DALLAS — Lane Kiffin knows the circumstances are drastically different this time around. But as someone determined to learn from his past, Kiffin knows just how important it is to not buy into the “rat poison.”
Ole Miss is coming off the first 11-win season in its history, culminating in a 38-25 Peach Bowl win over Penn State. Ole Miss finished the 2023 season ranked No. 9, the 12th time the program has finished a season ranked in the AP top 10. The Rebels defeated three ranked teams last season, including a nail-biting 55-49 win over LSU that came down to the final few plays of the game.
The 2024 season will likely mark just the second time a team coached by Kiffin will start the season ranked in the AP preseason top-10. The previous occurrence was at USC in 2012, when the Trojans were the preseason No. 1 team in the country — star quarterback Matt Barkley and wide receivers Robert Woods and Marqise Lee returned for what was expected to be one of the premier offenses in college football — and finished 7-6. The Trojans lost their final three games of the season and lost the Sun Bowl to a sub-.500 Georgia Tech team.
Preseason expectations don’t mean much of anything in Kiffin’s eyes. He and several key players met with media Monday at SEC Media Days in Dallas to discuss the upcoming season.
“There is plenty of noise out there that means nothing, and plenty of teams over the years in all sports have been ranked high and haven’t played well and been ranked low and played really well,” Kiffin said. “None of that means anything.”
Ole Miss has started a season ranked in the AP top-10 on 11 occasions in program history, most recently in 2009 (No. 8). The Rebels return quarterback Jaxson Dart, premier receiving options in Tre Harris, Jordan Watkins and Caden Prieskorn and an already-ascending defense that added star transfers Walter Nolen and Princely Umanmielen, among others.
“This is a rat poison situation here, to have all this attention on our players,” Kiffin said. “And it means nothing because it’s all about the work that they put in, the process they do daily, they’re working extremely hard this summer, and then we’re going to have a lot of work to do in training camp.”
Kiffin’s 2012 USC team had very different circumstances than the 2024 Rebels. Scholarship limitations incurred from NCAA sanctions under previous head coach Pete Carroll hindered the Trojans’ depth that season. But coming off a 10-2 season in 2011 where the Trojans won their final four games — including a win at No. 4 Oregon — expectations were through the roof, particularly given the key returners.
Kiffin said that, with the benefit of hindsight, his team may have looked at its press clippings a bit too closely and bought into its own hype. Lesson learned.
“That truly was ‘rat poison’ of where we really weren’t — shouldn’t have been — (ranked that highly) due to scholarship limitations and how low our roster was,” Kiffin said. “But you still want to learn from every obstacle that happens in your life. And so I think we probably leaned into that too much at the time.
“Matt Barkley was coming back, and that was made a big deal, and preseason No. 1 after a strong finish the year before. And (we) kind of embraced that and leaned into that, probably — it didn’t work. So, as you look back and say, ‘Well (we) probably shouldn’t have and resisted that more.’ Because really, as I said now, however many years later, it really doesn’t mean anything.”
The Rebels don’t expect getting ahead of themselves or buying into hype to be a factor in 2024. That message was a constant Monday afternoon, regardless of the player answering the question.
“It’s really not something that I feel like we think about a lot,” senior defensive end Jared Ivey said. “It’s there, it is what it is. You know what this generation is, you can’t stop anything from being said online. … We just kind of take an internal mindset and try to look inward and keep our eyes on the man in the mirror.”
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