What no Ole Miss fan wants to admit about this year’s football team

OXFORD, Miss. — Nobody wants to hear any of this, but Ole Miss basically got what they earned in a 9-3 season that was disappointing more than anything else. In this wild and crazy season, that’s nothing to apologize for, but some fans feel the Rebels under-achieved.

That’s not a complaint. Whether you want to buy it or not, Ole Miss simply wasn’t able to do enough in three games for a win.

How times have changed. It wasn’t long ago that a record like that was celebrated. Expectations have gone up, which is probably exactly what Lane Kiffin has been trying to develop.  His teams have won at a higher clip (70.5%) than anybody since Johnny Vaught (74.5%).

Fans can get as accustomed to winning as they do losing. It was the legendary John Barnhill, who played and coached for General Robert Neyland at Tennessee, said as athletics director at Arkansas, “people don’t remember what was accomplished in November as much as what was expected in August.” That’s everywhere in college football for decades.

Ole Miss fans were expecting to be in the College Football Playoff this year. That’s probably not going to happen now. The set of circumstances to get there would require enough goofy things to happen as basically being nearly impossible.

The biggest issue is around a 9-3 South Carolina team being the current flavor of the week to get the tag of hottest thing going right now. Some are suggesting since they are playing better than the Rebels right now, the Gamecocks should be in the 12-team playoff. They are citing the committee’s rule of taking the team playing the best at the end of the season, which has been taken out of context.

Ole Miss beat — no, dominated — South Carolina back in October, 27-3.

“If the committee is even thinking about that, then what do you play the games for?” Kiffin said Sunday afternoon. “That’s what everybody always says. ‘what if this team played (each other), then how would they do?’ That’s the hard thing in comparing these different conferences. Well, we did at their place and it wasn’t even close. We could still be playing the game and they still might’ve not scored a touchdown.”

It’s not that unusual for coaches to talk about a team being better than the previous year, but the record doesn’t always reflect that. A lot of fans really can’t even believe that statement is real.

“Things go wrong in the games, the kick goes in or it doesn’t or a ref makes a call or they don’t,” Kiffin said. “I’m not even talking about this year, I’m just talking in general. When games come down to that, it doesn’t necessarily mean this team is better than that team. They happen to make one more play at the end or a field goal goes in or out. So many games come down to that — one score games — and we were on the good side of that a year ago. We’re actually a better team than a year ago, even though we were 10-2 and now we’re 9-3 in regular season, but those are three one-play games.”

To hear some folks talk about, the Rebels should win every game by four touchdowns or more. That’s unrealistic in an SEC where every team has scholarship players and highly-recruited players. It’s as close to a JV NFL as it can get.

“In both of the first two losses, they gotta make fourth and six conversions,” Kiffin said.​​ “In our other nine games, every game been double-digit wins or more. Really all of them haven’t been close at the end. To me, that describes a really good team that played three super close games and didn’t find a way to win them in the end,

“Somebody said that we’re the only team — you think about the SEC being the best conference — we’re the only team that hasn’t lost by more than one score. Everybody else has lost by more than one score, including Texas, because it’s a hard league. It shows we’re really good.”

Just not as good as some fans were expecting. You could just about hold an SEC playoff these days, but that’s not politically good for anybody as long as the NCAA is clinging to relevancy by it’s fingernails.

Like everything else, that will likely change. But not this season.