FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Hello from Fayetteville, where I’m spending the weekend with my daughters and taking a little mini-break of sorts. Happy Valentine's Day, if you're into that kind of thing.
Before that begins, here are some Ole Miss-related thoughts in this week’s Food For Thought, presented by The Iron Horse Grill.
Less than a month ago _ on Jan. 21, to be specific _ Ole Miss’ basketball team appeared to be left for dead.
The Rebels had been run out of Thompson-Boling Arena in Knoxville, Tenn., and had fallen to 0-5 in the Southeastern Conference. On Feb. 1, the Rebels were 1-7 in the league after losing in uninspiring fashion at LSU.
Three games and 13 days later, Ole Miss has a pulse. The Rebels are on a three-game winning streak, having whipped South Carolina, Florida and now Mississippi State to improve to 4-7 in the league and No. 81 in the NET rankings.
The Rebels have no margin for error _ both on the schedule and with injury _ in their quest to get back into the NCAA Tournament picture. The road to the bubble is full of hair-pin turns and obstacles, but at least there’s a road.
It starts Saturday at 1 p.m. CST at Kentucky. The Wildcats are 19-5 overall and 9-2 in the SEC after Tuesday’s 78-64 win over Vanderbilt.
“We talked about it,” Ole Miss coach Kermit Davis said. “In our league, in the SEC, you’re never out of it if you’ve got 10 or 12 games to go. There are just so many great opportunities for Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 2 wins. So it’s just where it is. We’ve got a long way to go and obviously it’s tough, but what a great opportunity on Saturday at Kentucky, a Quadrant 1 opportunity. They’re terrific and all that but you just keep having these opportunities. We’re just going to keep that mantra and try to win February.”
The Rebels, Davis said, have reduced practice times. They’re working 60-70 minutes a day, getting in their work and getting off their feet.
“I think our guys look fresh and are playing well,” Davis said.
They’re also playing with confidence and renewed energy.
“We’re trying to still play in this postseason,” Ole Miss guard Breein Tyree said. “A lot of people counted us out. We’re the only ones counting us in. So we just have to play hard, play together and I think we’ll wake a lot of people up as we keep going.”
Another baseball season has arrived.
Today, Doug Nikhazy will take the mound, toe the rubber and throw the first pitch of the season for No. 25 Ole Miss as the Rebels entertain No. 1 Louisville at Swayze Field.
(I used the D1Baseball rankings here; I have no idea what Chase Parham uses and I’ll defer to him. If you want Baseball America, the Cardinals are ranked No. 2 nationally and Ole Miss is unranked.)
I’m not a college baseball guy. I cover basketball, which goes through at least mid-March and then I’ve got spring football, which begins this year on March 17 and goes through April 17. Throw in college football recruiting, which picks back up to some extent on March 1 and never really stops and I don’t have the time to pay it that much attention.
From a personal standpoint, March, April and May mean the crunch and the playoffs in the NBA and the start of another summer of disappointment following my beloved Chicago Cubs.
I say all of that to say this: When it comes to Ole Miss baseball, it would be tough to find a more neutral, less engaged observer than me. Unless Parham needs me to fill in, I probably won’t make it to the ballpark one time this spring. I’ve attended one game in a non-working capacity in the past 10 years. I do, however, have to follow along at least enough to be conversant on the Oxford Exxon Podcast each morning.
So, frankly, I brace for what’s coming. The Rebels play the first of at least 56 games today, and for a portion of the fan base, that means bringing a football mentality to a sport that ebbs and flows and, at least at Ole Miss, requires real nuance to evaluate properly.
The fire-Mike Bianco crowd, I assure you, is waiting on pins and needles to start the diatribe as early as this evening. Bianco has been at Ole Miss for 20 seasons, and he’s built a powerhouse of sorts. The Rebels are a perpetual NCAA Tournament participant, but they’ve only made it to the College World Series once in his tenure. They’ve come close plenty of times, including last season when the Rebels fell one game short of Omaha here in Fayetteville.
That’s the rub on Bianco, of course. His teams are always good, always competitive, even in a brutally difficult league that affords other programs competitive advantages over his. However, his teams seem to fall short in the postseason, losing to programs that don’t have the resources Ole Miss has. It’s baffling, bewildering, and for Ole Miss fans, maddening.
