After a dominating Gator Bowl victory, will Ole Miss finish Top 10 in Rankings for Second Consecutive Season?

OXFORD, Miss. — With all the blowouts that we witnessed and the numerous teams ranked directly ahead of Ole Miss barely putting up a fight in the postseason, voters could without hesitation elevate head coach Lane Kiffin’s Rebels to as high as No. 7 in the final AP poll.

Why it matters

This would mark the first back-to-back Top 10 seasons for the Rebels since 1963. Perhaps it’s small consolation for some, but it still goes into the record books and onto the resumés — and that’s an all-important commodity in this highly-competitive sports world. 

At this point in the season and knowing what we’ve seen across the board, it’d be a complete injustice to the Rebel football team to keep them out. If your last impression is the enduring impression, the No. 16 Rebels certainly left their best on display while eleven of the AP’s Top 15 failed to do so.

While several other programs struggled to keep their teams together and their players motivated after missing the playoffs, Ole Miss stayed strong to the finish line. Never before have eleven Top 15 teams heading into bowl season LOST. Playoffs or not, this is simply unfathomable and was completely unforeseeable.

The “playoff” teams who stepped on the field and found themselves behind by 20 or 30 points weren’t particularly inspiring, either. Perhaps they felt out of place … or were they just out of their league? We certainly can’t imagine the Rebels getting in that type of situation against any team that’s currently ranked above them, particularly the nine teams ranked directly above them.

We’re always told that you prove yourself on the field and the Rebels did exactly that. What more could’ve been accomplished this year had the Rebels received the playoffs nod, we’ll never know.

But what we do know is if you’re looking for the most impressive football teams in the country to cast your vote for at season’s end, Ole Miss has earned a spot near the top of that list based on sheer performance and its indomitable school spirit and team camaraderie. 

What we wanted…..

Teams can only play who they’re assigned to play in bowl season. Many of us had hoped to see competitive matchups but it isn’t what the powers-that-be had in store for us.

After the Committee had completed its “rankings,” one would’ve preferred seeing Alabama against Miami, Ole Miss playing BYU, South Carolina teeing it up against Iowa State, and Missouri going up against Illinois. In other words, Big on Big for the top teams that weren’t selected for the playoffs.

What we got…..

We didn’t get a single one of these matchups. Instead, we had Alabama favored by 16 1/2 points over a 7-5 Michigan team. The no-show Tide barely scraped up 13 points themselves in a 19-13 loss.

South Carolina was a 9-point favorite against Illinois but fell to Luke Altmyer’s Fighting Illini by a score of 21-17 after tallying a single field goal in the entire first half.

The ACC’s  blowhard Miami Hurricanes didn’t get Alabama, but they did get Iowa State, the only Power 4 football team that was bypassed by the committee after playing in a conference championship game. Iowa State lost that game quite badly to upstart Big 12 newcomer Arizona State, 45-19.

No one expected much from the Cyclones against Cam Ward and company, but the former Incarnate Word quarterback sat out the second half and Iowa State took the Canes down for the third “upset” of the playoffs’ “first three out.”

Then, in a tournament seeding fiasco, the NCAA set up four of the six best teams (according to Vegas) as its 5, 6, 7, and 8 seeds because, by rule, only conference champions can receive Top 4 seeds and a bye.

These mid-range seeds received home field against the 9, 10, 11, and 12 seeds. They then annihilated their weaker competitors by 28, 25, 14, and 10 points. In each of these games, there were leads as large as 35, 35, 21, and 21 points. The pregame point spreads were indicative of the upcoming poundings as all four home teams were at least a touchdown-plus favorite.

The hosting “bowl games” then featured the top four seeds against the victors of the first round games. None of the top four seeds was favored, and for good reason. Only one of them turned out to be a competitive football team, and that was Arizona State who drew the Texas Longhorns. This game provided the only drama of the entire playoffs thus far, going to overtime before Texas put the feisty Sun Devils away.

The other three were very one-sided games dominated by the first-round winners: Penn State by 17 over Boise State, Ohio State by 20 over Oregon, and Notre Dame by 13 over Georgia and their backup freshman quarterback.

So there you have it. This is how eleven of the AP’s Top 15 teams each went down in their lone postseason appearance.

Meanwhile, Ole Miss beat the devil out of Duke, their NCAA-assigned 17-point underdog opponent, just like a heavy favorite is expected to. And by all accounts it could’ve even been worse.

If this were just another week in the college football season, we’d see those eleven losing teams drop automatically as a unit. Ole Miss would move up at least nine or 10 spots after comparing the week’s performances. None of us will ever forget the week the Rebels DROPPED nine spots after a heart-wrenching overtime loss at LSU.

Sometimes a legit old school mindset is what it takes to remind us all of what is truly important. Hell Yeah, Damn Right!