Welcome to the most anticipated football season in Ole Miss history

how did the Rebels get here and can they live up to the hype?

photo credit: Ole Miss Athletics

The most anticipated football season in a generation is nearly a week underway as Ole Miss began fall camp six days ago. Here are some thoughts I had last week on the eve of the Rebels starting preseason camp that I just now finalized.

How will Ole Miss handle being The Hunted?

This isn’t really a storyline that will flesh itself out in preseason camp, but rather one to ponder throughout the entirety of what is sure to be an entertaining fall.

One of the many reasons this offseason has been unique is simply how the Rebels are perceived by the media. Ole Miss was picked to finish fourth in a loaded SEC that welcomes two new members: Texas and Oklahoma. The Rebels were picked behind only Georgia, Texas and Alabama — two of last year’s four playoff teams, and probably the actual best team (Georgia) in 2023 who lost one game and became a victim to a flawed system.

It’s an unfamiliar place for an Ole Miss program that has had its fair share of highs and lows over the last quarter century. It’s a program that’s seen plenty of success between some lean years, but most of its successful seasons have blossomed from exceeding expectations, like Houston Nutt’s maiden voyage in 2008, Lane Kiffin’s 10-2 mark in 2021 and even last year’s record-setting 11-win mark — when most rational prognosticators were debating a path to eight wins in July and August. Hugh Freeze’s 2014 and 2015 seasons shouldn’t go without mention, but those two campaigns, particularly 2015, featured a couple of head-scratching losses that still make them hard to quantify when juxtaposed to preseason expectations.

The only season in my lifetime that comes to mind in terms of heightened preseason expectations was 2009. That year, the Rebels entered the season ranked 8th in the AP poll, lost a frustrating road test on a Thursday night to South Carolina in the season’s third week and stumbled to an 8-4 record that culminated in an embarrassing 41-24 Egg Bowl loss to a 5-7 Mississippi State team led by first-year head coach Dan Mullen. I am not sure you can make a good-faith argument that the 2009 team had a more talented roster and a more realistic path toward winning a title than this team. Of course, a lot of that is circumstance and how this enthralling yet stupidly-managed sport has changed over the 15 years between the two aforementioned seasons, but the point remains.

The preseason expectations surrounding an Ole Miss team fresh off of an 11-win season are fairly unprecedented. In what world does this team *exceed* the expectations bestowed upon them by fans and media alike? Making the 12-team playoff? Is that considered meeting or exceeding expectations? I’d argue the former, while the latter likely means… winning a game in the playoff and being eight quarters away from winning a national title? This thought exercise is not intended to dampen any well-warranted excitement, but rather emphasized the rarified air Lane Kiffin has brought this Ole Miss program into.

If anything, it’s a reminder to enjoy every second of this journey over the next five months.

What makes this year different?

Kiffin’s cutting-edge approach to the transfer portal has been well-documented here. He has been dubbed the Transfer Portal King long before the 2023-2024 offseason occurred. Kiffin’s ability to get the fanbase to buy into what he’s selling, has also been well-documented, as has the revolutionary work of the Grove Collective.

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His success in this new college football ecosystem has brought forth warranted excitement entering every season he’s been in Oxford, besides his initial year that included that whole global pandemic thing no one wants to rehash. Ole Miss has won a ton of games during Kiffin’s tenure in Oxford, but until this year, none of his teams have been objectively viewed as a legitimate college football playoff contender. What makes this year different? There’s a simple and a complicated answer to this question. We’ll start with the former.

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The playoff expanded

As the world of college football remains in a state of unforecastable evolution, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Ole Miss’ heightened expectations are somewhat a result of the sheer fact that there are now more seats at the table due to the sport adopting a (more traditional) 12-team playoff.

College football is a sport that has desperately needed unified leadership since cable tv was invented. Instead, due to a lack of leadership, its ecosystem has devolved into one that is most similar to the illicit drug trade. Various cartels — whether it be conferences like the SEC, ACC, Big 12 and BIG 10, or television networks like ESPN, CBS and Fox, — are fighting for the biggest cut of a product that the the laborers get no part of, aside from the illicit benefits that wealthy alums (who are somehow vilified when caught) were willing to offer. I won’t turn this into a rant. But it is funny to me that wealthy and successful alums giving money to an athlete was seen as a moral shortcoming in this utterly idiotic and dysfunctional cash cow of an industry.

