Mississippi was limping along after a second three-point loss left the team’s playoff and Southeastern Conference hopes on life support.
The 10th-ranked Rebels then fell behind to Oklahoma at halftime. In the 10 quarters since, Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin doesn’t think any FBS team has played better.
“Some people would say right now we’re playing as well as anybody in the country, which we are,” Kiffin said.
No need to be humble when the Rebels (8-2, 4-2 SEC) entered a bye week fresh from a 28-10 win over then-No. 2 Georgia. They’ll finish up against Florida and Mississippi State, games when Ole Miss is likely to be a significant favorite.
The turnaround came after a 29-26 overtime loss to LSU. Really, though, it started in the second half against Oklahoma when Ole Miss rallied for a 26-14 win with 16 unanswered points.
At halftime of that game, Kiffin challenged a team packed with transfer portal pickups to decide if they’ve “had enough” of letting those tight games slip away or wanted to keep striving for bigger things.
“I told them you can keep screwing these games up at the end and the narrative can be, you guys came here for money and Ole Miss can’t be one of those teams that makes an elite run and can’t be a championship team,” Kiffin said. “Or you can have enough.
“Since then, it’d be hard to argue that anybody in the country is playing better these last 2 1/2 games of football.”
Ole Miss, which already had lost 20-17 to Kentucky, has outscored Oklahoma, Arkansas and Georgia 107-41 since that halftime challenge.
The Rebels scored the last 12 points against the Bulldogs to pull away.
Normally, this might be a bad time for a potential momentum-halting open date. But quarterback Jaxson Dart has an extra week to recover if needed from an ankle issue that briefly sidelined him in the Georgia game. It gives more time to potentially get back wide receiver Tre Harris after he missed the last three games with a lower body injury.
Wide receiver Juice Wells, a South Carolina transfer, said the team knew the Rebels “weren’t playing to our standard at all.”
“We knew there was something still left on the table and we knew we all came here for a reason,” Wells said.
Indeed, once again Kiffin leaned heavily on the transfer portal to fortify his roster after a Top 10 finish last season.
The group included top players like now-injured tailback Henry Parrish Jr., linebacker Chris Paul Jr. and linemen Walter Nolen and Princely Umanmielen. But some of them didn’t arrive until the summer.
Kiffin said that’s one explanation for why his team has picked up steam late in the season.
“This was kind of like an NBA free agent thing where it was put together late,” he said. “There were a lot of late pieces.
“I think what you’re seeing is when those teams are put together, they take longer sometimes than ones that have been together for years, and then they screw up early in the year sometimes.”
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