Rippee Writes: a look back at the Egg Bowl + coaching carousel madness
Lincoln Riley to USC, Brian Kelly to LSU and an Ole Miss team that made history
Hope everyone had a good Monday and a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. We have a pair of new podcasts out.
Chase Parham joined me on Friday morning to react to Ole Miss’s 31-21 Egg Bowl win, what it means in the long term and the significance of this 10-2 season. Check that out here or anywhere you get podcasts.
Weldon Rotenberg joined in his normal Sunday slot to take a look back at Ole Miss’s 2021 season, some final stats and the craziness of the coaching carousel. You can check that out here or anywhere you get podcasts.
I also wrote a column on Rebel Grove about Matt Corral’s journey at Ole Miss and being the hero the program needed but didn’t always deserve. You can read that here.
We have a lot of the same stuff to get into today.
Ole Miss wins Egg Bowl to cap 10-2 season
We’ve covered this pretty thoroughly between the two podcasts, and the game was nearly five days ago at this point, but what a remarkable end to the season for Ole Miss. This team will be remembered as one that won a pair of tough games on the road, was as good as any team in nearly three decades at home and one that maximized their ceiling with a generational arm talent at quarterback. The Rebels battled a slew of injuries on the offensive side of the football, but rode their defense to 6-1 mark despite it on their way to notching the first 10-win regular season in program history.
The defense was terrific once again.
Maybe the most surprising part of this 2021 season is the fact that this previously much-maligned defense was the more physical group at the line of scrimmage in the team’s two biggest wins of the season.
This group was fortunate to remain healthy for the entirety of the season and began to establish an identity rooted in physicality. If you think about it, Ole Miss didn’t have a turnover on Thursday night. In its win over Texas A&M, the Rebels were already well-positioned to win that game before the two fourth-quarter interceptions. And don’t mistake what I am saying, those interceptions helped seal that victory, but the point is that Ole Miss was successful largely because of its physicality and its ability to not allow big plays. D.J. Durkin deserves a lot of credit. Things looked pretty rough after the Arkansas game, but his group looked like an entirely different defense from that point on. Ole Miss didn’t allow a team to reach 30 points after the shootout with Arkansas, and in the final six games of the season, it only allowed more than 20 points on two occasions, with one of those being Mississippi State’s garbage time touchdown to bring the Bulldogs total to 21. This defense was tough and played with an edge. That’s the first time in over half a decade that you could accurately say that about an Ole Miss defense.
Sam Williams was unblockable
It was evident from the the first defensive series that No. 7 was going to be an issue for Mississippi State. After the Bulldogs stopped Ole Miss on a fourth and short on the game’s opening drive. Williams, lined up across from struggling right tackle Scott Lashley, induced a false start and a pair of quarterback pressures to help hold Mississippi State to a field goal. That was a sign of things to come. The Bulldogs could not block him and he disrupted their offense the entire night. You could make an argument no one player impacted the game more than Williams. The best way to neutralize Will Rogers and that air raid scheme is to get pressure with four and get Rogers moving laterally. He doesn’t love contact and he is far less accurate when throwing out of a broken pocket. Williams and the Rebels defensive line did that to a tee.
He put together one hell of a performance to wrap up an incredible season in which he earned a lot of money. Williams has a fantastic story and is a guy that’s been through a lot and grown up a lot at Ole Miss. He will have a lengthy career at the next level if he remains healthy.
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Corral was the next biggest difference
Five years from now, if this game ever comes up in conversation, I’ll remember two guys from this Egg Bowl: Williams and Corral. Offensively, Ole Miss had Matt Corral and Mississippi State did not. He extended a couple of drives with his feet, was active enough running the football that it helped the Rebels a bit in the red zone (and, you know, using Snoop Conner in short yardage situations) and provided the Rebels and offensive lift yet again, just as he’s done all year. I wont’ rehash everything I wrote on Friday, and will just re-plug the column instead.
Corral is one hell of a talent and will be remembered a one of the more important figures in Ole Miss football history given the time in which he played and the state of the program upon his departure versus when he arrived.
