This is the season Ole Miss cornerbacks Tee Shepard and Tony Bridges have been working for their entire lives.

The two took divergent paths to wind up in the Rebels’ starting lineup at the end of spring ball, but together they’ll be charged with carrying an Ole Miss secondary that now must replace two All-Americans heading for the NFL.

The one thing the Shepard and Bridges have in common is an ability to overcome adversity, and that shared trait may be the reason the tandem succeeds in their first season in the SEC.

Shepard was a highly coveted cornerback coming out of high school (regarded as the No. 4 corner in the class of 2012 by 247Sports), receiving offers from the likes of USC, Oklahoma, Alabama and others. He wound up at Notre Dame, but then quickly found himself out of Division I football due to academic struggles.

He got his grades right at Holmes Community College in Mississippi, where he ascended to the No. 1 corner among the juco ranks by the end of his second season in 2013.

He arrived at Ole Miss last year thinking he’d finally done everything he needed to in order to star in the SEC. Then he hurt his toe last summer, just months before Ole Miss’ season-opener against Boise State, and that injury kept him out for the entire 2014 season.

Now, once again, it appears Shepard’s time to shine has finally arrived. Had he remained at Notre Dame, he’d be a senior. Instead, he’ll make his SEC debut this fall as a starter on the nation’s reigning No. 1 scoring defense.

For Bridges, on the other hand, his path to the cornerback spot opposite Shepard couldn’t have looked any different. He was a two-way player who was recruited as a three-star receiver coming out of high school in the class of 2013, garnering interest from primarily mid-major Division I schools like Memphis, Louisiana-Lafayette and Southern Miss.

Instead he wound up in Mississippi’s junior college league, where he was moved to cornerback full-time. By the end of his two seasons at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College (the same program that produced Auburn wideout D’haquille Williams) Bridges was the No. 1 corner in junior college, just like Shepard was a year earlier. He initially committed to Auburn but ultimately settled on Ole Miss, a big step up from his initial route to play receiver in the Sun Belt Conference or in Conference USA.

Now both players are on campus, both are healthy, and both are slotted to start at cornerback for the season-opener on Sept. 5. The two started the Grove Bowl (Ole Miss’ spring game) in April, a game in which the three Ole Miss quarterbacks battling for the team’s starting job completed fewer than 50 percent of their throws. The corners will need to repeat that kind of performance in live games against seasoned SEC starters like Mississippi State’s Dak Prescott.

However, having these two on the roster marks the best-case scenario for the Ole Miss secondary as it aims to replace departing All-Americans Senquez Golson and Cody Prewitt. Having the ability to plug in two veterans with two years of experience competing against college student-athletes (albeit in junior college, but the competition is still a step up from high school ball) makes moving on from those two dazzling seniors all that much easier.

Plus, because Ole Miss has two upperclassmen ready to assume starting roles at the cornerback spots, senior cornerback Mike Hilton (winner of this year’s Chucky Mullins Courage Award) is able to move from corner to safety to help replace Prewitt at the back-end of the defense along with returning starters Tony Conner and Trae Elston. That move allows Ole Miss to get its five best defensive backs onto the field in its base defense, and better yet, all five are either juniors or seniors.

Who said losing two senior All-Americans would undo the secondary? Who said losing players like Golson and Prewitt would force Ole Miss to rely on inexperienced talents? Neither could be further from the truth, and Shepard and Bridges are the reasons why.

The Rebels’ secondary won’t be as good this fall as it was last year, at least not right away. It’d be underselling Golson and Prewitt to assume otherwise. But the secondary will hold its own, and it certainly shouldn’t cost Ole Miss games this fall.