Ole Miss 17 Florida 24 - Live By the Portal, Die By the Portal

Well damn. Ole Miss dropped a close game to Florida, a monumuntal choke-job by the Rebels. Jaxson Dart had his chances at the end to pull the game out of the fire, and he delievered interceptions. This 2024 team will move on to defeat a hapless Mississippi State and turn in a 9-3 record and play in some bowl game nobody cares about. For all intents and purposes, the season is over, and defying all expectations, it will finish worse than last year’s 11-2 squad.

In this Florida game, it was just more of the same from Ole Miss’ previous losses to Kentucky and to LSU. Lane Kiffin was outcoached. I had said after the Kentucky game that the Wildcats delieverd a blueprint for how to defeat this Ole Miss team. Basically, you have to stuff the run and force Jaxon Dart to beat you with the pass. Ole Miss must establish a running threat to rip open its offense, which we saw in the game at Arkansas in which the Rebels hung 63 points on the pigs.

I’ve said it all season, and you can verify that with pretty much everyone I talk to about Ole Miss football, I hated the JJ Pegues run every single time Ole Miss needed to convert a 4th and one. I don’t understand what was going on in that running back room at all, really. I would be interested to know what the hell was going on with Ulysses Bentley, who did not play a down in this game. Ole Miss started it’s 4th string running back, if I’m not mistaken. The running attack was an absolute disaster, pretty much all season. I think we can safely say now that Ole Miss was unable to find a suitable replacement for Quinshon Judkins. You won’t hear commentators talk about things like that, but we definitely missed Judkins. Live by the portal, die by the portal.

What to make of Jaxson Dart? He is a marvellous touch passer, but this season he never truly soared like everyone believed he could, yet he has delievered the best season an Ole Miss quarterback has ever had. He is going to break pretty much all of Ole Miss’ all-time records for the quarterback position, but Dart could not deliver at Florida. At the games end, when Ole Miss needed his best, he laid an egg. I hate it for him. What can you say? It’s a game played with an oblong ball, you know? Jaxson Dart could have been a championship quarterback if the ball had bounced his way. More than anything, it is weird to be witness to that sort of ending. You want the storybook national title game, the chance to win it and enter into the lore.

In several games this season Dart just seemed off. The passed didn’t connect. In this Florida game, I thought the Rebels were going to break out after the 14-14 halftime tie. Dart had zipped a touchdown pass to Tre Harris to tie the game, and it felt like things were clicking. In the second half, touchdown passes were dropped at least twice, and I can’t help but wonder how the flow of the game might have been different had the Rebels elected to kick the two field goals it left on the field when it chose instead to run Pegues off tackle. It looked to me as if Florida has expressly practiced stopping that play, because they stopped it twice dead-to-rights.

Huge disappointing season for the Ole Miss Rebels. The team never congealed, never played up to its potential, and never played consistently. It is a very good football team, but it isn’t the great team we all had hoped for. The hightlight of the season is obviously that huge win over Georgia. I know I had that game circled on my calendar for a solid year, and I’m glad the Rebels got to avenge the awful loss to the Bulldogs from the previous year.

Weird, weird times for college football, and weirder times are ahead as it transitions into a fully-developed minor league for the NFL. I don’t know about you, but I felt it this season more than ever before, that these players were just mercenaries. Ole Miss was organized and ready to compete with the NIL money, and that’s how Kiffin has been so competititve in the transfer portal and able to beat teams like Georgia, but it is still competing with in the SEC, so every other SEC team can do the same thing, and what it ends up looking like is a huge funnel as the lower-tier college teams will filter their best players up to the SEC via the transfer portal. It is a wild west thing going on right now that Ole Miss has been able to capitalize on as well as anyone, but it will eventually equalize and the new rules will settle into place. I have no idea how long that is going to take, but probably ten years or so. Whatever it looks like, it will be completely different from what came before, from what we’ve always known. It just seems to keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and a part of me starts to care less and less.

Anyway. I suppose the Rebels have a date with the Bulldogs coming up to finish out this regular season, and there’s nothing the Bulldogs would enjoy more than to rub some salt in the Rebels’ wounds.

Hotty Toddy!