It's getting harder and harder to make sense of the Kentucky win at Ole Miss

Ole Miss tasted revenge in the sweetest way Saturday in Oxford. A year after Georgia ate a 50-burger against the Rebels, the Dawgs were held to just 245 yards of offense at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. The only touchdown Georgia scored was thanks to a Jaxson Dart interception on the opening possession.

Ole Miss looked like one of the best teams in college football en route to a 28-10 victory over Georgia. With only a road trip to Florida and a date with Miss. State left on the schedule, a CFB Playoff berth is just on the horizon for Lane Kiffin’s squad.

The same team that dominated the most dominant program in college football, lost to a 3-win Kentucky team on that same field. With each day that passes, it’s getting harder to understand how and why that happened.

If you recall, RB Henry Parrish averaged 4.8 yards per carry and scored a touchdown in the loss to Kentucky, while WR Tre Harris tallied 176 yards and a score. Neither of them played against Georgia.

Huh?!?

Last week, Ole Miss scored 63 points at Arkansas. That’s the same venue where the Razorbacks defeated Tennessee, a one-loss SEC team vying for a spot in the CFB Playoff.

For casual SEC football fans, explaining those results isn’t too challenging. Weird things happen in college football. The stars simply aligned on one Saturday for Kentucky. That’s not so easy for Kentucky football fans to digest.

Watching Ole Miss throttle opponents is a tough pill for Kentucky fans to swallow. That wasn’t just a one-off. They played well enough to beat Georgia and Tennessee too, but Ole Miss was the only opponent where they didn’t compound self-inflicted mistakes until they were insurmountable.

It’s not just a tough pill to swallow, it’s flat-out frustrating for Kentucky fans. Mark Stoops has pointed out Kentucky’s strength of schedule on numerous occasions. In fact, 20% of the first CFB Playoff Rankings are on Kentucky’s schedule. The problem isn’t how Kentucky played against those teams. It’s that they came out flat at home in winnable games against Vanderbilt, South Carolina, and a very bad Auburn football team. Unless they have some magic left in the tank at Texas, Ole Miss will be the only SEC victory this fall for the Wildcats.

Kentucky was good enough to beat one of the best teams in all of college football but bad enough to lose six games, maybe more. Making sense of that discrepancy is maddening.

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