fayetteville last fall. Green was injured that week and split time with Malachi Singleton (who has since transferred to Purdue). Green is a dynamic running threat. The Ole Miss defense didn’t face a lot of mobile quarterbacks last season. The Rebels fared pretty well against D.J. Lagway — Lagway’s legs were not the reason Florida won that game. South Carolina’s LaNorris Sellers rushed 15 times for 55 yards against Ole Miss in Columbia last season, which is a fairly significant output when you factor in the six sacks (and the loss of yardage that comes with it) he absorbed. But aside from one long run in the 30-yard range, I don’t remember Sellers killing Ole Miss with his feet in a game the Rebels won 27-3, but I could be mistaken.

Arkansas might finish in the bottom third of the SEC this year, but it won’t be because of their offense. Offensive coordinator Bobby Petrino has produced highly-productive offenses at every single stop of his career over the last 20 years and the Razorback offense will be a significant challenge for Golding’s defense.

Whether it’s a compromised Simmons or Chambliss at quarterback, Ole Miss is going to need its defense to play very well in order to win this football game. Golding is as good as anyone in the sport when it comes to week-to-week schematics. I am fascinated to see how he tries to contain Green, how he uses Suntarine Perkins, and what the defense front looks like on a down-by-down basis in this game.

With Ole Miss’ uncertainty at quarterback, here’s a simplistic lens through which to view this game: If Arkansas scores more than 25 points, the Rebels could be in trouble. If Arkansas scores fewer than 20 points, Ole Miss is likely going to win this game. That is just my opinion, and I am often wrong. Golding’s defense played at a Playoff-caliber level every week last season. It’s the offense that kept Ole Miss out of the inaugural 12-team invitational. On Saturday, Ole Miss may have to lean on its defense again to beat Arkansas.

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4. The receiving corps

This is less about the receivers being a key to this game and more so about me being interested in how Ole Miss disperses the football to what appears to be a deep receiver room with diverse skill sets. Tre Wallace and Deuce Alexander each caught four passes last weekend and carried the bulk of the yardage production. Ole Miss only completed a total of 13 passes in the game. I am curious to see what this looks like on Saturday. I am told Arkansas transfer tight end Luke Hasz practiced this week. He was touted to be a key part of this passing game. Does he play? And if so, what is his role?

We haven’t seen much from the veteran of this pass-catching unit, Cayden Lee, so far this year. I don’t think that really means a whole lot. We are only talking about four real quarters of football so far this season. You can’t gauge much of anything about this team from the Rebels destroying Georgia State on Labor Day weekend. Is this a game in which Lee becomes the reliable option for a back-up QB in Chambliss or a hobbled Simmons? Ole Miss didn’t push the football down the field much against Kentucky. Most of the completions it executed were within 15 yards of the line of scrimmage and the chunk plays came from Wallace and Alexander’s ability to make their primary defenders miss tackles and dart upfield.

Again, I am not citing the receiving unit as a key to Ole Miss winning this game. I think the Rebels have a deep and talented receiving corps. I am just curious to gain another four-quarter sample size of what that group looks like.

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5. Is Ole Miss capable of winning in a Vintage Kiffin style

This is likely a bad headline, but I couldn’t come up with anything better despite trying. What I mean is that with the uncertainty Ole Miss has at quarterback, is this offense capable of running for 250-plus yards, leaning on a bad Arkansas defense, controlling the tempo of the game and winning at its own pace?

Lacy gives Ole Miss an element of explosiveness that it has not had since Quinshon Judkins — while that name is probably a sore subject among fans, and I am certainly not comparing the two running backs, it's simply the truth. I am far less confident in what Ole Miss has behind Lacy than I ever was with what Ole Miss had behind Judkins (Zach Evans and Bentley), but assuming Lacy is the bell cow, remains healthy and gets the majority of the carries in this game, is this offense, and particularly this offensive line — for one game at least— capable of running the football at the level that the 2021 and 2022 offenses did on a regular basis. It seems like Ole Miss could use a vintage offensive performance — like LSU in 2021 (249 yards rushing), Texas A&M in 2022 (390 yards rushing), or Tennessee 2021 (279 yards rushing) — to win a game with a compromised (or back-up quarterback).

For that to be the case, the interior of the offensive line must be better. I have doubts as to whether this subpar offensive line unit is capable of producing such an output, but it certainly feels like the Rebels could use it against a pesky but capable Arkansas team in a series that always seems to get weird.

To conclude, if Ole Miss wishes to be even a remotely serious threat to make the College Football Playoff, it must win this game — somehow, some way. There is no realistic path to this team playing meaningful football in the month of November with a loss to Arkansas on its resume. How this game plays out is as big of a mystery to me as any game in the Kiffin era. But, like most of you, I am incredibly eager to find out. We’ll have more on Sunday. Thanks for reading.

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Ole Miss kicked off its season with a 63-7 thrashing of Georgia Southern.

I did not figure we would learn a ton about an Ole Miss team that I feel is more of an unknown commodity than any team in the Kiffin era, other than his first one ( that weird, COVID-riddled 2020 season), but here are a handful of observations I had from the win.

Simmons’ career begins in earnest

Austin Simmons waited two years for this. On Saturday, he took the field for his first collegiate start. It’s now his team and he’s the face of this program. Simmons is a remarkable talent. I did a story on him this summer that you can read here. In reporting that story, I spoke to several of Austin’s family members, coaches and even his childhood tutor. His father is a former collegiate athlete and is a high school football coach. His mother is a first generation Bahamian immigrant who works as an admissions counselor for a college. His entire life to this point has been structured by two pillars: sports and an expedited education track. Austin was home-schooled from the time he was in eighth grade. He graduated high school two years early. His father has been the architect of his athletic life since Austin could walk, and now, he’s an SEC quarterback on the precipice of stardom.

Simmons’ debut went about how I expected. The arm talent is clearly elite. When scouts and evaluators use the phrase “the ball just looks different coming out of his hand,” think of Simmons, because he is a textbook example of what that phrase means. That was clearly on display on Saturday. He also made mistakes. He threw two interceptions. One was a poor decision on a throw into the end zone. The other one wasn’t really his fault as he was ambushed by defensive linemen that breached the interior of Ole Miss’ offensive line, hit him and affected the throw. Those two things. decision-making and protection will tell the tale of Simmons’ 2025 season — and Ole Miss’ for that matter.

If Ole Miss can protect Simmons, he will thrive. If Simmons can limit poor decisions, the offense will thrive. It reminds me of Jaxson Dart’s 2022 season at Ole Miss. Most fans rightfully remember Dart as a poised decision-maker who was tough as hell and the leader of the team. But if you think back to the 2022 season, Dart’s first full year as a starter at the collegiate level, he made a handful of head-scratching decisions throwing the football in most games. It’s natural for any young, inexperienced quarterback. There will be growing pains with Simmons, too. How quickly he is able to learn how to mitigate them will drastically shape the trajectory of Ole Miss’ season.

One thing that stuck out to me about Simmons is that he’s clearly up to the challenge from a mental standpoint. He made a bad throw on that interception, but it wasn’t due to trepidation or a lack of poise, but rather being too aggressive. He is clearly ready for this moment and prepared to take on this role. I talked to Simmons a couple of weeks before that story was published. I asked him about that drive against Georgia last November, when he replaced an injured Jaxson Dart, led the team on a touchdown drive that shifted the momentum of that game — a drive that really kickstarted the hype surrounding him entering this year. I asked him if he was nervous in that moment. He scoffed at the notion and told me that he’s never been nervous before a sporting event in his life. The matter-of-fact manner that he discussed that drive and how he simply did his job the way he was supposed to do it was pretty remarkable for someone who lacked experience. What he certainly does not lack is confidence.

In my opinion, the first throw Simmons made after the end zone interception (the one that was a poor decision on his part) is emblematic of his confidence.

He threw a perfect football to Penn State transfer Trey Wallace down the far sideline. Simmons finished with a line of 20-31 for 341 yards, three touchdowns and the two interceptions. It’s tough to definitively analyze a quarterback after one game against an inferior opponent, but on a Saturday in which young, inexperienced quarterbacks across the country struggled in their debuts, Simmons certainly looked the part.

The offensive line, yet again, appears to be a potential liability

The Ole Miss offensive line did not have a great day on Saturday, particularly the interior offensive line. Simmons was sacked just one time, a number that would have likely been higher if not for Simmons’ mobility. Georgia State registered four quarterback hurries.

The Simmons interception that was not his fault didn’t come as result of a blitz or a pass rusher on the edge getting to Simmons, right guard Patrick Kutas got beat so badly, an interior defensive lineman hit Simmons before he released the football — a scenario that is not exactly common as far as a pass rush and turnovers are concerned. There is a reason that, generally speaking, defensive tackles don’t register high sack numbers. It’s usually the defensive ends and edge players that get to the quarterback. Lane Kiffin had an interesting quote about this play.

“Yeah, that one wasn’t his fault,” Kiffin said. “The right guard gets beat. They’re in a blown coverage and we are going to score a 70-yard touchdown walking into the end zone, yet the guy that blows the coverage is who picks it off.”

The right guard Kiffin is referring to is Arkansas transfer Patrick Kutas, who Ole Miss signed with the hope that he would improve an offensive line that is the most glaring reason that an uber-talented 2024 Rebels team did not make the college football playoff. Georgia State sent pressure into the interior of Ole Miss’ offensive line and had great success in doing so.

Ole Miss started Brycen Sanders at center, Charlotte transfer P.J. Wilkins at left guard, Diego Pounds at left tackle and Jaydin Williams at right tackle.

I am not at all a savant on offensive line play, and I always hesitate to give opinions/criticize specific positions on performance because there is so much that goes into it that I don’t understand. With that said, to me, it seemed like Kutas and Wilkins really struggled at the two guard spots, and that while Sanders seemingly played fine, the ineptitude on either side of him made his life harder — again, just my uneducated opinion.

Entering the season, the offensive line was seemingly the biggest concern surrounding this Ole Miss team (much like last year). Also like last year, Ole Miss is dealing with some injuries that occurred before the season. UAB transfer Delano Townsend and Maryland transfer Terez Davis did not play in the game and it’s been widely speculated that both are dealing with injuries, though it doesn’t sound like either guy is expected to miss the entirety of the season. So, in fairness, Ole Miss is not dealing with a full deck on the offensive line.

One of the concerning aspects of the offensive line, in my opinion, is that we watched a similar script last year. To refresh your memory, last year, the Rebels dealt with injuries to Caleb Warren and (USM transfer) Gerquan Scott in the preseason, then veteran Jeremy James got injured week one. Losing three key contributors before week two is a tough pill for any team to swallow. The alarming lesson we learned last year is that, even when those guys got healthy, a fragile Ole Miss offensive line didn’t actually get any better. It got worse. And two of the three aforementioned injured players never made their way back to significant playing time. So, while the fact that Ole Miss is yet again without two players on the offensive line, that it believes can help them win football games, I have a hard time believing their return will be some drastic difference-making factor in the unit’s performance, mostly based on prior history.

The last thing I would like to harp on when it comes to the offensive line is the strategy of building it. To preface that, let’s remember that it’s only week one. This unit could absolutely just need some time to gel and could become a serviceable offensive line. But after a season in which a generationally-talented Ole Miss team missed the 12-team College Football Playoff largely due to ineptitude on the offensive line, the program’s strategy in rectifying the issue is bizarre to me. Lane Kiffin has a pretty damn good track record of hiring assistant coaches. His batting average is pretty high. He’s never shown much hesitation in changing coaching staff members to improve a specific aspect of his program. But after last year’s offensive line debacle, he elected to retain offensive line coach John Garrison. Ole Miss then brought in five transfer linemen: Kutas, Davis, Townsend, Wilkins and (Auburn transfer) Percy Lewis.

It seems clear they are going to rely on four of those five to be significant contributors. What is puzzling about this strategy to me is that it is identical to the strategy that led to the 2024 debacle — except with lesser players. Prior to the 2024 season, Ole Miss paid top dollar for the pair of Washington transfers, Julius Buelow and Nate Kalepo — a pair seen as the cream of the crop of the available offensive line portal talent, as well as Pounds (North Carolina). The results were horrific. Yet, Ole Miss seemingly changed nothing about how they approached rectifying the issue this offseason. Same coach, same concept of portaling together an offensive line. Obviously, there are a variety of factors in all of this that I am not privy to, but generally speaking, it looks like doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result — which is the definition of insanity.

