How Kiffin, Rebels Dealing with Praise in Playoff Opportunity

OXFORD, Miss. — There is no secret this year that Ole Miss is polished and ready as a program to make a run at the SEC Championship. It’s been 61 long years since the Rebels have even won a conference title and that’s when the league only had 10 teams way back in 1963.

Lane Kiffin brings confidence and swagger to a school that’s been mostly an also ran before the past 12 years or so. Hugh Freeze helped prop the Rebels to national notoriety with the programs unprecedented recruiting wins.

Now, the Rebels have an opportunity through NIL, transfer portal activity and enough returning starters to have built enough depth to compete for a national title. Ole Miss brought in the No. 1 transfer class and a crop of in-state freshman ready to make an impact which could be the perfect storm at the right time with an expanded 12-team playoff.

Like his mentor Nick Saban, Kiffin uses the phrase ‘rat poison’ to deflect praise from his player’s skulls. The last thing he wants is team to become cocky, complacent and unmoved at his program’s ultimate task this season.

“As Coach Saban used to say, that’s truly the rat poison, especially in the preseason,” Kiffin said at SEC Media Days. “There have been plenty of teams not ranked high that end up high and plenty of high-ranked teams that end up low.”

He went on to share more of his thoughts on the Rebels’ praise in the preseason. It’s tougher now than ever to keep players tuned into the task at hand but knows its up to the team to remain focused under his guidance.

“I do talk about it extensively to players because I think that does come at them non stop nowadays because of phones,” Kiffin said last week. “That’s a big concern of mine and we talk about it all the time. There’s more of it than we’ve ever had here, for sure, with the preseason rankings and the position rankings or with mock-draft things and we’re supposed to have this many people drafted, which is way more than we’ve ever had. It’s a lot to guard against.”

Kiffin has been in this situation one other time before while he led USC through heavy NCAA sanctions. Despite restrictions, the Trojans finished 10-2 with a 7-2 mark in conference play in 2011. After the thrilling campaign, 2012 was set to be an entertaining season as his team was voted No. 1 overall to start the season with a solid group of returning stars off an exceptional offense.

This time around, Kiffin plans to motivate his team differently by embracing the chase than being chased.

“That was a different situation because that truly was rat poison of where we shouldn’t have been due to scholarship limitations (restricted to 75 scholarships from 85 man limit due to sanctions) and how low our roster was,” Kiffin said, “You still want to learn from every obstacle that happens in your life. I think we probably leaned into that too much at the time.

“Matt Barkley was coming back, and [USC] was preseason No. 1 after a strong finish the year before. We kind of embraced that and leaned into that. It didn’t work, so as you look back, you say you probably shouldn’t have and resisted that more.”