OXFORD – I’ll allow myself the rare pat-on-the back to start.
Sure, I may have hedged my bets when I wrote my preseason analysis of the 2025 Ole Miss Rebels in the college football previews for both Lindy’s and Athlon.
For Lindy’s I wrote, in part, that, “The 2025 Rebels are once again talented, as (Lane) Kiffin has built a sustainable, contending program through high school recruiting and the transfer portal. But without many veterans, they’ll rely on (Austin) Simmons and other new faces to try to remain in the national conversation.”
In Athlon’s I noted, “This season will largely hinge on how well the new pieces replace the outgoing ones, particularly Simmons at quarterback. The schedule is manageable by SEC standards, though, and Kiffin has the program in as consistent a place as it’s been in decades.”
OK, so I didn’t have a perfect day at the plate. I nailed the “new talent needs to replace old talent” (brave of me, I know) and the manageable schedule/consistent program portion. I absolutely whiffed on Simmons and, in part, Kiffin, though in my defense it was impossible at the time to see how their individual stories would … shall we say, unfold.
Hand up: when I went to SEC Media Days and did the talking circuit, I said this was probably an 8-4 or 9-3 team. I envisioned myself spending the holidays at the Gator Bowl or perhaps seeing a coach doused in mayonnaise. That wasn’t a bad thing – a team replacing 18 starters, including eight NFL Draft picks, was going to be really hard. How do you, in one offseason, replace arguably the most talented roster in program history? Even that team lost three games. If the 2024 team didn’t make the College Football Playoff for the first time in program history, what chance did the 2025 group stand?
Well, it appears that myself and the majority of people outside of the Manning Center didn’t take a few things into account. Included on that list are: Being on “Island Time,” cliché chips on shoulders that were actually the size of boulders, a hunger to complete a mission just missed out on a year before and, perhaps more than anything, toughness and heart.
It’s hard to quantify the intangible. We can look at rosters and star ratings and scouting reports all we want, but that won’t tell us everything. Some things you have to see with your own eyes to fully understand. And as the dust settles on one of greatest seasons in Ole Miss history – one that ended 35 agonizing yards short of the program’s first berth in a national championship game – I can’t help but think back to August. We truly had no idea what was going to unfold.
This seemingly unlikely group of Rebels did the unthinkable: they set a program record with 11 regular-season wins, made it to the CFP for the first time, won two CFP games and nearly came back to win a third to advance to the national championship game. Oh, and did I mention they lost their head coach before the playoffs began?
No, Ole Miss’ incredible 2025 story didn’t ultimately get its fairytale ending. Not every great story ends happily. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take this team for what it was: a group whose belief in itself was so contagious it made you ponder whether there was ever a ceiling at all.
Who could have possibly foreseen that a slightly undersized quarterback named Trinidad Chambliss from Division II Ferris State would take over for an injured Simmons in Week 3 and never look back, en route to an eighth-place Heisman Trophy finish but first-place finish in the hearts of college football fans? I, for one, didn’t anticipate Trinidad/Tobago flags hanging around Oxford. Was it possible to know that Kewan Lacy, who ran for 104 yards total last season as a freshman at Missouri, would tie the single-season Rebels record with 1,567 rushing yards and set the program record with 24 rushing touchdowns? Did anyone know before the season that a team trailing by nine at halftime of the biggest game in program history to that point – the CFP quarterfinals at the Sugar Bowl vs. SEC champion Georgia, who had come back to beat the Rebels earlier in the season – had the grit to take punch after punch before dealing the final, deciding blow itself? Could we have foreseen that Lane Kiffin leaving a team headed to the playoffs for an archrival would ultimately drive the Rebels even harder to prove their worth? Of course not. But that’s why we watch, isn’t it?
What will you remember about this Ole Miss team? The 13 wins or the two losses? Will you remember Miami rushing State Farm Stadium’s field when the clock hit zero on Jan. 8 or Lucas Carneiro’s game-winning field goal in the Sugar Bowl? Will Hurricane quarterback Carson Beck’s game-winning touchdown be your lasting image? Or will it be one of Chambliss running into his own end zone, circling back around and inexplicably keeping a drive alive against Georgia at the Caesars Superdome? Is your final memory of Ole Miss players walking off the field in Arizona in tears? Or is it that the Rebels put themselves in position to win an all-time college football classic?
The 2025 Rebels never thought they were out of a game. Was this the most talented roster in program history? Probably not. But you can’t convince me it didn’t have the most guts.
The last page of the Rebels’ story didn’t end with them hoisting championship hardware, with confetti raining on the field at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium. But the last chapter isn’t always the best part of a given book, anyway. Sometimes it’s the details at the beginning or middle that captivate us most of all. It’s how you arrive at the ending that’s often the part people remember most of all. It’s the unpredictable – and unexpected – we relish above all else.
And the stories that led Ole Miss all the way to Glendale, Arizona? Those are some of the best stories I will ever have the privilege of telling.
Michael Katz covers Ole Miss Athletics for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.
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