Poor offensive line play is an epidemic across Power Four College Football. On the Rippee Writes podcast, I did opponent previews with all eight SEC opponents Ole Miss plays this year — every single writer, with the exception of Florida beat writer Graham Hall, identified offensive line play as a cause for concern for the programs they cover. It’s not a coincidence. NIL and the transfer portal have created an ecosystem of rapid roster turnover and 50-plus newcomers on a team becoming the norm. The offensive line is really the only position group in football that is not conducive to that. High school recruiting matters. Development matters. It’s the only position group in which plug-and-play out of high school is nearly impossible. Offensive linemen enter a college program out of high school and need to gain muscle mass and weight, and the adjustment to SEC defensive lines compared to high school defensive lines is likely the largest gap to cover compared to any other position group in the sport.

Unless Devin Harper, a talented true freshman Ole Miss signed out of Calvary Baptist HS in Shreveport, Louisiana, plays this year — Sanders is the only offensive lineman that will contribute to this team that the program signed out of high school. To use a term I was known for in my radio days: that seems suboptimal.

I don’t blame Ole Miss for going out and signing more portal guys to fix it. If the staff doesn’t believe it has enough developed high school prospects on the roster that are ready to play, then I suppose the portal is the only option. I just know that the offensive line appears to be a problem yet again, and Ole Miss seemingly didn’t alter its approach at all in terms of fixing it, which is puzzling.

Again, it’s one game. If the offensive line plays well over the next four games and the Rebels are 5-0 after a win over LSU entering the month of October, I will happily admit I was wrong in my concern, but for now, the offensive line looks like the position group that will hold this team back more so than any other area — and it’s the second year in a row that appears to be the case.

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The Rebels are clearly more talented at running back

Missouri transfer Kewan Lacy ran the football 16 times, earned 108 yards and scored three touchdowns in the win over Georgia State. Rehashing last year’s running back debacle will likely make most of my readers want to drive into oncoming traffic, so I will spare you the misfortune of recapping that saga, but the point is that Lacy looked like an above average SEC running back. Just ask Lane Kiffin.

“I’ll just tell you how it is. We did not have that last year,” Kiffin said. “It is really good to have that That’s how he practices. He’s got a really unique skill set of speed and power. When a guy can break and not get caught, it makes it a lot easier not to call more plays afterward. That was good to see.”

I have no clue what Kiffin is referencing here, or whether or not it’s a shot at Ulysses Bentley or any of the personnel last year, but clearly he trusts Lacy more than any running back he had on the roster a year ago. It’s also hilariously ironic that Georgia State’s leading rusher in this game was Rashad Amos, but enough about that.

LSU transfer Logan Diggs was the only other ball carrier to get extensive action in the game. Diggs transferred to Ole Miss from LSU last year, but missed the entirety of the season due to a leg injury he suffered in LSU’s bowl game the previous year. Diggs played in the Gator Bowl win over Duke. I didn’t really know what to make of it, and if I am being completely honest, I didn’t have much of an opinion on his seven-carry, 91-yard output in this game. What I do know is that having a serviceable SEC running back behind Lacy will be a significant advantage for Ole Miss and I am curious to see what Diggs’ workload looks like over the next two weeks as the Rebels play Kentucky and Arkansas.

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The pass-catching options are interesting

Describing Ole Miss’ pass-catching corps as ‘interesting’ in the header feels like a bit of a cop out. I would like to declare that the Rebels’ receivers are better and the unit is deeper than it was in 2024, but I think I need to see more. With that said, Ole Miss has a diverse and talented group of targets. Penn State transfer Trey Wallace caught five balls for 130 yards and a touchdown. Dae’Quan Wright reminded the public that he had one hell of year last season and is a really good tight end. We didn’t see a ton of Oklahoma State transfer De’Zhaun Stribling in the opener. He caught three passes for 55 yards. I make nothing of that. It’s the season opener. The staff raved about this guy in the offseason. He will be a significant factor in this offense. Veteran Cayden Lee registered two catches in this game. We all know what Lee is and what he brings to the offense, I only mention it to reiterate that judging receiving corps production after a game is silly.

Alabama transfer Caleb Odom is a physical freak and an intriguing storyline as far as how Ole Miss uses him. I am very bullish on this pass-catching corps and think it will end up yielding a much better result than the whole ‘force feed Tre Harris when things get tight’ offense of last year.

Ole Miss having Pete Golding as DC is such an undervalued advantage

Ole Miss put out a press release before the season that Pete Golding signed a contract extension that will make him the highest paid assistant in college football. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Golding has been excellent since he’s been at Ole Miss.

Ole Miss had one of the best defenses in college football last year. It was certainly not the reason the Rebels failed to make the Playoff. Ole Miss lost a lot off of that defense a year ago, which is interesting. I’ll ask, you, the reader, a question: did you hear more this offseason about Ole Miss’ potential issues on offense or defense? Personally, I heard more about the offensive line, a new quarterback and an unknown receiving corps. While valid concerns, this defense lost a boatload of talent. Why was that not more of a storyline (again, maybe it was. This is all subjective), but I think part of it is due to the track record Golding has built. He’s recruited incredibly well. Ole Miss lost Walter Nolen, J.J Pegues and Jared Ivey off the defensive line. But uber-talented prospects like Will Echoles and Kam Franklin were waiting in the wings. Golding signed LSU transfer Da’Shawn Womack, who looked dominant in the season opener.

Linebacker transfers Tahj Chambers (Missouri State) Jaden Yates (Marshall) played a lot — a combined 59 snaps — and add to a group headlined by T.J. Dottery, and (in whatever form they choose to use him) Suntarine Perkins. Chucky Mullins Award-winner Tyler Banks only got 18 snaps in the game. I am not saying anything should be made of that, it’s just indicative of Golding’s trust in the newcomers.

I could write 5,000 words on the secondary alone and what it has to replace from last year, and I likely will cover the secondary more in the coming days, but I suppose my point is that Golding, in my opinion, has proven himself to be an elite talent evaluator and a tremendous defensive coordinator. He also seems completely content in his current job and is not looking to leave for another, for a myriad of reasons.

I am going to write about this later in the week, but after watching a preseason camp load of player interviews, the way the players describe Golding is sort of fascinating to me. Each player interviewed said some variation of “the guy is a schematic genius. I don’t worry about where he moves me or what I am asked to do because I know that guy only puts players in positions in which their strengths will be maximized.”

That is, of course, not a real direct quote and a generalization of about a dozen players, but the general theme is not inaccurate. Golding seems to have a knack for establishing something with his players that is increasingly hard to achieve in this modern era in which the transfer portal and NIL give players an infinite amount of others options — trust. Golding’s player’s seem to totally trust him. That, to me, is as invaluable as anything else in this modern era of college sports.

A thank you to the readers

I have a lot more I would like to get into about this Ole Miss Football team and there is a lot more that I could have covered in week one. But at the risk of making this, a 10,000 word manifesto, that is all for now.

I want to take a moment to thank each of you out there (who clearly read to the end!) for reading and supporting this newsletter. I have not been very consistent in producing content in the last 9-12 months for a myriad of reasons, but consider this newsletter as a relaunch of what will be a regular content item in your inboxes. I want this to be something people look forward to reading and that would all be futile without your subscription and support. So, cheers to the next iteration of a great thing and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for being a loyal reader. You’ll hear from Rippee Writes again here real soon.

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Fewer than five days after Ole Miss Basketball’s season ended in Atlanta, after the Rebels’ fell 73-70 to Michigan State in what was just the second Sweet 16 appearance in program history, the much-maligned basketball program received a jolt of validation that arguably rivals the significance of its appearance in the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament.

On Wednesday afternoon, Ole Miss Athletics publicly announced that Chris Beard agreed to a contract extension that will keep him in Oxford for the foreseeable future. This announcement, of course, was calculated and hardly unprompted.

On Tuesday, Texas A&M head coach Buzz Williams left the Texas Cult of Scientology to accept the same role at Maryland. Williams is a career nomad who never sticks around at a program for more than five-to-seven years. It’s a smart strategy. He’s a good basketball coach and he leaves before the mob of critics ever form and ignite their torches. But the move was still seen as somewhat shocking in the college basketball world. Why is that? It’s a fascinating question to ponder.

A New Frontier

In the world of college athletics, Texas and Texas A&M are seen as the closest thing to the Saudi Public Investment Fund as anything that exists within the ecosystem, and with good reason, too. Both are massive public institutions in one of the richest states in the country, with uber-wealthy alumni bases that supply a seemingly bottomless amount of funds to ensure the success of the sports teams.

On July 1, 2021, the perpetually short-sighted NCAA introduced new bylaws that allowed athletes to profit off of their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL). Though none of the bureaucratic empty-suited morons involved in that decision making process knew at it at the time, it essentially ended one era of history and birthed another. College sports as we knew it ended that day. The anti-American farce of a concept that was amateurism was finally (legally) dead and a completely lawless economy, that previously existed as a shadowy black market, became mainstream. Everything you knew or assumed about college sports became moot that day, whether you knew it or not.

Like any other undiscovered frontier in human history, a new landscape presents great opportunity: it allows the adaptable and opportunistic to thrive and essentially forces the passive and bewildered to flounder.

There has never been a clearer line of demarcation in college athletics, and it’s signified by quality of leadership. If you have smart leaders, anyone can thrive. If you have morons in charge, your ship will sink. It’s never been more matter of fact in a constantly changing landscape that requires foresight and adaptation. History, tradition, and the nonsensical label of being a ‘blue-blood,’ have repeatedly proven to be outdated labels that can best be described as utter bullshit in this new era.

Ole Miss has tremendous leadership. It is thriving in this modern era. As we’ve covered extensively both in this space and on RebelGrove.com, Ole Miss’ collective, the Grove Collective, is the gold standard. And it’s because Ole Miss acted while most stood idly by (click the link to read how and why). The decision to act fast, form the Grove Collective (the correct way, as in not a 501C3) is still paying dividends to this day, including this development of retaining Beard.

So, in this NIL era, where money can be thrown at athletes openly, instead of in McDonald’s bags in cash in a Wal-Mart parking lot (shoutout Jeremy Pruitt), why hasn’t one of the richest schools in the country (A&M) thrived?

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Dysfunction Breeds Chaos

Williams is a Texas native. He’s made four Sweet 16s and an Elite Eight in his career. He took an ACC program with little basketball history, Virginia Tech, to the Sweet 16 before he left for A&M. Though he’s a career nomad, many figured he’d finally made his way back home in College Station, and wouldn’t leave. But he did. And it’s not just the fact that he left, it’s who he left for.

Maryland’s job was open because its coach, former Seton Hall head coach and now-Villanova head coach, Kevin Willard, left in disgust. This story did not get a ton of national media attention, but it is truly one of the wildest things I have ever seen in college sports. Willard took the Maryland gig after 13 years at Seton Hall. He got the Terps to the Round of 32 in his first year, missed the tournament last year and made the Sweet 16 this year before he left, and it wasn’t without a flare for the dramatics.

On March 17, Villanova fired head coach Kyle Neptune. Villanova is a proud basketball program. Neptune had a near impossible job: to follow Jay Wright, who won two national championships and was arguably the greatest active coach in the sport when he left. Neptune failed mightily and his firing was deserved. Villanova is an A-class basketball job. Willard’s name was immediately tied to the opening. Willard seemingly had things rolling at Maryland, you’d figure he’d dispel the rumors or leverage them into a pay raise and an NIL budget increase before announcing he loves being at Maryland? Yeah, not even close.

On the eve of the first round of the 2025 NCAA Tournament, Willard used his NCAA-mandated press conference to call his outgoing AD a cheap-ass, declare that he screwed up handling NIL and then publicly confirmed the AD was leaving to go to SMU. For context, Maryland’s AD is a guy named Damon Evans. It had been long-rumored that he was a favorite to land the SMU AD job, but nothing had been publicly reported or confirmed. His subordinate basically broke the news for him to force his hand.

Think about that for a second: Many of you reading out there likely have bosses. What if you had a public press conference in which you basically said “yeah, my boss is a moron that screwed us, oh and by the way, he’s leaving the company soon.” — it’s truly one of the wildest things I have ever seen in college athletics. I can’t believe this did not become more of a national story. If you don’t believe me, watch the video above.