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Ole Miss is going to a New Year’s Six Bowl, but which one?
I am far from an expert when it comes to bowl projections, but in this particular case, Ole Miss’s options seem pretty clear cut. If Alabama somehow beats Georgia in the SEC Championship this weekend, the Rebels will head to the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. If Alabama loses, which I expect to happen as I really don’t see how the Crimson Tide can block Georgia for four quarters, Ole Miss will either go to the Peach Bowl in Atlanta or the Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, and I would wager that it ends up being the Peach Bowl, but again, that’s just a guess.
Pretty much any projection you look at has Ole Miss in one of those two bowls.
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This is the wildest coaching carousel in some time
It might be the craziest silly season of all time and it isn’t close to being over with. On Sunday, Lincoln Riley departed Oklahoma for USC in a move that seemed to shock a lot of people. It’s not shocking the Riley left Oklahoma, it’s where he left Oklahoma for. There was a lot of smoke on Friday afternoon and into Saturday morning that LSU extended a seismic offer to Riley and that he planned to accept it. No one with any credibility reported that it was a done deal, but a handful well-sourced reporters hinted at the idea of it throughout the week. When you really think about it, did Riley to LSU ever actually make a lot of sense? Leave one program bound for the SEC for another that is already in the SEC? LSU is a better job than Oklahoma in a more fertile recruiting area, but it isn’t some gigantic step up from a resources standpoint and the expectations at LSU are certainly steeper and, in some ways, more irrational.
Did you see the SEC West this year? Lane Kiffin won 10 games at Ole Miss, Mike Leach had his team playing as well as anyone in the country in the season’s final month and Sam Pittman won eight games at Arkansas. It’s worth reiterating that LSU’s permanent SEC East opponent, for now, is Florida. That means he would have to beat four of these seven opponents every year just to have a chance to finish above .500 in the league — Auburn, Alabama, Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Arkansas, Mississippi State and Florida. And for the record, LSU’s rotational opponent next year is Tennessee. How fun does that sound to you if you were in his shoes? Oh, and guess who won’t be happy with 5-3 in the SEC West? Every single Cajun that fills that stadium, writes checks to the school or buys merchandise.
Now, Riley gets to live in southern California while coaching a national power and doesn’t have to figure out how to beat Alabama, Auburn and Florida every year for the right to keep earning a juicy paycheck. Not a bad gig. These are USC’s 2022 conference opponents: Arizona, Arizona State, Oregon State, Stanford, Cal, UCLA, Colorado, Washington State and Utah. Which slate sounds more manageable to you? Not to mention, if he can convince two quarterback prospects every other year not to leave California for the SEC or elsewhere, I like his chances to dominate the PAC 12.
There was a lot of ‘what has Lincoln Riley done?’ commentary on the internet in the immediate aftermath of this news. Well, he went 55-10 with a 37-7 mark in Big 12 play and notched two College Football Playoff appearances in five years. His worst ever AP Poll finish is 7th. Is there a program in this sport outside of maybe Alabama, Clemson and Ohio State in which you could reasonably expect more out of than that? I rest my case. I think he’s an interesting fit at USC. He is certainly a splash hire that will get people excited about USC football again. I keep hearing that’s important in the uber-competitive sports and entertainment market that is Los Angeles, though I am increasingly skeptical USC Football will ever be the spectacle it was under Peter Carrol again. Whether a Trojans return to prominence is enough to save the PAC 12’s dwindling relevancy as it pertains the playoff and postseason as a whole is another interesting angle to all of this.
Credit to USC AD Mike Bohn. He pulled off one hell of a power move here, as did Riley. I am fascinated to see how this plays out and how quickly Riley finds success. Given the relative competition, the resources at USC and Riley’s pedigree when it comes to quarterbacks, I think it is a matter of when rather than if this thing is successful.
Well, what’s next for LSU?
I had this part written earlier in the afternoon, wasn’t able to finish an then mass deleted the entire thing upon getting home from work. Why? Well, I will show you why.
