Nobody is talking about Ole Miss, but November Playoff contention is coming
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Whether Lane Kiffin admits it or not, this is the preamble he prefers, not last year.
A year after Ole Miss entered a season with its best preseason ranking in the AP Top 25 since the Richard Nixon administration, it’ll be a different story this time around. Maybe that would’ve been different if Ole Miss had been able to capitalize on that preseason buzz by reaching the Playoff instead losing 3 games by a combined 13 points to non-Playoff teams. But with a team that ranks last in the SEC in percentage of returning production, I’d expect Ole Miss to start closer to the back end of the preseason AP Poll when that’s released in August.
You know, exactly how Kiffin prefers.
During his 13 years as a head coach, that’s when Kiffin has been at his best. He’s had 6 double-digit win seasons, and 5 of those teams started No. 21 or worse. The lone exception was the aforementioned 2024 Ole Miss squad, which started No. 6 but missed the Playoff because … you get it.
Nobody is talking about Kiffin’s squad, and understandably so. A program that has never won the SEC Championship with a ton of roster turnover isn’t ever going to drive preseason conversation.
But look a little closer and you’ll see what I see — November Playoff contention awaits. A post-hype season isn’t nearly as crazy as one might think (FanDuel has Playoff odds at +210).
Before you tell me that I’m sippin’ too much Oxford punch (whatever that is) and that Kiffin’s 2024 shortcomings showed why he’ll never put Ole Miss in position to compete for championships, ask yourself this. How you forgotten how favorable that schedule is? Like, again?
Here are the bullet points:
- Only 4 road games
- 3 of 4 road games are vs. teams with losing records
- 1 game vs. team who won 10 games (Georgia)
- Only road game in Weeks 1-7 is at Kentucky
I realize that those were all stats about road games. Want a home game stat? Ole Miss only has 1 home game against a team that finished in the AP Top 25, and it’s South Carolina. As in, the team that Ole Miss beat 27-3 in Columbia last year.
Hence, why the regular season over/under is 8.5 wins. Alabama, Georgia and Texas are the only SEC teams with higher over/unders, and they’re all at 9.5 wins. That schedule factored into why I had Ole Miss finishing 5th in the SEC, and not 7th as it was slotted by the rest of the media.
Rooted in any Ole Miss belief is an Austin Simmons belief
Guilty. I’m all sorts of intrigued, and it’s not just because he had ice water in his veins while filling in for Jaxson Dart against Georgia. At the same time, a guy who says “OK, bet” to himself in that moment should have a certain level of eternal respect from the 99.99999% of us who would’ve been sweating bullets instead of dodging them.
(Simmons said that’s what went through his mind before he led Ole Miss on its biggest touchdown drive of the season against Georgia.)
Also part of that intrigue will be SEC defenses reacting to the talented southpaw. He’s in Year 3 in the Kiffin offense, so he’ll have different Year 1 expectations than predecessors like Matt Corral and Dart, both of whom started in their first seasons with Kiffin. There’s an expectation that he understands how to operate at that speed, and someone with his IQ — a college graduate at age 19 isn’t lacking in that department — will roll with those punches. The guy who surpassed decorated LSU transfer Walker Howard on the 2024 depth chart did so because of how well he executed the offense.
History tells us that a Kiffin-coached quarterback has one of the highest floors in the sport. Kiffin has yet to have an Ole Miss offense that finished outside the top 30 in FBS in scoring, and if you go back to include his time as Alabama’s offensive coordinator, his lone season without a top-30 scoring offense from 2014-24 was 2018 Florida Atlantic, which had the No. 45 scoring offense with a redshirt freshman starting quarterback. Even 2022 Dart as a first-time starter or the turnover-prone 2020 Corral still gave Kiffin’s teams teams a chance.
One of the more stunning SEC developments of the 2025 season would be if Simmons struggled. It wouldn’t be stunning if he became an All-SEC quarterback, which Kiffin had in 4 of his 8 seasons running an SEC offense in the Playoff era.
What’s also working in Simmons’ and Ole Miss’s favor? They won’t face a top-20 scoring defense until November.
This all comes down to … the most defining year of Pete Golding’s scrutinized career
For what it’s worth, I mean “scrutinized” strictly from the perspective of Alabama fans. Ole Miss fans have no reason to be upset with a defensive coordinator who just led the program to the No. 2 scoring defense. That group just had 5 players selected in the NFL Draft. That was after Golding’s Year 1 defense produced 3 NFL Draft picks in 2024. Just for a little perspective, that 2-year total (8) was twice as many defensive players that Ole Miss had drafted in the first 3 years of the Kiffin era (2021-23).
In the last 8 seasons, Golding was the defensive coordinator for a top-20 scoring defense 7 times. He did that at 3 different programs, so no, that wasn’t just the byproduct of sharing a sideline with Nick Saban for 5 of those 8 seasons. The only time that one of his units finished outside the top 20 in scoring defense was Year 1 at Ole Miss in 2023, when that group finished No. 40 in FBS, and it improved by 3 points per game.
Consider that my way of saying Golding deserves a bit more faith than he’ll probably get. He fit the plug-and-play transfer portal additions well during his tenure, so what’s to say he won’t do that again in 2025? Plus, he’s got guys who are entering Year 3 in the system like preseason All-American Suntarine Perkins (tied for 2024 team lead in sacks and tackles for loss) and preseason All-SEC selection Zxavian Harris.
A new-look secondary will also benefit from facing just 2 returning starting quarterbacks before November, and Garrett Nussmeier and Taylen Green both struggled against Ole Miss. Take that for what it is. Whether that was more about Golding’s scheme or the loads of NFL talent in the front 7 will reveal itself in 2025.
It’s a defining year for Golding. If he prevents that group from major regression, scrutiny had better turn into praise.
So what would November Playoff contention look like?
It could look like a lot of things.
It could look like Texas A&M, who had just 1 loss entering the second Saturday of November and still had a Playoff path in the regular-season finale against Texas (the winner got into the SEC Championship Game). Perhaps it could look like it did last year with Ole Miss sitting there as a 2-loss team heading into the penultimate regular season game against Florida.
For all the criticism of the expanded Playoff, think about that scenario. It’s Nov. 15, and Ole Miss is 8-2 with losses to LSU and Georgia with hopes of following the 2024 Tennessee path and getting an at-large bid as a 10-2 team. Florida is coming to town. Maybe DJ Lagway is in the midst of a Heisman Trophy campaign. Perhaps Simmons isn’t very far behind. It’s a potential Playoff elimination game in Oxford with the home team knowing that if it can avenge last year’s loss in The Swamp, it’ll have an Egg Bowl win-and-in for the field of 12.
That’s not a fantasy. It could be a whole lot closer to reality than what the national preseason Ole Miss conversations would suggest.
That’s exactly what Kiffin would prefer.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