Anyway, the point of me mentioning that is this: Buzz Williams just left Texas A&M to take THAT job. Williams just took a gig with no athletic director (so, no boss until a new boss that didn’t hire you is in place), very clear NIL dysfunction and a desperate admin. Why would he do that? Buzz is not dumb. I have a theory: Texas A&M AD Trev Alberts is arguably the dumbest human being in major college athletics, who keeps inexplicably falling upward into better jobs — much like Ross Bjork. I don’t get this whole empty-suit AD thing. Maybe I am just dumb, but it seemingly never works out well — and is spreading his toxic stupidity into one of the largest athletic brands in the country. You think I am being too hard on the guy? Read this story about what he did to Nebraska-Omaha’s athletics department before falling upward into the Nebraska AD job, and then get back to me.

Make no mistake about it: Williams left to get away from Alberts. Last summer, Texas A&M made the national title series in college baseball against Tennessee. The Aggies lost that series to Tennessee. Head coach Jim Schlossnagle then left College Station to become the head coach at Texas, a bitter rival. You think Schlossnagle left because he felt under-supported or that the money was lacking (at A&M of all places!) ?. Of course not. He left because he realized his boss was a moron.

And while I am speculating here, I have to figure Williams and Schlossnagle left the cash cow that is Texas A&M because they realized that money without organization and infrastructure is fairly worthless. A&M might have more money than anyone in this ecosystem. But without the proper organizations in place, without the proper infrastructure to deliver that money to elite-level athletes in an ethical and responsible way, then what good is the money?

Multiple sources told Rippee Writes and RebelGrove (predominantly Chase Parham) on Wednesday that Texas A&M could not provide Beard with a definite number regarding an NIL budget for the 2025-26 season, and that it was a significant factor in Beard’s decision.

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When I interviewed Walker Jones (a man who deserves a statue along with William Liston, Matt McDonald, David Nutt, Carter, Glenn Boyce, Denson Hollis and many others) about 18 months ago when reporting on the story about how the Grove Collective was founded, Jones explained that this collective (a new term at the time), could help Ole Miss fight a resources battle. Jones likened it to his time spent at Under Armour, when the company was in its infancy while fighting behemoths like Adidas and Nike for market share. He said that Ole Miss needed to be “organized, disciplined, and make one dollar spend like three.” He truly believed Ole Miss could alter the power structure in college sports by being more organized than anyone else.

Well, as it turns out he was 100 percent correct, and Wednesday’s development of keeping Beard is a prime example of that. Why did Beard choose to stay at Ole Miss? It’s a job with zero history, zero NBA presence and has been historically (and accurately) regarded as the worst job in the SEC.

Beard stayed because the New Ole Miss is not the Old Ole Miss. The idea that Ole Miss is still a bad basketball job is an outdated and uninformed narrative parroted by the schmucks I used to call colleagues who are more concerned about the media buffet than actually digging into a subject. Ole Miss Basketball pays its coach a top-15 salary. Its assistant coach pool is borderline top-10, its NIL is in the top half of the league and its facilities are A+. Historically speaking, Ole Miss is a tough basketball job. But again, history went out the window that summer day in which the NCAA legalized NIL — by what objective measure is Ole Miss a bad or “tough” basketball job now? It’s not. But it will take a half decade for the national media to catch up because of a lack of intelligence and motivation.

A multi-faceted validation

Ole Miss keeping Chris Beard and fending off Texas A&M is a massive validation for the basketball program. It’s proof of concept and proof of financials that you can win big at Ole Miss, that Ole Miss will support you and that this is no longer a doormat job. Beard is an elite coach, who would have never ended up at Ole Miss in the first place if not for issues in his personal life (I have written extensively about this, so spare me the self-righteous email about me glossing over it). The fact that he stayed, and that he does not view this job as a stepping stone on his rehabilitation tour, but rather a place he can build and win at, is a massive validation for a historically-maligned program.

It’s also proof of a much larger theme: The Ole Miss Rebels are thriving in modern college athletics because of their leadership.

Carter, Boyce, Jones, Hollis, the list goes on-and-on. The NIL era has beamed an intense spotlight on leadership. It has weeded out bad leaders. If a school has smart people and good leaders in charge, it can thrive. If it has incompetent people running the show, it will wither.

This is the New Ole Miss: thriving in a new frontier.

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In the moments after an inexplicable, devastating defeat to Florida, Lane Kiffin played out his usual post-loss routine. He spoke about “analytics”, the opposing team’s quarterback playing well, empty red zone trips and the “ball not bouncing” Ole Miss’ way. On the heels of losing to an unranked Florida team, 24-17, to end any realistic Playoff hopes for arguably the most talented Ole Miss team ever assembled, Kiffin appeared allergic to any form of the introspection he’ll need to channel to learn from this failed season.

“Disappointing outcome today. This was a game with a lot of missed opportunities, going 0-3 in the red zone, get stopped twice on fourth down and lose the turnover margin in a tough place to play, against a team that plays really well when that quarterback plays,” Kiffin said. “Credit to him. He is a really good player that made a lot of great plays in the first half. It’s a disappointing outcome. Sometimes things don’t go your way.”

His last sentence is undoubtedly true, but Ole Miss did very little to will the game in its favor. The Rebels out-gained the Gators by 120 yards. The turnover battle was even until the final three minutes of the game, when Ole Miss already trailed by seven points and was rightfully pressing due to being in a race against the clock and the scoreboard. Dart made a series of poor decisions on the final two drives that resulted in two interceptions to end a game the Rebels should have never been trailing in the first place. Dart’s postgame press conference differed drastically from Kiffin’s. There was no mention of analytics or things just not bouncing their way.

“It was a bad decision by me,” Dart said. “The only thing I can really say is that I am sorry. I am sorry to my teammates. I am sorry to my coaches and I am sorry to the fans. We cannot lose these games. This one is going to hurt for a really long time. All I can really say right now is that I am sorry.”

While Dart isn’t completely blameless for Saturday’s loss, this defeat to Florida — one that followed an eerily similar pattern to Ole Miss’ other two losses — rests at the feet of the coaching staff rather than one player. Yet it was the player with a larger appetite for shouldering responsibility in the postgame. More specifically, a player that Ole Miss would’ve never been in this position without. Dart worked tirelessly to recruit this roster and lead this team to the precipice of a playoff berth. He is an imperfect quarterback, but he is a crucial piece to the rise of Ole Miss, a kid who genuinely cares about this program, this school and this town. Dart may frustrate fans on the field at times, but the opportunity this season presented was never possible without a kid from Kaysville, Utah, who was forced to transfer from USC to no fault of his own, and arrived at Ole Miss in search of stability and acceptance, and ultimately blossomed into a star.

Why is it that a 21-year-old kid was more willing to accept blame than the $9 million man running the program?

The job of a coaching staff is to extract the best version of its team on a weekly basis. The best version of this Ole Miss team pummeled Georgia by three scores. Yet the 2024 season was torpedoed because the Rebels lost as three-score favorites at home to Kentucky, on the road to LSU in a game in which they didn’t trail for a single snap, and then as a double-digit favorite at Florida. Ole Miss lost to three teams with less talent. None of the three opponents performed beyond their talent level when they played Ole Miss. They simply let the Rebels beat themselves, and Ole Miss happily obliged. The coaching staff, specifically the offensive staff, failed this team.

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Empty second halves

In the second halves of those three losses (six quarters), Ole Miss scored a grand total of one touchdown — and it came on a 4th & 7 play in the third quarter of the Kentucky game in which Tre Harris caught a pass 10 yards downfield and ran it 38 yards into the end zone. Ole Miss converted 8-of-25 third downs in those six quarters and were outscored a combined 21-3 in the fourth quarter. The offense totaled fewer than 200 yards in the second half in two of those losses. More often than not, when a game was tight at halftime, the Rebels’ offense went into a shell in the final two quarters. The lack of consistency on that side of the football is one of the more puzzling aspects of this season. It’s also inexcusable.

There are many causes for this. Earlier in the season, Ole Miss was far too reliant on Tre Harris in the passing game. In the loss to Kentucky, Harris had 11 catches and accounted for exactly half of the team's total offensive yards. The only other receiver to record a catch in that game was Cayden Lee (2). Caden Prieskorn had one reception. Harris was lost to injury in the second half of the win at South Carolina. Ole Miss scored three points. Harris again exited the game with an injury in the second half of the loss at LSU. Ole Miss kicked three field goals in the second half. When the slightest thing went wrong on the offensive side of the ball, there seemed to be no back-up plan. Ole Miss tried to force-feed Lee the football in the absence of Harris. It failed miserably, and that is not a knock on Lee. His skillset is wildly different from what makes Harris such a dominant presence.

It took the absence of Harris over the next three games for the Rebels to change their approach to the passing game, and the offense ironically functioned more efficiently against Oklahoma, Arkansas and Georgia. If it takes your best player being physically unavailable to pivot to a different strategy, does that not make the coaching staff stubborn by definition? Stubbornness is one of many adjectives I would use to describe this hellacious season from the offense.

Ole Miss also struggled to run the football with any consistency this year. Some of that is due to running back personnel and the failed attempt to replace Quinshon Judkins. Some of it was due to the offensive line struggling all season, particularly in run blocking, despite landing four transfer linemen in the portal in what was supposed to be an effort to upgrade the offensive line. A lack of talent at running back and poor run blocking up front is a recipe for a dysfunctional running game. It’s nearly impossible to win consistently in the SEC without running the football well. An explosive running game has been a core component to Kiffin’s offenses throughout his entire career.

But even with all of that being true, the coaching staff’s puzzling use of the personnel didn’t help rectify the issue, nor did it bring clarity as to what specifically was the root cause of the problem.

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Puzzling handling of the running backs

The Ulysses Bentley IV situation will remain the greatest mystery of the 2024 season. When Judkins elected to hit the portal and go to Ohio State, Ole Miss paid Bentley to return for another season and seemingly felt pretty good about adding pieces around Bentley in the portal. The Rebels brought Henry Parrish back from Miami, added Miami (OH) transfer Rashad Amos, and Georgia State transfer Dominique Thomas. Unless this staff had an alternate plan all along, Bentley was supposed to be a key piece of the running game.

Then, the season arrived. We were all reminded that Parrish, who followed running backs coach Kevin Smith to Ole Miss, then to Miami, and eventually back to Ole Miss, was Smith’s proverbial favorite child. Parrish, an average SEC running back, debuted as the team’s starter. That’s fine, but it was Bentley literally never seeing the field that raised eyebrows as Ole Miss coasted through a joke of a non-conference schedule.

As the running game continued to falter, when asked about Bentley’s scarce usage, Kiffin essentially gaslit the fanbase by saying he’s simply not not as good as Parrish or former walk-on Matt Jones. Even after those two suffered injuries, nothing changed. Jones was unable to play at LSU due to an injury and Bentley had to play out of necessity. He ran for 107 yards on 11 carries, including a 50-yard touchdown run on a fourth-and-short down — a scenario the Rebels have notoriously struggled with all season, to the point of allowing a defensive tackle to take a direct snap and have free rein as to which gap to run through.

Kiffin was seen on the sideline shouting something in Smith’s direction after Bentley scored that night. If nothing else, that exchange wasn’t great optics for an already bizarre situation in a season littered with horrible optics. Bentley’s performance at LSU remains the only 100-yard rushing output by an Ole Miss ball carrier in SEC play.

With Parrish lost for the season, Bentley did not receive a carry in Saturday’s loss to Florida. Instead, Ole Miss used wide receiver and punt return specialist Micah Davis at running back. Yes, the coaching staff thought a fifth-string wide receiver and punt-return specialist who transferred to Ole Miss in August, was a better option at running back than Bentley.

The illogical gaslighting campaign continued the day after Saturday’s loss.

“It’s nothing off the field at all. He’s a wonderful kid and does everything we ask of him,” Kiffin said. “We just haven’t been real consistent and productive at that spot this year. Tried something else yesterday. Is what it is. Got a lot of respect for him, really appreciate how he’s handled the situation, but this is what happens in coaching. Everybody doesn’t play. You gotta make hard decisions.”