LSU, after presumably missing out on Riley, never really committing to wanting Mel Tucker and allegedly shooting its shot at Jimbo Fisher, has now landed a top five coach in college football. Scott Woodward pulled off another gigantic splash hire. This is the same man that hired Chris Peterson at Washington, Fisher at Texas A&M and convinced Kim Mulkey to leave Baylor for LSU. For roughly 36 hours, it looked like Woodward and LSU were scrambling, on the verge of striking out on every splashy hire that was remotely realistic, only to pull Brian Kelly from Notre Dame.
Kelly went 113-40 at Notre Dame (this is not factoring in two vacated seasons because to hell with the NCAA. Nerds). He made the BCS Championship game once and the College Football Playoff twice. What’s even wilder is that Kelly’s current salary at Notre Dame was a mere $2.7 million. For comparison’s sake, every single coach in the SEC West minus Sam Pittman makes at least $5 million (Kiffin’s current deal is slightly under than that but he went over this mark with incentives, and spoiler alert, is about to be paid a lot more than $5 million). The contract figures for Kelly’s deal at LSU have yet to come out, but I would imagine the Tigers made him one of the top-3 highest paid coaches in the sport, if not the highest.
It’s hard to argue with Kelly’s track record at a place that is not the easiest to recruit to by Blue Bloods standards. With the resources at his disposal in Baton Rouge, Brian Kelly appears to be set up well for success. He is a damn good football coach. I am more curious with the cultural fit. I often find this aspect of coaching hires overrated. I don’t think Lane Kiffin loving chicken on a stick or The Library matters at all, just as I don’t believe Billy Napier needs to have a pro-jorts take to fit in in Gainesville. I also don’t think Riley needs to learn how to wax a surf board or read up on the cinema industry. But then you have cases like Bryan Harsin or Joe Moorhead. Fit matters, to a degree, particularly if overwhelming success isn’t immediate. The LSU job and everything that comes with it is an entirely different deal than being the head man in South Bend. Kelly can be sort of prickly at times and I am curious to see how he ingratiates himself with the people that matter in Baton Rouge. If he is able to do that part successfully, I don’t think recruiting will be an issue and I certainly believe the on-field results will be favorable.
The drama is far from over with Oklahoma still needed to fill its head coaching vacancy. There has been some buzz regarding Jeff Lebby, an Oklahoma alum, being in the mix for the offensive coordinator title there should Brent Venables get the job. All of that seems incredible premature as of this writing, but we will discuss more as the week progresses. What a wild time in college football.
The transfer portal brings a new normal
Ole Miss had four defensive players enter their names into the transfer portal on Monday afternoon. Momo Sanogo Daylen Gill, LeDarrius Cox and Patrick Lucas all departed the program. None of this should come as a shock. None were contributors and their prospects of having a major role in the future were slim to none. This is the new normal in college football, whether you like it or not. Roster building will be different than it’s ever been. I think Ole Miss is one of the best test cases of this new normal. The Rebels are going to hit the transfer portal hard. They need multiple impact receivers, at least one edge rusher, a quarterback and likely a linebacker. I am sure I left of three or four more needs that this staff will at least attempt to address via the portal too.
This coaching staff will spend the next two weeks on the road recruiting before the early signing period. Kiffin was in Louisiana last night visiting Mississippi State commit Cameron East. I am eager to see how this next month plays out for Ole Miss from a roster building standpoint. How does this staff balance the portal versus high school signees? Which quarterback do they land? Spencer Rattler or Dillon Gabriel? Where do they turn at receiver and what is in the cupboard at receiver on the current roster? This next month or so will largely determine what next year looks like for Ole Miss. As the Rebels wave goodbye to a generational quarterback talent and a senior-laden defense, can Kiffin and this coaching staff retool this roster to avoid a significant drop off next season?
On the horizon
I am talking to my old pal Antonio Morales, who now covers USC for The Athletic at some point this week for the podcast. I am guessing that will be a Friday show
We will do a hoops check in with Bracken Ray at some point too
A packed week of newsletters
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