OXFORD — He never really had a chance.

Two years after landing Ole Miss’ head coaching job on a non-interim basis, Matt Luke was fired from the same spot Sunday night.

In three seasons at Ole Miss, including one as the interim, Luke was 15-21 overall and 7-17 in the Southeastern Conference. In the SEC West, Luke won just three games, beating Arkansas twice and winning at Mississippi State in 2017.

Luke’s final game, a 21-20 loss at Mississippi State on Thanksgiving night, was “an awful look, as bad of a look for the program and for him as was possible,” a source said Saturday night, as rumors began to surface that Ole Miss was looking to put together the $17 million necessary to buy out Luke and his coaching staff.

With four seconds left in that game, Ole Miss scored a touchdown on a pass from Matt Corral to Elijah Moore, pulling the Rebels within one point. Moore crawled to the back of the end zone, lifted one leg and pretended to urinate like a dog. The 15-yard penalty led to a 35-yard extra point kick for Luke Logan. Logan pushed the kick to the right, giving Mississippi State the victory and giving Ole Miss it’s 13th loss in its last 17 games.

By Saturday night, it was obvious the optics were working against Luke. By Sunday, boosters and donors were openly campaigning for change and by Sunday afternoon, per sources, new chancellor Glenn Boyce backed off his stance and acquiesced. Luke and his coaches were called off the recruiting trails late Sunday. He was expected to speak to his team on Sunday evening.

Luke was never fully accepted by the Ole Miss fan base. Hugh Freeze’s offensive line coach from 2012 through 2016, Luke was named Ole Miss’ interim head coach in July 2017 after the Rebels fired Freeze for using his university-issued phone to call escort services.

Throughout that 2017 season, then-Ole Miss athletics director Ross Bjork conducted a national coaching search. Bjork, per sources, talked to then-Oregon coach Willie Taggart before settling on North Carolina State coach Dave Doeren. However, Ole Miss upset Mississippi State on Thanksgiving night in the season finale, and 24 hours later, alumni and donor support for Luke intensified. Three days after the Egg Bowl win in Starkville, Luke was named the Rebels’ coach.

He retained Freeze’s coordinators, Phil Longo and Wesley McGriff, and that backfired. The Rebels started the 2018 season 5-2 but lost five straight games to finish the season. Luke fired McGriff and let Longo leave for North Carolina. He hired Mike MacIntyre as his defensive coordinator and Rich Rodriguez as his offensive coordinator but struggled to close on several high-profile recruits from Mississippi.

As the close losses piled up this fall, public support wavered. By Sunday, the support, with a few exceptions, was gone.

Ole Miss’ 2020 schedule is a nightmare, featuring games against Baylor, Auburn, LSU, Alabama and Florida _ five teams with a combined mark of 52-8 this season _ in the season’s first seven weeks. Recruiting was going well, but there were already signs that closing strong was going to be difficult.

So Ole Miss made the move a season before it had intended to consider it. A search for Luke’s replacement, obviously, begins immediately.

His fate really isn’t fair, but college football is a scoreboard business, and he failed to win enough games. He inherited a broken program from Freeze, who left Oxford with the tarnished reputation of a charlatan. NCAA sanctions crippled the roster, and Luke and his staff were dependent on young players in a brutally difficult league. Luke, who had no previous head coaching or coordinator experience, struggled to convey a message to a fan base.

Bottom line: It simply didn’t work and he ran out of time to turn it around.

More importantly, he never should have been hired. Had former chancellor Jeffrey Vitter and some meddling boosters left it alone, who knows where the Ole Miss program would be today?

Luke is a super guy, a family man who was nothing but fair to the people who covered him and interacted with his program. But he wasn't ready for this. He deserved better. He was likely headed to a program like South Alabama, where he could have learned on the job and developed into a future head coach.

But again, this is a multi-million-dollar business and few “deserve” anything. Ole Miss decided it couldn't wait.

So it ended Sunday, a chapter in Ole Miss' football history that everyone associated with it can't forget soon enough.