Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze doesn’t have time to reflect on all that his team has accomplished this year.
He’s been too busy either recruiting or preparing for TCU in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl.
“Maybe after the bowl game,” he said. “Go to the mountains maybe and reflect on it.”
He needs to find a nice vista and settle down because it may take a while.
The Rebels are about to finish a season like they haven’t experienced since the 1960s. It’s featured the highs of wins against Alabama, Texas A&M and Mississippi State, and the lows of final-seconds losses to LSU and Auburn, and a mysterious beat down by Arkansas.
“It’s a roller coaster, and here I am 58 years old so on these young guys it must be tougher because they only get that one shot to do it and then move on,” Ole Miss defensive coordinator Dave Wommack said.
But it’s a journey the players wanted.
The upperclassmen had grown tired of being one of those teams on the schedule that were penciled in as a “W” by opponents. After two solid recruiting classes, it was time for the program to change from a shoulder-shrug of indifference to an eyebrow-raiser of anticipation on schedules.
“Ole Miss is almost there, Ole Miss almost won this game, almost won that game,” defensive back Cody Prewitt said. “We want to get there. We want to be in the national run consistently. We want to be an elite team like Alabama or like Auburn. Seniors wanted to lead a team that wasn’t a pushover anymore.”
They are almost there.
Ole Miss (9-3) is No. 9 in the College Football Playoff rankings and the AP poll and with a win over the Horned Frogs has a chance to tie its highest-ever finish in the AP poll, which was No. 7 in 1963. Barring odd results and voting, the Rebels will finish the season ranked in the poll all 16 weeks, the longest streak since being in the polls for 17 weeks during the 1969-70 seasons.
A win over the Horned Frogs would be first time the team has defeated four top-10 teams since 1969.
The big wins were historic and somewhat surprising.
The Rebels entered the season as a darkhorse in the SEC West, receiving just two votes in the preseason polling to win the league. Within the division, Alabama (picked to win), Auburn and LSU received more votes.
No matter.
The Rebels started in Atlanta in one of the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Games with a 35-13 thumping of perennial overachiever Boise State. Ole Miss moved up three spots to No. 15 in the AP poll the next week. Three more wins over the easier part of the schedule – Vanderbilt, Louisiana-Lafayette and Memphis – moved the Rebels to No. 11 and set up a showdown that made bowties in Oxford spin and seersucker suits wrinkle with tension: No. 3 Alabama.
ESPN’s GameDay Crew, complete with Ole Miss fan Katy Perry in a combination that would seem to go down as well as barbecue and white wine, camped out in the famed Grove for the first time. Behind Bo Wallace’s 251 yards passing with three touchdowns, the Rebels snapped a 10-game losing streak to the Tide, 23-17.
But the fun wasn’t done.
“We worked hard for this moment,” Ole Miss receiver Laquon Treadwell told ESPN after the game. “And as (the final seconds) happened, I thought, ‘This isn’t the end of it all. It’s just the beginning.’”
The win moved the 5-0 Rebels up to No. 3 in the AP Poll – their highest mark since being preseason No. 1 in 1964 – and set up yet another showdown. Next came Texas A&M, which was upset by Ole Miss rival Mississippi State at the same the Rebels were taking down the Tide.
Ole Miss jumped on the Aggies early with 14 points in the first quarter to pull away for a 35-20 victory in beating AP Top 25 teams in consecutive weeks for the first time in program history. Now 6-0, Ole Miss stayed at No. 3 and easily put away Tennessee next week 34-3 to advance to 7-0.
The magic ran out the next week at LSU. A horrible pass by Wallace was picked off by Ronald Martin at the 1-yard line with two seconds left to seal a 10-7 loss. Though the Rebels dropped four spots in the AP poll to No. 7, they came in at No. 4 in the inaugural college football playoff rankings.
There was still hope for more history, the best kind of history: a national title.
That dream ended the next week with a 35-31 loss to Auburn at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. Just like in the loss to LSU, Ole Miss had a chance at the end. Treadwell fumbled at the goal line, a play in which he suffered a season-ending broken leg, in the game’s final two minutes. Wallace fumbled at Auburn’s 6-yard line on the Rebel’s previous possession.
“It’s just a really, really sickening way to lose,” Freeze said after the game.
The team swapped results in the next two games in destroying Presbyterian 48-0 before being blitzed by a red-hot Arkansas, 30-0. It was an inexplicable performance that defensive back Senquez Golson said reminded him of his freshman year when the Rebels were what they didn’t want to be.
No matter. Next was Mississippi State. No artificial emotional stimulation necessary.
The Rebels destroyed the Bulldogs, No. 4 in the college football playoff rankings, in the Egg Bowl, 31-17, ending their rivals’ hopes of making it to the playoffs.
The victory didn’t save the season, but it did give the Rebels a boost of momentum heading into the bowl game.
“I only want to end the season on a high note,” Golson said.
Though they came within two plays in the losses to LSU and Auburn of possibly reaching the inaugural College Football Playoff, the Rebels said this season shouldn’t be viewed as a disappointment.
Instead, it was a success, one of many they hope are in the future.
“Game of football is just like life,” Prewitt said. “There are some good times and some bad. How do you respond to adversity? For most part, we’ve responded well. We never lost faith in ourselves and coaches. Simply saw our mistakes and tried to fix them the best we could.”
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