When the preseason polls come out over the next month Ole Miss is going to more than likely present Lane Kiffin a second opportunity at leading a preseason Top 10 team into a year full of high expectations.
Twelve years ago Southern California headed into the 2012 campaign ranked as the preseason No. 1 by members of the Associated Press — No. 3 in the Coaches Poll — and the Trojans were given plenty of high expectations, including a run at a BCS National Championship.
What ultimately happened was the Trojans starting the year winning six of their first seven games and still a Top 10 team. But they went on to lose five of their last six, including a 21-7 loss to Georgia Tech in the Sun Bowl for a 7-6 season.
Everyone knows what happened in 2013 as Kiffin was fired on the tarmac after a 3-2 start. But that is not the point of this. The point is Kiffin is continuing the theme that has been with him since he arrived in Oxford just under five years ago.
Ole Miss has provided Kiffin a second chance to rebuild his coaching legacy and this season offers yet another re-do, of sorts.
The Rebels are almost assuredly a preseason Top 10 favorite, if not flirting with a Top 5 ranking, when the polls start rolling out in a few weeks.
If that proves to be true Kiffin will have a second chance to lead a preseason Top 10 program. The first since that 2012 season in Los Angeles.
Though the fifth-year Ole Miss head coach sees some differences and similarities when looking at the two teams.
“That was, I think, a different situation,” Kiffin said. “Because that truly was rat poison of where we really weren’t, shouldn’t have been, due to scholarship limitations and how low our roster was. But, you still want to learn from every obstacle that happens in life and so I think we probably leaned into that too much at the time.
“Matt Barkley was coming back and that was made a big deal in preseason No. 1 after the strong finish the year before and kind of embraced that and leaned into that. Didn’t work. So, as you look back and can say, ‘Well, we probably shouldn’t have and resisted that more. As I said now, however many years later, it really doesn’t mean anything.”
Similar to those Trojans, the Rebels have a star quarterback returning in Jaxson Dart who will be the starter for a third straight season. This time without a preseason quarterback battle on his hands.
Going from the top with Dart on down the roster there is a plethora of top, and potential NFL, talent. The offense has nearly all of its weapons back from the 2023 season, plus the addition of some new ones, to the defense continuing its rebuild under second year coordinator Pete Golding.
But as it has been seen, and continuously preached by Kiffin, these transfer era rosters take time to gel and that challenge is the hardest thing for a team to overcome before success begins.
“I don’t deal a whole lot in expecting on things exactly to happen because it doesn’t really go that way,” Kiffin added. “It’s more just about the process of daily work with our players and getting better. I do think we have a really good collection of players that decided to return and had a chance to go to the pros. Then we were able to add some really intriguing portal pieces to that. But again, there’s a lot of work to do and all those expectations out there, those mean nothing.”
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