What is the hard decision? Assuming Bentley’s fully healthy (he’s apparently healthy enough to return kickoffs), he’s somehow all of a sudden not as good as Jones, Thomas and Davis? — a punt-return specialist receiver who once took some carries at the Air Force Academy a few years ago? Sure, piss on the fanbase’s head and tell them it’s raining. That’s not a remotely coherent explanation. It leads one to believe that Kiffin doesn’t think that the fans, many of whom donated money to fund the roster, deserve an explanation. What changed from January to September? What changed in the two weeks since the Georgia win? Bentley got carries in that game. If it’s so bad a receiver has to play running back in the most consequential road game of the season, why did Bentley play against LSU and Georgia? Veteran players like Dart and Jordan Watkins are advocating for Bentley to play on social media. If other players don’t understand the situation, isn’t that somewhat indicative of a problem?

Kiffin is paid $9 million to manage the roster and handle personnel. This isn’t to suggest he should cater to the whims of fans. But Ole Miss just played a game in which it ran the football 35 times and only 10 of those carries went to running backs. At what point does it become obvious the staff lost the plot?

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The offensive line has also been a mystery

Without adequate run blocking, the question of who runs the football becomes a moot point. The Ole Miss offensive line has struggled to move opposing defensive fronts. This unit was riddled with injuries early in the season. Caleb Warren and Gerquan Scott were injured during preseason camp. Jeremy James got hurt before the season’s second game. Jayden Williams was injured before the Kentucky game. Ole Miss was forced to shuffle some guys around. But Scott is the only one of the four transfers — who were brought in to supposedly upgrade the offensive line — to suffer a significant injury.

James started his 50th consecutive game in the season-opener at guard before his injury. Williams was the starting left tackle before his injury. Warren started 36 games over the previous three seasons. Scott is the only one of the four to return to the field in any significant capacity post-injury. Kiffin said entering the Florida game that the Rebels were fully healthy on the offensive line for the first time all year.

Warren has not played many snaps at all since exiting the injury report. James played sparingly at guard against South Carolina and Florida due to in-game injuries elsewhere. Williams, who wasn’t listed on the injury report last week, did not start at left tackle, but played in short-yardage packages. I am sure there are valid reasons for all of this, and it would be silly for me to act as if I know what Kiffin and his staff should do with their offensive line. It’s just puzzling that three veteran guys (particularly James and Warren, given that Williams’ was still working his way back through the second bye week) haven’t been given much of a look admidst the offensive line’s struggles.

Ole Miss invested in upgrading its offensive line in the offseason, but has seemingly regressed up front instead. It’s another head-scratching chapter in this season.

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This season has been a trainwreck from an optics standpoint

Despite all of the struggles outlined above, Ole Miss still had more than enough talent to beat Kentucky and Florida as double-digit favorites. The Rebels were talented enough to hang onto a four-point halftime lead at LSU. The shellshocked nature of the postgame press conferences following the trio of losses and the lack of substantive answers as to why they fell short has done little to ease the anguish.

The way Kiffin has discussed his team’s flaws in press conferences this year has been dramatically different than a year ago. The Bentley soap opera aside, I’ll revert back to a note I had in a previous newsletter about the way Kiffin discussed the struggles in the running game this year versus in 2023.

Last year, Ole Miss beat a ranked Tulane team on the road in the second week of the season despite running for fewer than 100 yards in the contest — a rare occurrence for a Kiffin offense at the time. That win came on the heels of rushing for only 143 yards in a 73-7 win over Mercer in week one. Kiffin was asked after the Tulane win about the early-season running game struggles.

"Highly concerned," Kiffin said "That’s very unusual for us, not just here, but anywhere. It’s just been a long (time), this job, FAU, Alabama, I don’t remember the inability to run the ball at all. They did a great job, but obviously that has a lot to do with us and that’s everybody. That’s perimeter blocking, linemen execution, running back footwork, everything. It takes everyone to have a good running game. We definitely look to improve there. That’s a major issue and one I don’t think we would’ve guessed."

This year has been a lot more of “It is what it is,” or “yeah, we’ve struggled there and are looking for a spark. Things just haven’t gone our way.”

Other than the loss of Judkins, it doesn’t seem rational to suggest the talent on the offensive line and in the running back room is remarkably worse than it was in 2023. The only stark difference between the two seasons is that this year, Kiffin has seemed flummoxed as to how to fix it. He’s paid handsomely to solve problems like this.

On Monday afternoon, he was pressed by Ben Garrett of the Ole Miss Spirit as to why Bentley doesn’t play anymore. Kiffin, seemingly flustered by being challenged on anything at all, cited yards per carry as to why.

Kiffin is not a dumb person. It’s obvious at this point his illogical crusade against Bentley is a cover for some alternative reason that we will likely never learn. The one question I have regarding it, is it the fault of the kid? Or a petty and defiant ego trip from the staff? If the latter is the case, that’s a problem.

It’s not great optics that all of the melodramatic subplots that sprouted throughout this season have been on the offensive side of the football. There have not been any baffling personnel mysteries or tactical errors on the defensive side of the football. Pete Golding’s unit has shown up every week, played at a playoff-caliber level and given Ole Miss a chance to win games. Why is that?

This offense team has not practiced what Kiffin preaches

Kiffin’s slogan since he got to Ole Miss has been “pro mindset.” While I am not sure what that actually means, it is abundantly obvious at this juncture that this team has not adopted a pro mindset. It has become an emotional rollercoaster that has not handled increased expectations well at all.

The core of this 2024 team was formed through an 11-2 campaign in 2023 that saw a resilient group erase fourth-quarter deficits against LSU, Arkansas and Texas A&M. This year’s team hasn’t displayed the same resolve. Why is that the case? Is it the stakes? The wins in 2023 were important, but there wasn’t a looming preseason “playoff or bust” expectation hovering over each game. The team’s postseason hopes did not hang in the balance in any of the aforementioned games in 2023 because there was no realistic expectation of the Rebels making a four-team playoff. Now, when the stakes have risen, this team has mostly shrunk. The offense has looked off, from play calling, to personnel usage and overall production.

A team is often a reflection of its head coach. For as much as Kiffin talks about Nick Saban, Kirby Smart and the time he spent at Alabama, he doesn’t behave in a remotely similar manner to either of those men. And while I realize that is an impossibly high standard to hold him to, he’s the one mentioning it repeatedly. I always found the narrative of “Kiffin can’t win the big game” to be silly and lazy. After this season, a far more accurate narrative is questioning whether a Kiffin-led program can handle business on a week-to-week basis to make it through an SEC schedule with a resumé worthy of making a 12-team play. The Saban model he looks up to was successful because it didn’t lose to teams it was favored over by double digits. Kiffin did that twice in one season.

This season was a failure, but this program is not failing

Two things can be true at once. This season was a failure, but this program is not failing. In fact, it is operating at as high of a level that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. Assuming Ole Miss beats a hapless Mississippi State team on Friday, it will have won 10, 8, 10 and 9 games in the last four seasons. That is one hell of a run. Kiffin deserves immense credit for that. So does the administration and the fanbase that provided him with the necessary resources to accomplish that. High school recruiting has picked up for the Rebels’ 2025 class. Kiffin has mastered the portal better than any other coach in his profession. Assuming the financial resources remain available, he will likely have another good portal class. All of that will be needed for what is a significant roster rebuild entering next season.

The perception of a healthy program should not be diluted by the disappointment of a season that fell short of expectations in excruciating fashion. This is why I never understood the “Last Dance” moniker this team bestowed upon itself after the Peach Bowl win over Penn State last winter. While I realize this was created by guys like Dart, Prieskorn and the aforementioned core from the 2023 team, and that this was quite literally their last ride in college football, I thought it was a calculated error that Kiffin, and/or Ole Miss, didn’t reject that moniker. If this is truly The New Ole Miss and the program has graduated to a different tier in the rigid college football ecosystem, then this season should’ve been just the first of many the Rebels compete for a spot in the expanded playoff, rather than some all or nothing campaign that only magnified the anguish of Saturday’s loss and left many fans wondering where the hell the program goes from here.

If Ole Miss is truly a big boy program now, then the messaging must change. It failed to make the Playoff this year, but it must present itself as capable of regrouping, assessing what went wrong and reloading for another run next year. This is arguably the most consequential offseason in Ole Miss history in that respect.

Before all of that, one more game looms

For as much time as we’ve spent writing the obituary of this 2024 Ole Miss team, the Rebels are not technically eliminated from making the College Football Playoff, though I would describe those odds as miniscule. Regardless, one more game looms against a completely hapless Mississippi State team. While many claim this game doesn’t matter and there is a deflated sense of importance bred by the ‘all or nothing’ expectations perpetuated by this Ole Miss team, this game absolutely matters.

Two years ago, Kiffin torpedoed the end of the 2022 season after losing a heart-breaker to Nick Saban — a man he became borderline obsessed with beating — and allowed Ole Miss to get dismantled by an average Arkansas team and then lost an Egg Bowl at home to a Mississippi State club the Rebels had zero business of losing to. We’ve seen what a distracted and uninterested Kiffin team looks like. I’d argue that you will find out more about the character of a Kiffin-led program, in terms of how committed he is to winning here despite this season’s failure, by how Ole Miss comes out in the Egg Bowl.

It would take a minor miracle for Ole Miss not to win the game outright. The Rebels are 27-point favorites. The Bulldogs are a completely incompetent program not designed for the modern era of college football due to their simple-minded leadership that only cares about keeping Ole Miss at the bottom of the proverbial crab bucket with them to validate their own insecurities. I mean seriously, Mississippi State’s season was made by the Ole Miss loss last week, yet none of them realize what a self-own it is to think: “haw, haw, Ole Miss dared to go try to be good, silly them. They’re just like us. They wasted money on this team.” Most of it can be attributed to their lack of a rudimentary understanding of the modern college football landscape and their cultish atmosphere that forces a brainwashed portion of their media contingent to lie to them about being left behind.

Anyway, all of that aside, this week’s game against a completely feeble in-state rival Ole Miss is on the verge of burying for good in this modern college sports landscape, will be telling about the character of this program, Kiffin’s willingness to motivate his team despite falling short of its goals and the culture he (mostly accurately) proclaims to maintain within his own program.

At the end of the day, this all rests at the feet of Kiffin

Lane Kiffin is an offensive-minded coach. Like any good coach, he gives autonomy to his assistants, lets them do their jobs and stays out of the way. But he is ultimately responsible for the results in the bottom-line business that is college football. From the debacle that is the running backs position and the running game, to the disjointed offense that was the cause of the Rebels being 4-3 in the last seven games, Kiffin must answer for that.

This offseason will be different. It can’t be explained away by saying Kiffin needed more resources or better players. There’s nothing he lacked that prevented him from beating Florida, Kentucky and LSU.

There was nothing preventing Ole Miss from making the college football playoffs other than Ole Miss. The Rebels’ own ineptitude and missteps are what will ultimately cause them to be watching the Playoff from home.

Again, the best version of this team beat Georgia handily and held the fifth best odds to win the national championship just three days ago. Now, Ole Miss is a three-loss team with its Playoff hopes on life support. Examining why anything close to the version of the Rebels that beat Georgia could not be replicated in the three losses will require some introspection from Kiffin. It will require a change in the way he approaches handling heightened expectations, being the hunted instead of the hunter.

How does Ole Miss prevent falling short again in the future? That’s the task of the man running the program. Every coach has flaws. It’s silly and unrealistic to crucify Kiffin for not being flawless in year five of a program he’s taken from a 4-8 punchline to one that people see as a place where winning at an elite level can be accomplished.

This offseason will be about Kiffin’s willingness to look inward. Whether or not he does that remains to be seen. 

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Ole Miss faces its final real test of the regular season on Saturday at Florida. Let’s take a look at what the game means given where the Rebels were slotted in the latest edition of the College Football Playoff rankings, what to watch for in the game and run through another weekend rooting guide.

Ole Miss No. 9 in latest CFP rankings

The latest edition of the College Football Playoff rankings were released on Tuesday evening. Leading up to the release, I had developed the opinion that this iteration of the rankings was the most important one of the season for the Rebels and simultaneously the last one that mattered at all. After a win over Georgia that sent shockwaves across the college football and media landscape, Ole Miss sat idle last week while Georgia and Tennessee, one team ranked ahead and one behind the Rebels, played each other. There was some thought that the Rebels would drop from their No. 11 perch after a week off and a potential Georgia win over the Volunteers that eventually came to fruition. Would the committee leapfrog Georgia over Ole Miss less than two weeks removed from the Rebels dismantling the Bulldogs? Would the committee rank a now two-loss Tennessee behind Ole Miss or bump the Rebels to the bottom of this three-team pecking order?

