Ole Miss leads all teams in SEC title odds after Week 5, per ESPN’s SP+ metric
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Ole Miss pulled off arguably the biggest victory of the Lane Kiffin era, certainly one of the biggest, with Saturday’s 24-19 win over an LSU team that was ranked 4th coming into the game.
The Rebels were ranked 13th, and now the teams have traded places in the new AP Poll, with Ole Miss shooting up 9 spots to No. 4 while the Tigers moved down 9 spots to 13th. The top-5 ranking is uncharted territory for Ole Miss, which has won a lot of games the past few years under Kiffin but hasn’t been able to break through in really big spots.
Saturday in Oxford was a big spot, and the unbeaten Rebels broke through just fine, and now they can set their sights on even bigger things. One of those bigger things happens in Atlanta in early December, when the SEC Championship Game is played. Ole Miss would love to be playing for the crown that day and, according to ESPN’s SP+ metric, the Rebels have a better shot than any other team in the league to win the whole thing.
The betting markets don’t quite agree. Per the latest SEC Championship odds, Ole Miss is +700 to win the SEC and is priced behind several other programs at various sports betting apps.
The SP+ metric gives Ole Miss a 16.3% chance to capture a conference championship for the first time since 1963. That’s a long time ago, and title-starved Rebels fans know it. Saturday’s win gave Ole Miss a leg up in those SEC title odds on Missouri, which was listed with a 12.9% chance to raise that SEC trophy in Atlanta. Oklahoma and Alabama were third at 11.1% each, while LSU fell all the way into a tie for 9th on the odds list after Saturday’s loss with only a 5.2% chance to win the conference.
Ole Miss will enjoy a bye in Week 6, and then it’ll try to avoid a letdown the following week at home in a nonconference game against Washington State.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