As society has grown more liberal (sheerly in a sports sense, we don’t do politics here), in terms of laborers getting the fair share of the labor they contribute, the transfer portal and NIL era were born. With that, came playoff expansion.

I think that in an age that saw television viewership skyrocket (and in turn, television rights) — while in-person attendance dwindled post-Covid — that expansion was inevitable, regardless of NIL and the portal. But I have a hard time believing, on a surface level, that revenue to the metaphorical cartels being diluted didn’t expedite the process.

All of that aside, there are now more seats at the table. Under Kiffin, Ole Miss, in all likelihood, would’ve made a 12-team playoff in 2021 and 2023. The Rebels would’ve been one of 12 teams remaining with a chance to win the most significant title in college sports in two of the last three seasons.

But what does that actually mean? We’ve seen how Ole Miss fared in the past against the true titans of the sport. The Rebels traveled to Athens, Georgia, last November as a one-loss team with an outside chance to make a farce of a four-team playoff (that, mind you, Georgia was left out of!), and they were embarrassed, 52-17. The game was not competitive.

The postgame press conference that night proved to be a seminal moment for Kiffin and this Ole Miss program and was a prelude to what it accomplished in the transfer portal this past offseason. This leads me to my next point.

There are now more seats at the table. The Rebels would’ve occupied one of these hypothetical seats in two of the last four years, but realistically, wouldn’t have had a chance at claiming a national title.

So, with the simple answer being that there are now more seats at the table: why is this year different? I’ll let someone more qualified than me explain the more complicated element of this answer.

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Saban weighs in on Ole Miss

Remember our good friend Nick Saban? He’s the greatest coach to ever put on a headset. Well, he retired recently and has tried his hand in the media space. Not shockingly, in a short sample size, he’s been incredibly good at it. I don’t typically put a ton of stock into television analysts’ opinions, whether it be former players or coaches, but I’ll make an exception for the greatest coach to ever live — who is so raw in his newfound hobby that he doesn’t understand the hot-take culture that the producers who placed him on set want him to adopt. Here’s what Saban had to say about Ole Miss in 2024 while on set with SEC Network during last month’s SEC Media Days in Dallas.

"I think this is the first time Ole Miss can really match-up up front," Saban said. "It's always been their issue. They'll win 11 games. They'll lose to Georgia, they'll lose to us (Alabama) because they can't match-up up front. They can this year. They're going to look more like an SEC team."

Unlike most failing media entities in this modern age, I try not to treat my readers and listeners like they’re complete dumbasses: Most of you reading this who follow Ole Miss football likely have some sort of understanding of why the Rebels — despite being incredibly successful during Kiffin’s tenure in Oxford — never beat Alabama and didn’t compete with Georgia. Hell, it’s why they were almost always in dogfights with Texas A&M despite the Aggies being a constantly dysfunctional program. A&M, for all of its flaws, has repeatedly recruited blue-chip talent on the offensive and defensive lines for over a decade. It’s because the Rebels did not have the talent, nor the depth, in the trenches. The front seven on both sides of the football are still what decide championships at any level of this barbaric but beautiful sport.

That’s why this year is different. Ole Miss has hurdled the final metaphorical barrier that prevents it from competing for championships.

The Rebels landed A&M transfer and former 5-star recruit Walter Nolan in the transfer portal. Nolan was the No. 1 defensive lineman in the 2024 transfer portal class. They also landed Florida transfer Princely Umanmielen, who led the Gators in tackles for loss in 2023 and earned 2nd-team All-SEC honors. They’re additions to a defensive line unit that already includes the likes of Jared Ivey, J.J. Pegues, (whatever the staff decides to do with) Suntarine Perkins and true freshman Kam Franklin.

I am not declaring Ole Miss, in terms of its defensive line or its front seven, a bonafide playoff favorite by any stretch. But, as Saban alluded to, the Rebels are in a much better place where it matters most than they’ve been at any time in the Kiffin era.

This is, of course, not by accident. Ole Miss entered Athens, Georgia on November 11 last year as a one-loss team with a puncher’s chance at the four-team playoff. I think any reasonable Ole Miss fan can admit that it was viewed as a free shot to slay a giant. Yes, the Rebels didn’t stand much of a chance, but isn’t it fun to dare to dream?

But why was that the case? Ole Miss was ranked something like 11th entering the game. Georgia was the consensus No. 1 team in the sport. Why was it viewed as such a David versus Goliath battle?

Let’s recall what Kiffin said after the game.

“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. “So, we need to recruit at a better level and just do a better job recruiting.”

