Ole Miss' return on investment: A win over Georgia, Lane Kiffin's first big win and a team talented enough to win it all

OXFORD, Miss. — Last year almost to the day, Ole Miss had an 8-1 team that was still alive in the SEC title race and the College Football Playoff when it traveled to Georgia to get a sense of where it stacked up against the nation’s elite. Ole Miss lost by 35. 

After the game, a dejected Lane Kiffin was asked what would have to happen in the future for Ole Miss to be able to compete with the monsters of the SEC. 

“That’s a good question,” Kiffin responded. “We have to recruit at a higher level. I’m not blaming (anyone). We have to coach better. But at some point, whatever those stats are — we have one five-star and they have signed 24 or something – those kind of show up at some point.” 

Maybe that was when Ole Miss boosters took out their calculators, put them on the table, and started crunching the numbers for how much it would cost to change that. 

Maybe that was the moment that led to Saturday, the day of Ole Miss’ 28-10 win over Georgia; the day of the biggest win of Lane Kiffin’s career; the day these Ole Miss Rebels not only got back into the SEC and College Football Playoff discussion, but look like one of the monsters of the SEC capable of winning games in January. 

This wasn’t an upset or a cute, frisky team clipping Georgia when the Bulldogs didn’t see them coming. This was no fluke. This wasn’t Georgia sleepwalking. This wasn’t Alabama in 2014.

This was the new Ole Miss.

Mississippi returned a large chunk of a team that won 11 games a year ago and invested in improving it. In the old days, Ole Miss may have just relied on coaching and development to take this roster to the next level. They would have demanded better recruiting rankings. That wouldn’t have been enough against Georgia. No, Ole Miss looked at the talent it had and this year’s schedule and made the business decision to be aggressive. So it went out and got the types of players who show up in games like this.

Ole Miss got defensive linemen Walter Nolen and Princely Umanmielen, linebacker Chris Paul, cornerback Trey Amos, receiver Antwane “Juice” Wells Jr. and so many others.

It didn’t have the patience for recruiting to maybe get better. It wanted to win now and it saw 2024 — the first year of the 12-team College Football Playoff — as the window of opportunity.

Which is what made this game so important. For a while this season, Ole Miss looked like a team that was going to be the poster boy for why you couldn’t buy championships. It came into this Georgia game already with two losses, one to Kentucky — believe it or not — and another to LSU.

When the investment in the roster was made, it was done so knowing Ole Miss could lose to Georgia and still compete for an SEC title and a CFP spot. Instead, Ole Miss came into Saturday finding itself in a must-win situation against the Georgia team that embarrassed it a year prior.

Had Ole Miss lost Saturday and fallen to a three-loss team, there would have been so many questions about Kiffin. You would have heard that Kiffin has never won a big game, which has become increasingly tiresome to the wonderful people of Oxford. You could have blamed him for squandering all of the talent on this Ole Miss roster, which was the problem the Rebels faithful solved for him.

Kiffin was brought to Ole Miss to win the biggest games in the SEC. Through the first three four years leading Ole Miss, Kiffin went a combined 1-7 against Alabama, Georgia and LSU. Coming into Saturday, he had yet to beat either Alabama or Georgia. 

That’s not true anymore. Ole Miss slayed a lot of demons with this win.

Kiffin can say he can beat Kirby Smart. He can say he won the big game at Ole Miss. And now, for the first time in his career, he can speak about competing for a national title because he finally has a roster equipped.

The touchdown Ole Miss scored to extend the lead to 12 midway through the third quarter? It was caught by Wells. The fumble recovered late in the third quarter to stop Georgia on the edge of the red zone as it attempted to make a comeback? It was recovered by Nolan. In the words of Don Draper from AMC’s television series Mad Men: “That’s what the money is for!”

The Rebels will show up in Playoff projections as soon as late Saturday night. This is where it was supposed to be, though it arrived here on a much different path than expected. Ole Miss was supposed to beat the heck out of Kentucky and (maybe) lose to Georgia but still be in those projections. It wasn’t supposed to lose to Kentucky, fall out of those projections, and then show up in its stadium on Nov. 9 against Georgia and look like the bigger, stronger, faster, more talented team. But we’re here.

Georgia isn’t what it has been in the past, which is, in part, because this new era of college football is supposed to make it harder to have super-teams. Georgia has some issues in its secondary — which Jaxson Dart and the receivers exposed, even without star receiver Tre Harris — and the Bulldogs lack dynamic offensive skill position talent to light up scoreboards.

But this Ole Miss team that was written off six weeks ago? It’s firmly right back in the picture.

The head coach who people felt couldn’t win a big game? He’s back, and winning makes his funny quotes, social media antics and injury report goofs so much better. Kiffin is one of the brightest offensive minds in the game and he has a team equipped to do something special this year.

Ole Miss is still a two-loss team, and every game it plays for the remainder of the year is a Playoff game. But it’s sitting pretty heading into Thanksgiving, which is the opposite feeling around this program a year ago when Georgia proved it wasn’t good enough.

That’s one hell of a smart investment.

This was the ROI.