OXFORD – Things will look different for Ole Miss football come Aug. 30 at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium.
Stalwarts like Jaxson Dart, Tre Harris, Jared Ivey, J.J. Pegues and Jordan Watkins will have already embarked on their professional football journeys. The team that takes the field against Georgia State to open the 2025 campaign is going to have a very different feel than the one that won 21 games over the last two seasons.
Spring football, which came to an end over the weekend, provided a glimpse into what the next group of Rebels has in store in the coming years. Here are four observations from Ole Miss’ spring practices.
Simmons appears to be real deal
Simmons, the redshirt sophomore from Florida, has huge shoes to fill as Dart’s successor. Dart finished his Ole Miss career as the program’s leader in nearly every quarterback statistic, including passing yards, total offense and wins by a starting quarterback. Though Simmons is the undisputed QB1 this year, he doesn’t think of himself as such.
“I don’t really look at being the guy here very much different,” Simmons said. “Football’s football at the end of the day. Regardless of if I’m the starting quarterback, if I’m the backup quarterback, it doesn’t matter. We’re still playing football. We’re preparing for one thing, and we always have one goal – to win a national championship.”
Simmons has dazzled in limited opportunities, the biggest being the touchdown drive he led against Georgia last season when Dart left the game briefly with an injury. Simmons has looked the part in practice, with teammates in awe of his powerful left arm. But more than that is the respect his teammates already have for him in his brief time as the face of the program. He’s doing the little things to strengthen his bonds with the rest of the roster.
“It’s everything. On the field, off the field. Me and Austin spend a lot of time off the field together,” senior receiver De’Zhaun Stribling said. “Kind of just learning each other more, not just on the football side but as humans, what he likes, what he doesn’t like. We’ve meshed a lot. Still making a lot of progress, but he’s the guy.”
WR room will be more than fine
Ole Miss is losing nearly 2,900 yards in receiving production with the losses of Harris, Watkins, Antwane “Juice” Wells Jr. and Caden Prieskorn. Junior Cayden Lee is the leading returning receiver with 874 yards a season ago while senior tight end Dae’Quan Wright had 394 yards and four touchdown catches. The Rebels reloaded in a big way through the transfer portal, though, and look to have the makings of another strong receiving corps.
Stribling, a transfer from Oklahoma State and senior Penn State transfer Harrison Wallace III have 3,374 career receiving yards between them. Junior West Virginia transfer Traylon Ray had 426 yards last year and sophomore Wake Forest transfer Deuce Alexander had 400 yards. The Rebels also added former blue-chip recruit Caleb Odom from Alabama and junior Arkansas transfer tight end Luke Hasz, who had 324 yards last season.
“You have a long history of here, great receivers coming in and winning a lot of games, putting up a lot of points,” Stribling said. “So I just wanted to be a part of something like that.”
The faces are new, but the talent looks to be there.
“We meshed pretty quickly as a unit,” Stribling said. “We all kind of have the same objective and the same goal in mind. So, we … push each other very day, try and get better and just work on … ourselves.”
DL might very well be a strength again
Ole Miss’ defensive line was as good as it gets a season ago. Headlined by Ivey, Pegues, Walter Nolen, Princely Umanmielen and Suntarine Perkins, the Rebels led the nation with four sacks per game and 120 total tackles-for-loss. Perkins and his 10.5 sacks return, but the rest are off to the NFL. The cupboard is far from bare, though, as Ole Miss has focused much of its high school recruiting efforts over the last few cycles on the defensive front.
Sophomores Kam Franklin, Will Echoles and Jamarious Brown should play big roles, as should junior LSU transfer Da’Shawn Womack and junior Nebraska transfer Princewill Umanmielen. Expecting the group to immediately fill the massive shoes left by last year’s stars probably isn’t fair, but the group believes it has all the talent it needs to be successful.
“We’re just disruptive,” Womack said earlier in the spring.
Don’t sleep on the running back room
Ole Miss’ struggles to run the ball last season were well chronicled – the Rebels averaged 175.7 rushing yards per game, the worst output in Kiffin’s five seasons at the helm. Only one player had more than 500 rushing yards, and the team’s second-leading rusher was Dart. The transfer portal again played a factor in restocking the room, as sophomore Missouri transfer Kewan Lacy and senior Troy transfer Damien Taylor will join returning senior Logan Diggs and incoming four-star freshman Shekai Mills-Knight.
At the end of last season, wide receiver Micah Davis was taking snaps at running back in an effort to increase rushing production. That type of situation doesn’t look like it will repeat itself this season. Taylor and Diggs alone have a combined 3,106 career rushing yards between them.
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