The very next question fielded in that postgame presser, Kiffin was asked if the loss to Georgia (Ole Miss’ 2nd loss of the year) was particularly devastating because it all but eliminated the Rebels from the (now defunct) four-team playoff.

“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.

In all honesty, Kiffin and his staff knew what the issue was long before entering that game and were knee deep in rectifying it before the Rebels ever took the field that night. But the fruits of their labor were not seen until several weeks after the fact.

And it’s now being admired by someone who was once his mentor, greatest foe and general idol.

Again, I am not telling you Ole Miss has the best defensive front in the SEC. But when the greatest coach in the history of the profession tells the general public that the difference between past Ole Miss teams and the 2024 team is that they can “finally compete in the trenches,” — it should raise an eyebrow.

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What about the culture?

Perhaps the most common and eye-rolling dissenting talking point with regard to how Ole Miss got to this moment and how Kiffin built this roster is this: “building a roster through the portal isn’t sustainable. Too many personalities. Newcomers and NIL = selfishness.”

This piece of the Kiffin puzzle is the most fascinating one to me. If you are a regular podcast listener, you likely know that me and my football co-host, Weldon Rotenberg, spent the better part of the 2020, 2021 and 2022 offseasons questioning (pondering is probably a better word) whether or not leaning so heavily on the transfer portal was a sustainable way to build a roster. We weren’t wrong in our line of thinking, but I like to think that the difference between the product we put out versus the general media climate is that we openly accept when we are wrong — and its not that we even really ever actually doubted it — but more so that our questions about the concept proved to be wrong. That doesn’t make us wrong to  question things. I still believe, even though I am no longer a Big-J-Journalist, that our job to our consumers is to question things.

Be that as it may, as quickly as the college football ecosystem has changed in the last half decade, it’s remarkable to me to see that Kiffin’s strategy, which was once seen as experimental, “unsustainable” and a quick fix to supplement a lack of talent, is now seen as a proven strategy to improve frontline talent and improve depth. The same people who are now fawning over Ole Miss in the national media and praising Kiffin for his innovation are the same ones who questioned his methods during the build.

I have written extensively in this space about Lane Kiffin’s quirks and shortcomings as a coach. But one thing he does not get enough credit for is the value he puts into program culture, chemistry and the team-building aspect of building a roster. His innovative use of the transfer portal has made him both a pioneer and expert in this capacity.

"We have really evaluated who they are and how they are going to fit versus just the player,” Kiffin said last week at Ole Miss media days. “If you study around the country, just because you sign highly-ranked portal classes, doesn’t mean you will win. It has to be the right eval(uation) and right fit, otherwise it doesn’t work. I think you’ve seen countless examples of this and it not working. I think we have the right guys here and we just need to put it all together.”

Many people reading this may roll their eyes at this notion, but they’d be ignorant to do so. Excuse my French but Kiffin doesn’t really deal with shitheads. Whether it be Chris Marshall, Michael Trigg or any other well-known or lesser known talent within the program, if said individual is not bought into what the larger group wants to achieve, Kiffin has little time for culture cancers and has dealt with them appropriately.

As someone who once questioned the strategy’s viability, I find it important to highlight that said strategy is now the norm in the sport and that Kiffin has the Ole Miss program on the precipice of unprecedented accomplishment.

Enjoy the ride

As I get to the conclusion of this long-winded point about how Ole Miss handles being the hunted, I will conclude it with this: I think this team is going to handle it fine. I think they believe they belong in this space and in this moment. Why? Look at the players coming back: Jaxson Dart, Caden Prieskorn, Ivey, Micah Pettus, Perkins, Tre Harris, Jordan Watkins... the list goes on and on. In this evolving and unstable world that is modern college football, this group of aforementioned players (and many I did not mention) all could’ve left Ole Miss, tested the professional waters, signed contracts or transferred elsewhere. But they didn’t.

They -- and Rippee Writes has this on impeccable sourcing from multiple different camps --  all made a collective decision to come back and make history at a place that lacks it. For all of the unfounded nonsense about Dart’s future, as I reported here back in the fall, he was recruiting guys (**unofficially**) like Juice Wells and others to join them — to the point that they’re calling this season “the last dance” (which, as an esteemed marketing professional, I would advise against considering some of them will be back in 2025!).

All joking aside, this group represents the rare occurrence in which the team understands the gravity of the next six months as much as the fans do.

It’s the most anticipated football season in Ole Miss history.

Enjoy it, and subscribe to follow along the way.