The significance of last week’s rankings after Ole Miss toppled Georgia and moved up to No. 11 was that, for the moment, the Rebels were the last at-large bid in the Playoff field. While they didn’t completely control their own destiny at the time, it would take some poor fortune for Ole Miss to be left out assuming it won its final two games. The Rebels dropping to 12 or worse in the rankings without playing a game would’ve presented a completely different dynamic: Ole Miss would’ve needed help in the form of upsets to crawl back into the playoff bracket.

All of these worries were quelled by the committee getting it right and keeping Ole Miss ahead of Georgia and dropping Tennessee behind the Rebels. Everything seems to be working in this program’s favor right now. Ole Miss didn’t play a game last week and moved UP two slots in the rankings. Now, all of those other hypotheticals I wasted your time going through are all irrelevant: Ole Miss controls its own destiny to make the College Football playoff. Sitting at No. 9, and the current 10th-seed (please don’t ask me to explain the seeding right now. It’s stupid and confusing but will make sense in the end), if Ole Miss wins its final two games, it will cement a berth in the Playoff and, as it currently stands, has a decent chance to host a first-round game in Oxford.

That’s why I thought this week’s rankings were the most significant as it pertains to Ole Miss. We’d either know that the Rebels controlled their destiny or would need outside help over the final two weeks. The ball is in Ole Miss’ court now to finish the job.

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Florida at a glance

Florida is coming off its biggest win of the season after knocking off LSU at home. The Gators have had a strange, trying 2024 season. Before the season began, head coacvh Billy Napier was viewed by most non-local media as a dead man walking and on the hottest seat of any coach in the SEC. The local media told a different (and more accurate) story, that Florida did not really want to fire Napier given his large buyout and the idea of starting over with its third coach in five years. I had Florida’s 247 beat reporter Graham Hall on my podcast in August as part of Rippee Writes’ opponent preview series and he said at the time that six wins, and even five wins depending on optics, would potentially be enough to save Napier’s job. He’s turned out to be correct. Napier will return for a fourth season in 2025, per a statement put out by AD Scott Stricklin a week or so ago.

Florida is currently in the middle of what might be the most difficult schedule stretch I have ever seen in college football. Take a peek at the Gators’ second half of the season (rankings retroactive to time of the game): at No. 9 Tennessee, vs Kentucky, neutral site vs No. 2 Georgia, at No. 5 Texas, vs No. 21 LSU, vs No. 9 Ole Miss, at Florida State. Think about how even more daunting that looked in the preseason when LSU was ranked No. 13 and Florida State was No. 10. It’s truly an insanely difficult stretch of games. Other than Florida State being an abject disaster, it’s still proven to be ridiculously difficult.

The Gators entered the year with veteran QB, Wisconsin-transfer Graham Mertz leading the offense with 5-star true freshman D.J. Lagway behind him. Mertz was concussed in a season-opening blowout loss at home to Miami. Lagway played the next week against Samford and shined. Instead of a desperate head coach sticking with a young quarterback and selling the future to potentially save his own job, Napier started Mertz the next week against Texas A&M, a game the Gators fell behind by three scores early and lost. Mertz tore his ACL in an overtime road loss at Tennessee — a game in which Florida led for most of the way, squandered the lead and tied it with a late touchdown with just 29 seconds remaining. Florida, surprisingly, did not elect to go for two and the win and instead played for overtime and lost. Lagway was thrust into the starting role the next week. The Gators blew out Kentucky at home. Lagway got hurt against Georgia, a game that the Gators again led for a large portion of, and missed the Texas game, and returned last week in the win over LSU.

Apologies for the play-by-play of Florida’s season, but I think it’s important when examining the current state of this Gators team. To its credit, Florida has not quit on Napier and continues to play hard each week. The team clearly has a newfound level of belief with Lagway at quarterback. He’s a wildly talented but raw prospect as a true freshman. He has a cannon of an arm, and, when healthy, can hurt opponents running the football, but makes poor decisions and is turnover-prone. It’s worth noting that Lagway, who is definitely not fully healthy, did not rush the football a single time against LSU. I think you’re going to see a limited version of this uber-talented quarterback on Saturday. I would be surprised if he played any sort of role in the running game and I think he’s going to struggle mightily against this Ole Miss defensive line with his limited mobility.

Beyond that, I really don’t have much more worthy analysis of Florida. The Gators are a below-average offense and are slow on defense despite having some talent. Florida did generate seven sacks against what is supposed to be a fierce LSU offensive line, but there isn’t a single aspect of this Florida team that jumps off the page in terms of being a potential problem for Ole Miss. The Rebels are a vastly better and more talented football team than the Gators. I think Ole Miss wins this game handily and I think this game will follow a similar script to the win at Arkansas in which Ole Miss KO’d its opponent by halftime.

Will this be a cakewalk for Ole Miss? In theory, no. Florida does have talent on its roster, though I think the Gators’ lack of depth, particularly on the defensive side, hasn’t been talked about enough (the Gators’ starting secondary played all 93 snaps against LSU last week). But if Ole Miss shows up focused and ready to play, I really don’t think this game will be a nail-biter. And I don’t know why Ole Miss wouldn’t be locked in. Its entire season is on the line in these final two weeks, which brings me back to a theory I’ve mentioned all year that has seemingly proved to be pretty accurate when prognosticating outcomes: you cannot fake desperation in this week-to-week sport that is college football in 2024. Ole Miss absolutely has to win this football game. Florida does not. The Gators, in all likelihood, will beat a dumpster fire of a Florida State team on the Seminoles’ home field next week to gain bowl eligibility and will seemingly feel good about where the program is headed going into next year with Napier. That’s what made the LSU win so significant for them. Entering the daunting final four-game stretch, Florida needed to beat one of Texas, LSU or Ole Miss to position itself for bowl eligibility entering the Florida State game. The Gators accomplished that last week in a game that I thought was vastly more reflective of LSU’s flaws than Florida being some type of dangerous team finding itself down the stretch. LSU out-gained Florida and possessed the football for over 2/3 of the game. The Tigers gave up too many explosive plays and then seemingly quit on the field in the fourth quarter.

Anyway, I digress. I think this seemingly rejuvenated Ole Miss team handles its business and wins this game convincingly. With that said, I’ll still give you an abbreviated version of five things to watch for in this game because I am a man of the people.

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Five things to Watch

1. Logan Diggs - The LSU transfer running back tore his ACL in the Tigers’ bowl game last January. When he announced his intention to come to Ole Miss, there was some optimism within the program (that has proven to be wishful thinking) that he might be ready to play by October. To partially quote the great Ricky Bobby from Talladega Nights, despite advances in modern science and Diggs’ high-level of income, a late-November return seemed much more realistic and aligned with an ACL injury recovery timeline (roughly 10 months). Kiffin said in his Monday press conference that Digg has “done more in practice” than he has all season. Diggs is officially listed as questionable on this week’s injury report. Based on what I have heard, I would be mildly surprised if Diggs played in this game. But, if Ole Miss can get Diggs on the field either this week or the Egg Bowl, that’s a massive boost for a run game that’s been pretty awful this year due to a combination of inadequate personnel at running back and run-blocking struggles on the offensive line.

2. Tre Harris - Harris, who leads the SEC in receiving despite missing the last three-and-a-half games, is supposedly a full go this week, according to Kiffin. I found this to be a little surprising based on what I had heard about the severity of the injury in the week leading up to Georgia. I was told, despite speculation to the contrary at the time, that Harris was not close to playing in the Georgia game. But, the Rebels have had a bye week since, so maybe whatever his injury is/was, has healed. If Harris is back, I am curious to see what the Ole Miss offense looks like. In its early season struggles, a clunky and disjointed offense force-fed Harris the football to the point of him basically being a one-man band in the passing game. Harris’ absence forced this coaching staff to alter its approach to the passing game and the Rebels have seemingly become a better offense as a result. I am obviously not insinuating any sort of Ewing Theory potential here. Ole Miss is better off with Tre Harris healthy and on the field. It’s absurd to suggest otherwise, but I am curious to see how he’s integrated back into this passing game and how that is handled without the Rebels slipping back to the toothless offense they were a few months ago.

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3. The offensive line - Jayden Williams was not listed on this week’s injury report. He has not played since the Wake Forest game due to an injury. Kiffin made a comment in his Monday press conference that his bye week has helped this team immensely from a health standpoint and cited that the offensive line’s two-deep (on the depth chart) was fully healthy for the first time this season. Ole Miss found a decent pass-blocking combination in the wins over Oklahoma, Arkansas and Georgia. I am curious to see if there is any change to the starting five linemen. This staff has been pretty resistant to major change on the offensive line. But if Williams is fully healthy, it would be completely foolish not to play him, so I am curious to see if there is any change to the starting offensive line.

4. Jaxson Dart’s health - Dart rolled his ankle on the first possession against Georgia, went into the locker room, missed a drive, then came back and played well. After the win, Kiffin described Dart’s return as him “undergoing some medical things” before returning, which I can only assume is code for Dart being shot up with enough Toradol to kill a horse and could not feel his foot for the final three quarters of that game. Ankle injuries can be pesky. I don’t think it’ll be some sort of major issue in this game, but I am curious to see if Dart is limited at all two weeks removed from the injury. He’s been a buoy at times for a terrible running game via some designed run concepts. I am curious if Charlie Weis Jr. and Kiffin run Dart much at all and if he’s limited in any capacity.

5. Jorts - It’s November in Florida. Is this jorts thing just a stereotype? Or do these people actually walk into a GAP, buy jean shorts and slap that elastic waistband denim on and get ready for some football? I will be monitoring the crowd’s fashion choices closely. 

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Rooting Guide 2.0

I was surprised at the feedback of last week’s last minute rooting guide. Maybe I was surprised that many of you still read this column, which I am grateful for. So, I supposed I’ll offer another version of it this week. Given what we discussed above about Ole Miss controlling its own destiny, this rooting guide will be a little bit different. It’s more geared toward how the Rebels back-end their way into hosting a playoff game versus what needs to happen to ensure they make the playoff.

No. 5 Indiana at No. 2 Ohio State, 11 AM CT (FOX). Rooting interest: Ohio State by a billion.

I’ll preface this by saying that I think Indiana is an incredible story and part of what makes college football so unique. Curt Cignetti, in his first year at Indiana, has single-handedly changed the trajectory of a football program at a basketball-crazy school. I also think that Indiana is actually a pretty good football team that is not nearly as much of a fraudulent paper Tiger as many in the media make the Hoosiers out to be. With that said, Indiana has played a ridiculously weak schedule, to little fault of its own. The Hoosiers are 10-0, and if they lose to Ohio State, and presumably beat Purdue next week, they’ll have an 11-1 season without beating a single team that received a single VOTE in the AP top 25. If Indiana beats Ohio State, it obviously deserves to be in the Playoff. If the Hoosiers lose, their resumé is so weak that I cannot possibly make an argument that they are definitively one of the best 12 teams in college football, as much as I truly admire the story. I think this is a game in which optics and style points matter. If Ohio State demolishes Indiana, I think there is a case to be made that the Hoosiers drop out of the top-12 entirely. If it’s a close game, then things become more complicated. If the Hoosiers win, then it becomes a super fickle situation that includes a debate about a two-loss Ohio State’s worthiness of an at-large bid. Ole Miss doesn’t need that to happen.

No. 4 Penn State at Minnesota, 2:30 PM CT (CBS). Rooting interest: Minnesota.

Speaking of fraudulent paper Tigers, a one-loss Penn State team being ranked No. 4 is a complete joke. Aside from a 21-7 home win versus a ranked Illinois team, the Nittany Lions’ resumé is completely void of quality. I’ve seen enough of James Franklin in big games to know this team is a pretender. I’ve seen enough of Drew Allar at quarterback to know that this Penn State team could not beat 10 of the actual 12 best teams in college football. Minnesota is a frisky but inconsistent 6-4 team that is definitely capable of beating Penn State. I think a second Penn State loss will warrant a strong argument that it is not worthy of a playoff spot. That would be good news for Ole Miss as it tries to creep up the seeding and rankings into a first-round host spot.

No. 19 Army at No. 6 Notre Dame, 6:00 PM CT (NBC) Rooting interest: America

Much of the same as we discussed last week. Notre Dame is a one-loss team. Its one loss came at home to Northern Illinois — a MAC program. I think that should immediately disqualify the Irish from the playoff. But because they have cool helmets and won a bunch of big games before modern cable TV, we have to pretend that the only major college football program that isn’t in a conference is somehow a real threat to win the national championship. To Notre Dame’s credit, the Irish have played good football lately and are blowing out opponents. Riley Leonard is a veteran quarterback who has played well in the last couple of games and the Notre Dame defense is pretty good. Ole Miss needs them to take a second loss and get booted from the playoff discussion. What better team to do that than the Troops.

