Ole Miss basketball agrees to home-and-home series with Memphis over next two seasons

Ole Miss and Memphis have agreed to play a home-and-home series in basketball over the next two seasons, The Commercial Appeal reported. The Tigers will host the first meeting in the 2024-25 season before traveling to Oxford the following year.

Dates for the games have still yet to be set.

Memphis and Ole Miss have met four times over the past five seasons with the home team winning each time. The Rebels won the most recent contest by a score of 80-77 this past season.

The trio of Matthew Murrell, Jaylen Murray and Allen Flanigan combined to score 60 of Ole Miss’ 80 points in this past season’s win vs. the Tigers. It marked the fifth victory for the Rebels in the past seven meetings, though Memphis leads the all-time series 28-16.

Ole Miss is coming off of a 20-12 finish in the inaugural season for coach Chris Beard. The Rebels started off 13-0 and got up to 18-3 before dropping nine of their final 11 games and missing out on the NCAA Tournament.

With Flanigan, Murrell and Jaemyn Brakefield all set to move on, Ole Miss will lose three of its top four scorers from this past season. Murray, who put up 13.8 points and a team-high 4.0 assists, announced that he will return for 2024-25.

Memphis finished this past season with a 22-10 record and also missed the NCAA Tournament. The Tigers lost a lot of pieces to graduation and the portal but could potentially return leading scorer David Jones, who averaged 21.8 points and 7.6 rebounds.

Memphis has already lost four players to the transfer portal this offseason, including Ashton Hardaway, the son of Tigers coach Penny Hardaway.

Memphis also agrees to home-and-home with Mississippi State

The Rebels weren’t the only team from Mississippi to schedule games with Memphis this upcoming season. Mississippi State is also set to begin a home-and-home series with the Tigers beginning next year.

That’s a nice little swap right there between to schools not too far away from each other. Of course, Memphis is tucked away down in the corner of the state at the confluence of Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. Heck, there’s Memphis suburbs that stretch into MS.

Meanwhile, Starkville is on the eastern side of the state but less than a three-hour car trip from Memphis. The Bulldogs will travel much further for some SEC games than they will to go face the Tigers next fall.

It will mark the first meeting between the two programs since the 2020-21 season. Memphis holds a 14-11 all-time advantage in the series.