OXFORD — It was late June, 2024, and defections were rocking the Ole Miss baseball program.

Andrew Fischer and Liam Doyle were leaving for Tennessee, and there were more departures on the horizon.

Ole Miss first baseman Will Furniss wanted to change the conversation around the Rebels’ program, so he called upon Scott Wyant for a favor.

“Hey Scoot!,” Furniss texted. “I need a cool video to post. We’ve had a lot of bad news this week. And we need something good trending in the feed.

“I’m going to make a post on Twitter that says this: ‘Success in not final; failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.’ Fight like Rebs.

“You have any ideas? Or are you able to make me something?”

Wyant, a senior producer/director who works on Ole Miss’ Emmy Award-winning “The Season,” was on vacation. He didn’t have access to his Ole Miss server with all of his files.

So he leaned on Twitter and other social media to put together a highlight reel/motivational post. First, Wyant leaned into a speech from Rocky Balboa in the 2006 film Rocky Balboa.

“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done! Now if you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain’t you! You’re better than that!” -- Rocky Balboa

“I’m a big Rocky fan, so I figured it kind of fit with the narrative of ‘Can’t quit here,’” Wyant said. “It just kind of made sense. I’d seen that scene a ton, so I just kind of put two and two together.”

Revisions were required. More players left. JT Quinn left for Georgia. Wes Mendes bolted for Florida State. Eventually, the video was posted.

“(Furniss) said, ‘That’s sick,’” Wyant said. "He said, ‘Make sure you get Mason Morris in there.’”

Wyant started at Ole Miss in the fall of 2017. His first Ole Miss baseball season was in 2018. He’d seen winning. He’d seen a national title in 2022. After two seasons of losing and adversity, he just wanted to play a role in making things around the program feel better.

Furniss posted Wyant’s video on July 1. The reaction was immediately positive.

“We just had a lot of bad news that week,” Furniss said earlier this week. “That’s when everything hit. Everything was negative on the feed. It was, ‘What are we going to do for next season?’ I just kind of wanted to put together a highlight film of all the guys that we did have staying because it was a good amount of good players. It’s hard sometimes to outweigh the positive from the negative, and that was the goal. Scoot did a great job with the video. It was awesome. I got chills when he sent it to me.”

Some 11 months later, Ole Miss is back in the NCAA Tournament. The Rebels are the No. 10 national seed, and they’ll host a regional this weekend at Swayze Field. Western Kentucky and Georgia Tech will square off on Friday at 2 p.m. Ole Miss and Murray State will face off at 7.

“I think that was the goal,” Furniss said. “It’s been the goal since the moment we stepped on campus in the fall. I think all the guys that stayed really helped. It’s tough losing guys to the portal. It’s just how it is now. It happens to everybody. I think we kept a key group of guys, which is huge. There’s not very many teams that can say they have guys who have been here for three, four or five years. We can, so that’s great for program morale.

“Bringing in the transfers, (they) have meshed really well. We’ve had a good group of transfers this year. Not only are they good baseball players but they’re good teammates. That’s a big thing. It’s exciting. We’ve accomplished our goals so far. Now we just have to go on and take on this regional and do what we did last week. We can beat anybody in the country.”

Wyant hasn’t recorded a hit or struck out an opposing hitter this year, but he is happy the video he threw together that day changed the mood around the program.

“I just want to be a part of those guys and what they’re doing,” Wyant said. “They’re such a good group. …I just want to be a part of the positive momentum. It’s been fun to see them get rewarded. Those guys stuck around when things were really, really hard. That’s been really impactful for me.”

Wyant said it was “awesome” last summer to see fans on social media embrace the Rebels that decided to stay after Furniss posted the video.

“And it’s been awesome to see those guys take the hard road and to get rewarded,” Wyant said. “They deserve all the success they’ve had.”

Ole Miss assembled an older, more mature team in the transfer portal. The Rebels are 40-19 and playing their best baseball of the season at the right time. Last week, at the Southeastern Conference Tournament in Hoover, Ala., the Rebels beat Florida, Arkansas and LSU before losing a 3-2 decision to national top seed Vanderbilt in the conference tournament title game. There’s a feeling around the program, one that couldn’t be more polar opposite than the one Furniss sensed when he asked Wyant for a favor.

“This one just seems like everything’s clicking at the right time,” Furniss said. “It’s really good.”