No. 7 Alabama at Oklahoma, 6:30 PM CT (ABC). Rooting interest: Oklahoma

Not nearly as significant as I thought this game could be a week ago in terms of Ole Miss’ playoff hopes, but Alabama is ahead of Ole Miss in the rankings and seeding. Oklahoma, a team with a fierce defense, a horrible offense and season that could best be titled as snakebit, is talented enough to give Alabama some trouble. Before you ask, no, I have no clue what this would mean for Ole Miss’ chances to make the SEC Championship game (I am pretty sure Ole Miss doesn’t really want or need to make the SECCG at this point), but I think any SEC team ranked in front of Ole Miss losing is good news for the Rebels.

No. 15 Texas A&M at Auburn, 6:30 PM CT (ESPN). Rooting interest: Auburn

Similar to the game above, this one is not as significant as I thought it might be a week ago, but A&M still has a shot at making the SEC Championship and earning an automatic bid (which would shrink the field and presumably steal an at-large bid from the SEC), so Reverend Hugh Freeze beating the SEC fanbase most similar to the Church of Scientology would be a de facto win for Ole Miss. I don’t think a two-loss A&M team has much of an argument to make the playoff. Its current ranking reflects that, but the Aggies taking a third loss to remove all doubt (then maybe beating Texas the next week to further the SEC cannibalism??) would be good for the Rebels.

Thanks for reading. We’ll have more coverage after the Florida game. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. Tell your friends to subscribe now for half off the original fee of $0.00

Thanks to the Leap Year, Ole Miss has a second well-timed bye weekend before its final two games of the 2024 season. Let’s take a look at where the Rebels sit in the College Football playoff rankings and who you should root for this weekend.

Ole Miss to No. 11 in the CFP rankings

The Rebels jumped five spots to No. 11 in the College Football Playoff rankings this week after debuting at No. 16 the week prior.

I figured a significant jump was likely, after beating Georgia, particularly because of the dominating fashion in which Ole Miss did it. As far as the favorability of where Ole Miss sits, I think this is as good of a spot as you could’ve possibly asked for post-Georgia with three weeks remaining in the regular season. As it currently stands, and with the way this tournament is structured, Ole Miss is currently the last at-large team in the field. Four automatic bids are awarded to the four Power Four conference champions, seven at-large bids and one bid to the highest ranked Group of Five team (currently Boise State).

Does this make it a mathematical certainty that Ole Miss will make the playoff if it wins out? No, but putting Ole Miss at No. 11 immediately after beating Georgia, particularly since the committee slotted the Bulldogs behind the Rebels, makes it incredibly likely. Would it have been nice for Ole Miss to crack the top ten by jumping either Notre Dame or Alabama? Sure, but it’s tough to gripe about where Ole Miss is situated given its current resumé. I think you could aptly describe the Rebels’ situation as one in which they mostly control their own destiny. Two wins and they are likely in. Not a guarantee, but close to it.

There’s always the possibility the Rebels get jumped while sitting idle this week. Two weeks ago, Texas A&M was demolished by South Carolina and debuted at No. 14 in the rankings. After a bye, the Aggies fell one spot this week due to being jumped by Ole Miss. It’s certainly possible that happens to the Rebels this week, but doesn’t feel nearly as likely given that Ole Miss beat the team directly behind it, two spots behind it is the highest-ranked group of five team in Boise State — whose ranking doesn’t matter a ton as long as the Broncos remain the highest-ranked G5 team — and that the next two teams behind the Rebels (SMU and Texas A&M) don’t play opponents worthy of making a large leap.

I think Ole Miss is also going to greatly benefit from recency bias. It’s clear that, outside of the four automatic bids, there isn’t really a rhyme or reason to the committee’s ranking process. They seem to lap up narratives like a drug and I think Ole Miss’ narrative of being this wildly talented team that has had a resurgence, found the best version of itself and saved its season is going to benefit the Rebels. I think their current ranking is already a reflection of that. Above all else, my confidence in Ole Miss making the playoff if it takes care of business in the final two games, lie in the fact that the committee, while far from perfect and often contradicting itself, does value the eye test above all else. It seems to have a desire to pick the four best teams. While I didn’t agree with the decision at the time, the committee leaving undefeated Florida State out of the four-team playoff last year after the Seminoles lost star quarterback Jordan Travis for the season in their penultimate regular season game tells me they value getting who they view as the *current* best teams in.

While I am glad the playoff expanded and college football took one baby step forward in terms of having a postseason that makes an ounce of sense, I still find this system to mostly be a farce. And while I don’t agree that recency bias should exist and think penalizing teams for losing late in the year versus early is silly, it does matter in reality. And Ole Miss being the hot team down stretch will work to its benefit. Should the Rebels handle business, their last loss will come nearly 60 days prior to the final selection show. With a bye and two games Ole Miss should win handily, the lasting image of this team in the minds of the committee will be pummeling the gold standard of the sport, Georgia, rather than walking off the field in somber defeat at any point in the season’s final month. That matters, even if it shouldn’t in theory.

Now, onto the teams you should root for.

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Ole Miss-focused rooting guide: version 1

I have gotten a ton of questions about who to root for this weekend and over the final weeks of the season. Being a man of the people, I took a stab at explaining Ole Miss’ fans rooting interest in the games this weekend. Before we dive into this, I should preface all of this by saying, this is far from an exact science. In a 12-team tournament that includes five automatic bids and seven invitations and more than two dozen teams vying for those spots, it becomes a subjective clusterf*ck. So, if you read any of these opinions and think I picked the wrong team to root for — you could very well be correct. I waffled on at least two of these for most of the week. I just did my best to sift through these and find a logical rooting outcome. Let’s dive in.

No. 3 Texas at Arkansas, 11 AM CT (ABC). Rooting interest: Arkansas

We’ll start with an easy one here. You should root for Arkansas and Sam Pittman to pull the upset here. Why? Texas has had a remarkably weak schedule to this point in the season. The Longhorns being ranked No. 3 in this week’s Playoff ranking became the main gripe of the general public. We’re two weeks into November and the Texas Longhorns have played one road SEC game — and that road game was at Vanderbilt. How is that possible? It’s no fault of the Longhorns. They’re only playing the schedule bestowed upon them. This was the year the Red River Showdown (a neutral site game between Oklahoma and Texas played at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas) counted as a road game for the Longhorns. Texas has only played one ranked opponent this year (not totally fair given that Vandy was ranked when it played them, as was Michigan). That opponent was Georgia and the Bulldogs essentially KO’d the Longhorns in one half on their own home field. An early-season win at a highly-ranked Michigan has lost its luster as the Wolverines have floundered to a 5-5 record.

I point all of this out to say that, while Ole Miss would generally like to avoid there being a log jam of 10-2 SEC teams at the end of the year, a Longhorns loss to Arkansas would put Texas at two losses with a game against two-loss Texas A&M still looming in the season’s final week. I also presume a Texas loss would somehow improve Ole Miss’ minuscule chances of making the SEC Championship game, but I am not smart enough to sift through the insane tie-breaker matrix involved with that and I am not sure I can make a convincing argument that Ole Miss even wants to be in the SEC Championship game at this point. With the Rebels having two losses, that’s essentially just one more potential elimination game for a team that’s been playing elimination games for over a month.

Plus, with Texas’ weak schedule and a week of the committee hearing how stupid they are for ranking the Horns that high, I am curious to see how far Texas would fall if it suffered a second loss.

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Virginia at No. 8 Notre Dame, 2:30 PM CT (NBC). Rooting interest: Virginia

I personally find Notre Dame to be incredibly annoying. This isn’t 1975 anymore. Join a conference. Yes, I understand it would work against the Irish’s best interest to do that in football, but we already have enough subjective chaos in this mess of a system. Trying to properly rate a team whose half-century’s old brand is the main reason we continuously talk about them as a power, playing a random hodge-podge of opponents and five ACC opponents per year is just nonsense. You shouldn’t be able to half-ass join a conference. Notre Dame beat Texas A&M in College Station in week 1 and has since beaten a ranked Louisville team and a Navy squad that was ranked at the time of the match-up. But the Irish lost to Northern Illinois at home a week after beating the Aggies. I think losing to a MAC school at home should disqualify you from making the playoff, but to Notre Dame’s credit, it has three pretty good wins. With that said, Notre Dame won’t survive a second loss.

The Irish play Virginia, at USC and a ranked Army team in the final three games. Another Irish loss would significantly benefit Ole Miss because it would eliminate them from playoff consideration. Plus, any team that beats the troops twice and rides a pedestrian schedule to the playoff is downright anti-American.

No. 23 Missouri at No. 21 South Carolina, 3:15 PM CT (SECN). Rooting interest: South Carolina

Missouri is a two loss team that is sort of in the playoff conversation due to a weak schedule, no quality wins, and the eye test consensus being that the Tigers are an average football team. South Carolina, on the other hand, is a three-loss team ranked ahead of Missouri (that should tell you all you need to know about what the committee thinks of Mizzou). The Gamecocks are playing as well as any team in college football and have more than a puncher’s chance of finishing the season 9-3 and being the three-loss team shouting that they belong in the playoff if it’s ‘truly about the 12 best teams’. Due to the way the season has shaken out the flawed scheduling model in the SEC (and other conferences, too), South Carolina has no real shot to make it. But the more the Gamecocks win, the better Ole Miss’ resumé looks. The Rebels stomped the Gamecocks in Columbia. At the time, it was viewed as the Rebels avoiding a land mine. Six weeks later, it is shaping up to look like a quality road win for Ole Miss.

No. 7 Tennessee at No. 12 Georgia, 6:30 PM CT (ABC). Rooting interest: Tennessee

Here’s the one that’s been furiously debated all week. Again, I admit my argument could be wrong and flawed. Ole Miss throttled Georgia, 28-10 last week in a game in which the final score could have likely been more lopsided in Ole Miss’ favor. It’s undoubtedly the best win of the Rebels’ season and is among the best wins among any team in college football. Would you really want to have the quality of that win diluted by Georgia losing another game? If you’d asked me this on Monday, I would have agreed and told you to root for Georgia. But, after the rankings were released on Tuesday evening and Georgia was slotted behind Ole Miss, my thinking changed.

Think about what your expectations were at the beginning of the season: if Ole Miss goes 10-2, presumably with losses at LSU and to Georgia, the Rebels will make the College Football Playoff, right? Hand up, I thought the same thing. But seemingly no one factored in — including the de facto cartel bosses that govern a decentralized sport in desperate need of unified leadership — was the idea that expanding these conferences to 16-plus teams without adding more conference games would create a logjam in the standings with no sufficient way to determine supremacy aside from a multi-tiered tiebreaker system that the legislators likely never thought would go past the second tear when they wrote it. Because of that, I am not sure Ole Miss is realistically in this playoff discussion had it beat Kentucky but lost to LSU and Georgia. Last Saturday’s win gave the Rebels real legitimacy as an elite team that can match up and dominate other teams with elite talent. I am not sure what the public perception of the Rebels would be if they lost to LSU and Georgia and basically had a South Carolina win as the gleaning feather in their cap.

The largest obstacle Ole Miss is currently facing is standing out among five other SEC teams with two conference losses and five SEC teams with two losses overall (not the same five teams). There are a couple very plausible scenarios in which the SEC could end up with a five-way or six-way tie for second place (or even first place!) in the conference by season’s end. So, generally speaking, Ole Miss needs as many teams as humanly possible to suffer a third overall loss or third conference loss to disintegrate this potential logjam.

At this point, you might be thinking ‘didn’t this idiot just argue for Texas to suffer a second loss and join the logjam?’ Yes, I did. But for entirely different reasons. I don’t think Texas’ resumé will hold up with two losses unless it wins the SEC — which it still very well could..? I think? I have never been accused of being smart, and deciphering through all of this makes my head hurt.

