McCready: 10 Weekend Thoughts, presented by Sego Wealth Management

1. For the last month, I felt like I wrote the same thing repeatedly.

Ole Miss looked really good. Ole Miss has a lot of elite talent. The Rebels had seen their weakness — size on the line of scrimmage — and rectified it through the transfer portal.

Ole Miss had elite wide receivers, depth at tight end, an additional linebacker with Southeastern Conference experience and a house-full of quality analysts, including a former SEC head coach and a former NFL head coach.

The pieces, it seemed, were all in place to make a deep run at a national championship. Most everyone in the media and in the coaching world agreed.

However — and I wrote this and said this so many times that I lost count — Ole Miss played no one in the first four weeks of the season. No one. Furman is now 1-3 after losing by 10 points to William & Mary Saturday. Middle Tennessee is now 1-4 after losing by 17 at Memphis Saturday. Wake Forest is now 1-3 after losing by three, at home, Saturday to Louisiana-Lafayette. Georgia Southern improved to 3-2 Saturday with a 17-point win at Georgia State.

Those aren’t SEC teams. With the possible exception of Georgia Southern, those aren’t good teams. They aren’t teams that give any objective viewer a real picture of what Ole Miss can or cannot be.

The Rebels lost to Kentucky Saturday at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, 20-17, the first game of one hell of a tripleheader on ABC. A national viewing audience saw Ole Miss take the opening kickoff and march for a fast touchdown and then basically go stagnant on offense the rest of the way. They saw Ole Miss’ defense sack Brock Vandagriff five times but struggle to get off the field in some key moments.