OXFORD, Miss. — All may not be well around Ole Miss football, but the goals they set before the season are still in front of them. Regardless what the polls are in mid-October.
The Rebels, naturally, dropped out of the Top 10 of both the AP and coaches polls, but not bad enough to disappear. It’s no consolation or mitigation, but the fact Ole Miss is the highest-ranked two-loss team is based on how good folks think they can be.
In the AP media poll, the Rebels dropped down to 18th, which may have as much to do with many of the talking heads and scribes’ opinions of Lane Kiffin as anything. A lot of them don’t care for him.
Ole Miss is No. 15 in the coaches’ poll. Both are simply opinions right now, but the despite anything the College Football Playoff committee says, it does get into the thoughts of who they start looking at if nothing else.
The Rebels’ 29-26 loss to LSU on Saturday night is one that could linger awhile. Kiffin admitted as much after the game.
“That’s a hard one,” he said. “We played really hard and then made some plays at the end. Give them credit, too. That last drive in regulation. We led the whole game until the last 30 seconds of the game?
“To come in here and lead the whole game, we’re doing some things right and got some really big plays. LSU’s quarterback played great. They had a couple of fourth-down conversions to put it in overtime. It should have never gotten there.”
This one will hurt. Probably more if they hadn’t lost to Kentucky a couple of weeks ago. That loss made the one against the Tigers that much harder to swallow.
“We handed two games away,” Kiffin said. “I’m not trying to say that when you lose you hand them away, but in both games, we have the ball, and we’re ahead.
“We’re ahead with the ball to go up two scores, and in both losses, we found a way to lose. We could very easily be undefeated, so that’s tough to handle. We’re still a really good team.”
If anything, though, the five games ahead will all be a dogfight, probably. Nobody left on the schedule can’t have that one day where they play lights out and get a win. Every week somebody has a game like that.
Maybe the best thing is having a week off. A lot of teams have gone into these things on a high and lost all the momentum with the downtime. Ole Miss won’t have that problem this time.
But they will still be ranked. Just not where they expected to be, but probably where they should be right now. There’s really no other way to say it with the penalties and unforced errors they keep having (12 penalties for 110 yards against LSU).
And leaving points on the board, especially in the fourth quarter.
“Sometimes things just suck,” Kiffin said. “Those things catch up to you.”