To conclude why I picked Tennessee as the team to root for is that, generally speaking, I think Ole Miss needs as many teams as possible to take a third loss and bow out from this circus. I’ll frame it this way: with the games Ole Miss has remaining, considering it is currently the last team in the field as things stand right now, are you more concerned with the teams ahead of the Rebels? Or, are you more concerned with them being jumped by teams behind them? I lean toward the latter, and if Georgia loses a third game, it will be out of the discussion. I think that’s more directly beneficial to Ole Miss than this vague concept that a third Georgia loss will dilute the quality of that win for the Rebels. We all (committee included) saw with our own eyeballs the talent on the field on both sides last Saturday and we saw which team prevailed. Eliminate the logjam by eliminating Georgia.

If you’re reading this thinking Georgia winning helps Ole Miss, you might be right. I don’t think either outcome is overly detrimental to the Rebels at all. I am also just some schmuck with a newsletter that you subscribe to for a $0.00 monthly fee.

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No. 22 LSU at Florida, 2:30 PM CT (ABC). Rooting interest: Florida

LSU is an average football team that was exposed by Alabama last week as such. While the Kentucky loss is the most glaring wart on Ole Miss’ resumé, the loss to the Tigers in Baton Rouge, in the manner that it occurred, is the one that stings a bit more for fans. But, as we discussed earlier above, and earlier this week, the path for Ole Miss to get to the playoff with a 10-2 record likely had to include a win over Georgia, so whatever.

I hate math and hate tiebreakers, but I am told by others in this industry and on the internet that there is a very plausible scenario in which LSU can win out and still make the SEC Championship game. Here’s the full explanation. It’s far from unlikely. While the Rebels lost to the Tigers, I really don’t think it matters if LSU fades down the stretch in terms of weakening Ole Miss’ resumé. I think you need whatever voodoo magic those cajuns can drum up to still make the SEC title game and steal a bid to be eliminated. Think about it from a college basketball standpoint. If you’re a bubble team entering conference tournament week, you’re rooting for one-bid leagues to have the favorite win that league. Like if a ranked Memphis team was still in Conference-USA, you’d want them to win their conference tournament, because you don’t want some random team to upset them, win the tournament, get the automatic bid and that ranked Memphis team to take up an at-large bid. It ‘steals a bid’ and shrinks the field, if that makes any sense. That is what LSU would be doing at this point if it made it to the SEC Championship game and won — stealing a bid and shrinking the field. There’s zero chance LSU would make the playoff unless it wins the SEC.

D.J. Lagway is apparently going to be healthy enough to play in this game, so I suppose there is a small chance?

Kansas at No. 6 BYU, 9:15 CT (ESPN). Rooting interest: Kansas

BYU is undefeated, sits atop the BIG 12 standings and appears to be poised to win the league. Two-loss Colorado sits one game behind them in the BIG 12 standings (5-1). You’re rooting for BYU to take a loss here because if everything remains as it is in the BIG 12 standings, Colorado will face BYU in the conference championship game. If Colorado were to win that, the Buffaloes would receive an automatic bid into the playoff and there would be a furious debate about BYU deserving an at-large bid as a one-loss team that finished the regular season undefeated but lost a de facto bonus game that other one-loss teams did not have to play because they didn’t win their respective leagues. And make no mistake — BYU would have a valid argument. These conference championship games are another weird, somewhat nonsensical element in this broken system as we discussed before.

If BYU entered the BIG 12 championship game as a one-loss team, it would not matter who won that game because, based on how the committee has reflected its views in the rankings, a two-loss BIG 12 team is not getting an at-large bid.

Take this rooting guide as gospel because I am clearly a genius who knows all.

Thank you for reading as always. We’ll have more thoughts on Sunday. 

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A rain-soaked Lane Kiffin stood among a sea of fans flooding onto Jerry Hollingsworth Field in the immediate aftermath of Ole Miss toppling Georgia, 28-10, to save the program’s most anticipated football season in a generation. He was interviewed by ESPN sideline reporter Molly McGrath.

As Kiffin seemingly processed the scope of the moment in real time, he reflected back 364 days prior to November 11, 2024, the night Ole Miss was embarrassed 52-17 by the same Bulldogs program that it defeated on Saturday evening — one that’s become the gold standard in a sport that is historically ruled by an elite few programs with little parity.

“One year ago, we lost to these guys by like 30,” Kiffin said. “We made a decision that we have to go recruit differently. We’ve got to coach differently. We planned for this game for a year. We’ve game-planned all off-season schematically for their defense and their offense.”

That November night in Athens, nearly a calendar year ago to the day, proved to be a pivotal moment for a Kiffin-led program that has been wildly successful in his four full seasons as head coach. The Rebels posted a 34-15 mark in that four-year span, had multiple 10-win seasons and won 11 games and a Peach Bowl in 2023. The Rebels were a solid, consistent program, but when it came to facing the best teams in the SEC, they usually fell short. Ole Miss arrived in Athens last November with an 8-1 record and were the No. 9 team in the country, but was a double-digit underdog to No. 1 Georgia. In theory, Ole Miss was playing for a potential at-large playoff spot in what used to be a four-team College Football Playoff. But as the betting line and general consensus reflected, no one (rightfully) gave Ole Miss much of a chance. The Rebels were promptly throttled by 35 points. Kiffin’s postgame quotes that night were telling.

“We have to recruit at a higher level. I am not blaming anyone. We have to coach better. But at a certain point, the stats are what they are. We have signed one 5-star, they’ve signed 24 or something. Those stats do kind of show up at some point,” Kiffin said after the loss. “So, we need to recruit at a better level and just do a better job recruiting.”

He scoffed at the notions of his team’s potential playoff hopes being dashed after the loss.

“No. That was not a playoff-looking team we put on the field tonight. The last thing I am worried about is us being knocked out of the playoffs. We don’t deserve to be in the playoffs,” Kiffin said.

Kiffin and his staff spent the offseason landing blue-chip talent in the transfer portal — a recruiting avenue no single coach in college football has navigated more effectively than Kiffin — to get bigger, stronger and more athletic at the lines of scrimmage. He saw the seismic gap between his team and the best teams in the sport, as well as the reasons for that gap, and sought to close it.

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This was a program-defining win

Saturday’s 28-10 victory over Georgia was a perception-changing win for Ole Miss football. The Rebels slayed the proverbial giant. The Bulldogs have won two of the last three national championships. Prior to Saturday, Georgia had not lost to an opponent other than Alabama since November 7, 2020 when a Dan Mullen-coached Florida team beat them in Jacksonville. Mullen hasn’t coached a game since 2021 and Georgia beat 52 consecutive non-Alabama opponents.

It was also a multi-faceted validation of a team, a coach and a program.

It’s a proof of concept that Ole Miss, who has been on the forefront of the rapidly-changing NIL landscape, can compete with the best when it is invested. It’s proof of how Kiffin built this talented roster. There was nothing fluky or auspicious about this. Ole Miss pushed Georgia around for four quarters because it was the more physical football team. The Rebels’ defensive line destroyed the Bulldogs’ offensive line. Quarterback Carson Beck was sacked five times. The Ole Miss defense generated nine tackles for loss. The defense leads the country in both categories. Ole Miss has generated 103 tackles for loss this season. The next closest mark is Duke with 85. The Rebels have 46 sacks on the year, six more than the next closest, Boise State.

Georgia Tech transfer Jared Ivey and Florida transfer Princely Umanmielen were complete game-wreckers up front. Both had two sacks. Suntarine Perkins added a sack and was a problematic match-up for Georgia’s tackles for the entirety of the game. Perkins leads the SEC in sacks with 10. Umanmielen is second with 9.5. Ivey ranks fifth in the conference with seven.

“I told our team coming in that I thought this was the most talented team we have played,” Georgia head coach Kirby Smart said. “Their defense really affected us through the pass rush.”

Georgia had just one rush for 10 or more yards. Georgia had 69 yards of total offense in the first half and a season-low 245 total yards. After the Bulldogs capitalized on the early interception with a touchdown, they scored just three points the rest of the game.

“I told the guys, they’re not scoring again,” Umanmielen said. “This game doesn’t even need to be close. I don’t think they are on our level.”

A year after realizing that they couldn’t match up physically, the Rebels defeated the Bulldogs using a similar blueprint Georgia has used to ascend to the pinnacle of college football.

The win is also a validation of Kiffin’s overall approach to the transfer portal. It’s been debated how sustainable Kiffin’s heavy reliance on the transfer portal is and whether or not you could actually build a contender with that approach to roster construction. The team on the field on Saturday night looked like it could compete with any team in the country.

“This is why I came here,” Umanmielen said. “To play big time football, to play in big time games and win games like this. This feeling is just unreal.”

It’s a validation of Kiffin’s offensive genius. For as clunky and disjointed as this offense has looked at times this season, Saturday was a schematic masterclass from Kiffin and Charlie Weis Jr. Ole Miss threw for 263 yards at an average 14.6 yards per completion. Only one other opponent (Alabama) has thrown for more yards and scored more points on the Bulldogs this season. And the Rebels did it without starting running back Henry Parrish Jr. and arguably the top receiver in the country in Tre Harris. Ole Miss had receivers running wide open for most of the afternoon. Harris has now missed three consecutive games since he suffered an injury in the loss to LSU. In his absence, the Rebels have been forced to spread the football around to their other pass-catching weapons and have become a more effective offense as a result. Obviously, Ole Miss is a much better offense with a healthy Harris, but his absence seemingly forced a needed change to the approach to the passing game.

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Ole Miss saved its season with this win

This win was also a validation that this team is indeed as talented as many believed it was in the preseason. The Rebels are now very much back in the mix to earn a berth into the College Football Playoff, a thought that seemed fairly incomprehensible a month ago. Ole Miss lost two games in excruciating fashion to inferior opponents in Kentucky and LSU. The loss to Kentucky is by far the most inexplicable of the two and looked to be the one that everyone would ultimately gaze back on at the end of the year when wondering how this gifted yet confounding team fell woefully short of expectations. The loss in Baton Rouge, a game in which Ole Miss didn’t trail for a single snap, eliminated all margin for error.

“We have to win out,” a shell shocked Jaxson Dart said after the loss. “There’s no other option.”

College football is as week-to-week of a sport as it's ever been. Match-ups and motivation (or lack thereof) have been two driving forces behind the newfound parity in the sport. You can’t really fake desperation, and it’s often the purest form of motivation.

“I told the team after the LSU game that you’re now in the playoffs. You have to win each game from here, so the playoffs start now,” Kiffin said. “Sometimes things happen and you don’t know why. That put our backs against the wall. For a lot of people, when your backs are against the wall, you fight a little differently.”

With its season on the brink of failure, Ole Miss notched its best win of the season, against the toughest opponent on its schedule, in a game it absolutely had to win. It certainly didn’t have to be this way for the Rebels, but maybe the bumpy road to Saturday’s triumph was ultimately the needed path. A large chunk of this team’s core was formed through an 11-win campaign in 2023 that saw them win several one-score games and overcome a few second-half deficits — like erasing a nine-point deficit against LSU in the final eight minutes of the game. For the entirety of the offseason, Ole Miss was praised as a legitimate contender for both the talent it returned and the talent it added. The Rebels were not tested through the season’s first four games due to a weak non-conference schedule. When (mostly self-inflicted) adversity arrived, this team didn’t respond well. It seemed to be what the 2024 Ole Miss Rebels might ultimately be remembered for. Saturday was a different story.

The first nine snaps of this game could not have possibly gone any worse for Ole Miss. Dart was swallowed by Georgia’s defensive line on the first three plays, threw an interception on third down and then limped to the locker room with an ankle injury as Georgia took advantage of a 21-yard short field and scored a touchdown. Ole Miss didn’t blink. Redshirt freshman Austin Simmons led the offense down the field for a 10-play, 75-yard touchdown drive that drastically altered the momentum of a game that could’ve quickly spiraled for the Rebels.

“He changed the momentum of the game,” Dart said. “He is one hell of a player, and for him to come in and manufacture a drive that resulted in a touchdown, that really sparked our team.”

In both of its losses this year, Ole Miss led entering the fourth quarter, only to surrender the lead and come up short in the games’ most crucial plays and drives. On Saturday, the Rebels slammed the door on Georgia. The Bulldogs did not score a touchdown in the second half and did not score a point in the fourth quarter.

“Georgia is a team that has been down more than we were up on them today and have come back,” Umanmielen said. “We knew we had to keep our foot on their necks and not give them any room to breathe, and we did that.”

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Ole Miss is within striking distance of earning a playoff berth

As significant as this win was, Ole Miss is still far from a lock to make the college football playoff. The two losses still eliminate any margin for error for the Rebels in the final two games of the season — a road test at Florida after the bye week and a home game against a hapless Mississippi State team the day after Thanksgiving. Ole Miss cannot afford to lose either game.

