Ole Miss 26 LSU 29

Lane Kiffin is 0-3 at LSU as the Rebels football coach. LSU defeated Ole Miss 29-26 at Tiger Stadium in a tough loss for Ole Miss that made getting into the playoff highly unlikely for the Rebels. Two-loss teams will get in, but Ole Miss has to win the rest of its football games, and the way this Rebels offense is playing, that’s highly unlikely. Ole Miss should have won this game by two touchdowns, and that’s all there is to it. Tre Harris just duffed a deep pass that was a certain touchdown. He had his man beat, and Dart put the ball right in the center of Harris’ mass, and he just duffed it. The other was turning it over on downs in the red zone, but there’s another score in there, too, that never happened because of sloppy play and penalties. I wrote in my preview of this game that Ole Miss’ offense was due for a breakout, but it regressed in this game. Dart was sacked five or six times, and this is the first game during which I missed Judkins at running back, because the Rebels are wildly inconsistent with the running game. Tre Harris seems to be the only Rebel who can actually catch passes, and that is when he isn’t duffing balls thrown directly at him.

If you told me just a few weeks ago that last year’s squad would turn out to better on offense, I would have argued otherwise, but the results are in, and this team looks like an absolute mess on offense. I can see four or five losses come out of this overhyped season, something similar to what happened in 2022 when the Rebels dropped it’s last four games on the way to an 8-5 season. Hell, even Mississippi State is improving, but not Ole Miss.

This Ole Miss team is most known for racking up penalities and flopping, and certainly not for winning games in which it is favored.

Kiffin is really good at generating hype. I do not like Kiffin, and I never have, from the standpoint that his teams just never play with heart. I’ve said it and I’ve said it, but Ole Miss is saddled with him like it or not, because he works the transfer portal and is in that sense a visionary coach who is straddling college football’s transition from the old school to NFL minor league. It can’t fire him. It can only hope he leaves of his own volition, but make no mistake, these sloppy performances would have almost any other coach on the hot seat.