There’s a new athletics director in town now, and no one really knows how Keith Carter will judge this season and Bianco’s program. The Rebels are young and should be very good a year from now, but this season could feature some nasty growing pains. Those pains could be exacerbated by a vicious schedule.
What’s always been interesting to me is how the program is viewed in the coaching industry. Let’s take Ole Miss and compare it to Arkansas, since I’m sitting here a mile or so from the UA campus.
If you were to take 100 football coaches and offer them both jobs, my guess is at least 70 (and possibly many more) would take the Rebels’ post. Lane Kiffin just did it. The former Florida Atlantic coach could’ve pounced on the Arkansas gig, but once Ole Miss came open and things got serious, he poured his attention into the gig in Oxford.
If you were to take 100 basketball coaches and offer them both the Ole Miss and Arkansas jobs, my guess is it would be pretty close. Both schools have great facilities and are committed to winning. Arkansas has a far more storied history and a more rabid love of hoops within its fanbase, but my guess is the aforementioned coaches’ poll would come down somewhere around 60-40 in favor of the Hogs (and possibly as close as 50-50).
Now, let’s do baseball. My guess is if you took 100 coaches with no emotional ties to either school and offered them the Arkansas and Ole Miss jobs, the results would be close to unanimous in favor of the Razorbacks. Why? Both schools have great facilities, great fan support, etc. One, Ole Miss, has 11.7 scholarships to work with. The other, Arkansas, has a massive advantage in the form of bordering state financial aid offered to all students, including those who play baseball. If you’re a kid from Texas, Missouri, Tennessee, Louisiana, etc., and you’ve got a 24 or higher on the ACT, Arkansas will waive a significant percentage of your out-of-state tuition. Ole Miss very likely won’t. That’s a game-changer in recruiting. It likely means Arkansas (and other SEC schools that have similar scholarship programs) are working with more resources on the recruiting trail. In a sport where only nine people play on the field at once, that’s a big deal.
So, as we get started with another season, keep that in mind. I’m not arguing for or against Bianco. It’s not my call, and I don’t care. I understand the frustration about the postseason failures. I also respect the regular season consistency on a non-level playing field. If everything were even, evaluation would be simple.
But it’s not, and therefore, it’s not.
It’s not fair, mind you, but in college football, does fairness really matter?
If you’re looking for a hard, inflexible line of demarcation regarding the success or lack thereof for Lane Kiffin at Ole Miss, I present to you December 2022.
Specifically, look at Dec. 14 or Dec. 21, 2022. I’m not sure which of those days will mark the start of the early signing period for the 2023 class, but you get the general idea.
Arch Manning, the ninth-grade son of Cooper, grandson of Archie and nephew of Peyton and Eli, will be eligible to sign with the school of his choice on that day. He’s already getting labeled as “Better than Peyton,” and attracting the attention of esteemed national reporters such as Sports Illustrated’s Ross Dellenger. It’s clear _ and becoming more clear by the day _ that young Arch is going to be a very big deal.
Tell me what that day looks and sounds like and I’ll tell you all about Ole Miss and Kiffin. For example, if Kiffin lands Manning’s signature, it likely means he’s at least stabilized the Rebels’ program, won the support of the Manning family and is recruiting at a high level. In that scenario, euphoria abounds and the artist working on the Kiffin statue for Vaught-Hemingway Stadium better start burning that midnight oil.
That’s the easy part of the equation. What if, however, Kiffin fails to sign Manning? If that’s met with a “Ho-hum, we’ve got better, his loss” response, you’ll know Ole Miss is thriving under Kiffin. That would mean he’d landed other quarterbacks who were putting Ws on the scoreboards around the SEC and the program had reached a point where it wasn’t always looking to the Manning clan for the next savior.
However, if losing the next Manning to LSU or Virginia or wherever is met with vitriol and gnashing of teeth, I’d bet you the end were near. If the program is meandering in mediocrity and can’t land Cooper and Ellen Manning’s son, that would be difficult for any coach, even Kiffin, to overcome.
It’s all a long way away for now. There are three seasons for both Ole Miss and Manning to play before the two parties can unite or go their separate ways. In college football terms, three years is a figurative lifetime. Just don’t think this isn’t going to be a storyline that builds to a crescendo over the next 34 months or so, for it absolutely is.
And again, that’s not fair to Kiffin or Manning, but as Kiffin often says, “It is what it is.”