Whether or not a 10-2 record will be enough for the Rebels to get into the playoff is still uncertain. Ole Miss moved up to No. 10 in the AP poll, one slot ahead of Georgia. On Tuesday, the second edition of the College Football Playoff rankings will be released. The Rebels debuted at No. 16 in the initial rankings last week. I think a significant climb up the rankings after a win of this caliber is likely. I think that if Ole Miss wins its final two games, it will get into the playoff. Entering the season, most assumed a 10-2 record would be more than enough to get into the playoff. Strangely enough, with the way this season has played out, I am not sure that notion would’ve ended up being true without one of the ten wins being Georgia. I don’t think Ole Miss would have a good enough resumé to get in without a quality win like this one.

Ole Miss will also be a favorable team from an optics and narrative standpoint. The Rebels are playing their best football at the end of the season. The convincing manner in which they demolished Georgia removed any discussion of it being a fluke. Maybe it’s fitting that beating Georgia — the same program that, one year ago, showed Ole Miss just how far it had to go to compete with the top teams in the sport — was the requirement to rectify two bad losses to get its season back on track. Fitting, that the manner in which the Rebels won — being the more physical team and dominating the lines of scrimmage, just like Georgia did to them in 2023 — is what might ultimately convince the selection committee that Ole Miss is undoubtedly one of the 12 best teams in college football.

At the end of his on-field interview with McGrath, Kiffin got emotional when asked about the toughness and resiliency of Dart. He was asked again in his postgame press conferencee. Kiffin has stated repeatedly that Dart did more than any single other active player to help recruit this offseason’s portal haul that allowed Ole Miss to assemble a championship-caliber roster.

" Jaxson had just walked by on the last play and said ‘love you, coach.’ He’s just an awesome kid,” Kiffin said. “It’s a cool group of kids. He led this thing, in getting this all together, getting all of these guys together, almost like a coach. For him to deliver a gritty performance like this, it was just awesome to watch.”

Dart and Kiffin’s relationship has evolved in Dart’s three years at Ole Miss and now appears to be stronger than ever, but certainly didn’t get to that point without rocky moments. The team those two spent so much time and energy assembling has also had its own trials and tribulations. But it’s an Ole Miss team that appears to be finding the best version of itself at the right time and still has everything left to play for.

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In the final minutes of the first half, Ole Miss looked like it was ready to throw in the towel on the 2024 season. The Rebels gifted a hapless Oklahoma team a 14-10 halftime lead and seemed lifeless as another game was on the verge of getting away from them.

Instead, Jaxson Dart said the team had a ‘look in the mirror’ moment in the halftime locker room. Ole Miss scored two third-quarter touchdowns, the defense pitched a shutout in the second half and the Rebels put the game away. I suppose what you take from this game depends on the outlook you prefer to have. There was plenty of bad but also a lot of good. I am not sure any of it makes me feel much different about what this team is and might become over the final four games, but the Rebels didn’t wilt, and there’s something to be said for that. Let’s take a look at both the good and the bad in alternating fashion.

Good: offensive plan without Tre Harris

Ole Miss was without its top receiver Tre Harris in this game. I thought the way the Rebels adapted was great. Ole Miss used a lot of two-tight end personnel, utilized both Caden Prieskorn and Dae’Quan Wright effectively as both pass-catchers and run-blockers. Ole Miss opened the game with a 75-yard touchdown drive. Prieskorn and Wright each caught a pass that accounted for 51 of those yards. The offense struggled to run the ball against a good Oklahoma rush defense, but this offense looked different, in a good way, without its top receiver.

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Bad: Ole Miss still can’t run the ball effectively

Nothing looked different in the running game this week. Henry Parrish Jr. got the bulk of the carries and Ulysses Bentley IV got a few in the absence of an injured Matt Jones. The presence of two tight ends on the field did not appear to do much to help this struggling rushing attack. The Rebels ran the ball 31 times for 69 yards. Parrish ran it 15 times for 44 yards. Bentley had five carries for five yards. Ole Miss was bad in-short yardage situations again — to the point of drastically changing the game late in the first half due to a bad play call that almost felt like an admission from the coaching staff that it doesn’t believe Ole Miss can consistently get 3-6 feet when it needs to.

I do not know what Ole Miss can do to improve its running game. It appears uncreative, but I don’t know enough about scheme to tell you which run concepts should be used instead. It appears the staff is hell-bent on keeping the running back rotation the same (I am curious to see what happens when Jones comes back from injury), but this offense is going to be limited without an effective and explosive running game.

Good: Jaxson Dart

Dart got off to a sluggish start but ended up playing a pretty effective game. He was 22-30 for 311 yards and a touchdown. Dart spread the ball around to the two tight ends, Cayden Lee, Juice Wells and Jordan Watkins. Prieskorn led with five receptions for 71 yards and a touchdown. Lee and Watkins had four catches. Wright and Wells had three catches. All five names mentioned had at least four targets. Prieskorn led with eight targets.

The passing game’s effectiveness is the single biggest reason Ole Miss moved the ball and won the game. Dart deserves a lot of credit for that. He made a hell of a throw to Micah Davis on a crucial third down conversion in the second half. The touchdown to Prieskorn was a good throw to capitalize on a great play call. He didn’t turn the ball over. Dart was really efficient in this game.

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Bad: finishing the half

I am not even sure the above title completely articulates what I am inferring, but for the second consecutive game, Ole Miss’ poor play toward the end of the first half altered the score in the opponent's favor and dramatically shifted the momentum of the game.

With 6:03 remaining in the half, the Ole Miss offense began a drive in Oklahoma territory thanks to one hell of a play from Jared Ivey that forced a fumble he also recovered. With 2:47 remaining, Ole Miss faced a 4th & 1 from the Oklahoma five-yard line. At this point, The Rebels had out-gained the Sooners 164 to 143 and were 15 feet away from taking a 17-7 lead. A field goal attempt would-have in, in all likelihood, made it a 13-7 lead with just over two minutes left in the half. The fourth down attempt was blown up and Oklahoma proceeded to march 92 yards down the field for a touchdown to take a 14-10 lead into halftime.

I didn’t think the Rebels played a particularly crisp half of football in the first two quarters of this game, but given how the game had played out in the first 27-plus minutes of the first half, It was wild to me that Ole Miss somehow trailed at halftime.

In the loss to LSU, the Rebels led 17-7 with just under two minutes remaining in the first half, gave up a field goal, then immediately fumbled on their next offensive possession and yielded another field goal to enter the locker room only leading 17-13. I think this issue stems from a multitude of things, but Ole Miss has done itself no favors at the end of halves over the last two games. It greatly affected the eventual outcome of the LSU game and, at the time, I thought the end-of-half swing against the Sooners might be the final straw for Ole Miss.

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Good: defensive adjustments

The Ole Miss defense has been tremendous for most of this season. In the first half of this game, the Rebels committed far too many stupid penalties that extended drives for an Oklahoma offense missing its top five receivers, multiple linemen (the Sooners lost their left tackle in this game, too) and is led by a young but talented quarterback. Jackson Arnold hurt Ole Miss with his feet in the first half. Oklahoma ran for 125 yards in the first half as the Rebels were seemingly not as aggressive in sending pressure at Arnold, which aided him in the passing game too.

The second half was a different story. Arnold was sacked six times in the second half (nine total for the game), Oklahoma rushed for just 22 yards with 94 yards of total offense and scored zero points. Ole Miss clamped down on the Sooners by getting to Arnold more frequently in the second half. Suntarine Perkins had three sacks in this game. J.J Pegues and Princely Umanmielen had two. Oh, and the Rebels were without Walter Nolen in the second half, who left the game with an injury.

This defense was once again really good.

Bad: short-yardage situations on offense

This ties into the finishing halves note above. The Rebels simply aren’t good in short-yardage situations. It’s a reflection of the offensive line’s inability to get a push up front and consistently run block. I am not sure if there is a solution to this. I think this offensive line and running game sort of is what it is at this point, but a pair of failed fourth down conversion attempts in the first half kept Oklahoma in the game.

The fake sweep to Pegues, toss to Wells on the short side of the field at the end of the second quarter was brutal. Ole Miss called timeout before that snap to regroup, too. It’s indicative of the offense’s inability to convert short-yardage situations and the staff’s lack of solutions to solve the problem. Maybe there are some ways Ole Miss can get creative with its play calling to boost its running game as a whole. I am not really sure there is much the staff can do to fix the short-yardage struggles.

It makes me wonder if Kiffin will change how aggressive he is on fourth downs, particularly in field goal range. I don’t have the numbers to fully defend that assertion, but it has felt like that has been the case to some degree. Caden Davis already has 18 field goal attempts on the season. He only had 20 total in the 2023 regular season. With as good as the Ole Miss defense has been, despite how frustrating these short-yardage situations must be for Kiffin — one of the most aggressive coaches in college football — I wonder if we see an even more conservative approach over these last four games when it comes to going for it versus taking the points.

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Good: pass protection

The coaching staff seemed pleased with the way the offensive line pass protected in this game. Ole Miss made a small tweak on the offensive line with Gerquan Scott playing right guard and Julius Buelow sliding out to right tackle in place of Micah Pettus. While this offensive line continues to struggle in the running game, an improvement in pass pro is certainly a positive development. I doubt it’s a coincidence that Dart also had one of his most effective games of the year throwing the ball.

After a bye week to work any of the previously injured offensive linemen back into the rotation (mostly Jeremy James and Caleb Warren), it seems apparent that the coaching staff is sticking with the same 5-6 guys up front. I am not sure what the one small adjustment of Pettus being bumped out of the starting five actually means (more on that a second), but this unit pass blocked well against a good defensive line.

Bad: Pettus a late scratch

Veteran right tackle Micah Pettus was not on the injury report last week, yet was a late scratch shortly before kickoff, though he appeared to be dressed out and on the sideline. Kiffin’s description of the situation in his postgame press conference was odd. He initially said that he learned shortly before kickoff that Pettus “said he couldn’t play.” When referencing the situation later on in the press conference, he said Pettus “decided not to play right before the game.”

I don’t really know what to make of this. That is certainly not a typical way for a coach to refer to a potential injury, and Pettus not showing up on the injury report all week seems odd. I have heard that Pettus has been playing through a couple of injuries this season. Pettus has been penalized frequently this year and I also heard he was not running with the first team offense in the two weeks of practice since the LSU game. I don’t really have much else to offer at this point. The whole thing is just odd.

Good: Ole Miss showed resolve

Things seemed pretty bleak at halftime for a team that hasn’t exactly responded well to self-inflicted adversity at other points in the season. Personally, I thought the game, and the season for that matter, was about to go completely sideways. But, to the Rebels' credit, they battled back and took control of the football game in the third quarter with a pair of stops sandwiched between two touchdown drives. If nothing else, that is a positive sign as the team enters the last four games of the season.

I think Ole Miss had only scored one second-half touchdown in SEC play entering this game — the fourth down catch and run from Tre Harris against Kentucky. So, to have two touchdown drives in the third quarter to take control of a game that Ole Miss could not afford to lose, is certainly a positive development.

Dart described the Rebels trailing at halftime as a bit of a gut check moment for the team.

“There was a lot of discussion in the halftime locker room,” Dart said. “A lot of us were pissed off. We felt like we should have been up by a lot more points. It was definitely a look in the mirror moment for us and I was really happy how we came out in the second half. I love how we came out and scored in the second half.”

I don’t think anything that happened in this game drastically changed my opinion of Ole Miss. I think the Rebels are a team with a limited offense due to a nonexistent running game and a struggling offensive line. I think that has put a lower ceiling on this season than originally anticipated. I don’t know how the Rebels will beat a team like Georgia without better offensive line play and better production from the running backs. But, for now, Ole Miss survived another week and now faces a road test at Arkansas. A win will at least get the Rebels to the Georgia game with a chance prove they can beat the best teams in college football and make a potential case for a College Football Playoff berth. It’s going to be a hell of a challenge for this team to win in Fayetteville.

In a must-win situation against Oklahoma, Ole Miss responded well to adversity. If nothing else, it sounds as if this team still believes it can right the ship.

“Coach Kiffin mentioned it, we are two plays away from being the number one team in the country,” Dart said. “We have a big challenge coming up this week and we need to continue to stack these (wins).”