Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin discusses Grove Bowl Games
What Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin said about the Rebels’ Grove Bowl Games
OXFORD ― The latest betting odds give Ole Miss football roughly a 14% chance to win the 2024 SEC championship – a feat the Rebels last achieved in 1963.
Since the SEC began playing a title game in 1992, no school with an all-time losing record against its conference peers has lifted the trophy. The Rebels are 300-409-19 against the programs that make up the current SEC – and 2-6 all-time against Oklahoma and Texas, who will be joining for 2024.
Collectively, the Power Five leagues have played 99 conference championship games. They have been won by a team with a losing all-time record within that conference six times: Kansas State (Big 12, 2003 and 2022), Utah (Pac-12, 2021 and 2022), Wake Forest (ACC, 2006) and Baylor (Big 12, 2021).
Modern college football doesn’t take well to the kind of disruption coach Lane Kiffin‘s Rebels are going to attempt in 2024.
What, if anything, can be learned from the six teams who pulled it off?
What would help Ole Miss football win 2024 SEC championship
When the underdogs prevail, it’s often because the league’s usual top predators falter. Miami, Clemson and Florida State each lost at least five games when Wake Forest won the ACC in 2006. Texas went 5-7 when Baylor won the Big 12 in 2021, and the Longhorns and Oklahoma combined for a 14-12 record when Kansas State triumphed a year later. When Utah won the Pac-12 in 2021, USC posted a 4-8 mark.
Some of the disruptors on our list, like 2003 Kansas State and 2022 Utah, didn’t benefit from outlandishly poor seasons by the league’s blue bloods. Still, it’s a common ingredient for what Ole Miss will be looking to achieve in 2024.
Though Georgia has threatened supremacy as of late, Alabama has spent the last decade as the most powerful force in college football, claiming seven of the last 10 SEC championships. With Nick Saban out of the picture and the Crimson Tide adding a new coach in Kalen DeBoer, the kind of down season the Rebels need to open the door for them looks more possible in 2024 than in any previous campaign.
Lane Kiffin’s Rebels must keep excelling in this key stat
Of the six teams in our sample, only 2021 Utah and 2003 Kansas State ranked in their conference’s top three in total yardage on both sides of the ball. Those two teams are the outliers of this group. They performed poorly in one-score games and turned the ball over too much. Had they benefitted from some better variance, statistics show, those teams might have been even better.
The other four conference champions expertly leveraged marginal games to their advantage – none more than Wake Forest, which had the ACC’s seventh-best offense by total yardage and ninth-best defense, but rode takeaways and a 5-0 record in one-score games to a title.
Collectively, those four teams went 14-5 in one-score games. They all finished with a positive turnover differential.
The Rebels’ success in close games under Kiffin has gone a bit under the radar. Since his arrival for the 2020 campaign, Ole Miss is 12-4 in contests decided by one score, including a 4-0 mark last season.
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What preseason rankings will mean for Ole Miss football
Ole Miss will, barring a major surprise, be a top-10 team when the preseason polls drop in August. The college football world expects the Rebels to be very good in 2024.
Some of the teams in our sample shared that expectation. Kansas State, led by Darren Sproles, was the country’s seventh-ranked team before the 2003 campaign. Pollsters ranked Utah 24th preseason in 2021 and seventh in 2022.
Their conference championships, while historically unusual, didn’t come from nowhere.
Others did. It took the AP Poll until Week 8 to rank Wake Forest in 2006. Baylor began the season outside the polls in 2021, as did Kansas State in 2022.
David Eckert covers Ole Miss for the Clarion Ledger. Email him at deckert@gannett.com or reach him on Twitter @davideckert98.
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