Jaxson Dart: Ole Miss needs to 'create a great culture' to have success in 2023

Ole Miss wrapped up the 2022 season by losing five of its final six games and nobody is more aware of that than Jaxson Dart.

Coming off the Texas Bowl loss to Texas Tech last December the taste in Dart and the rest of his returning teammates’ collective mouth is still a sour one. Ole Miss might have turned the page and left the result in the past but the motivation factor from that night in Houston remains.

With the transfer portal there is plenty of roster turnover and fresh faces in the Ole Miss locker room, replacing over 60 players who departed Oxford for the transfer portal this offseason.

Chemistry and culture building is tough in this new era of football. A majority of players are not three or four years deep into being at a school anymore.

This challenge is one Dart acknowledges and accepts to overcome to avoid how last November and December went for a second straight year.

“I feel like as a team we’ve come along really fast,” Dart said on Saturday after taking part in The Sip Youth Football Camp in Oxford. “It’s tough when you feel like half your team is brand new at times. I feel like people are buying in really fast and I think this year it’s been established that we need to create a great culture because culture is what replicates success.”

With that mindset there have been more “player-led” meetings this summer, according to Dart. Players are making sure the rest of the locker room is on the same page.

“We had a really good week this past week. It was probably the best week we’ve had since I’ve been here,” Dart added. “Guys stepping up in their roles, being super encouraging and also, you know, those times where maybe everyone’s slacking off and being able to snap that out of it really quick and not let it linger on to other things.”

Dart knows after last summer there is not much time to gel as a team and Ole Miss is attacking that better this year.

Players can arrive via the portal right up to the start of fall camp, giving only a handful of weeks to get accustomed to a team’s culture and system.

Being able to fall back on what worked, and maybe did not work, last offseason and summer is helping Dart go through this year’s summer workouts with a better understanding.

“We have a lot of leaders on this team and it’s really cool to have a lot of these transfers because a lot of them are vets,” Dart said. “They’re only here for one year. There’s not a lot of time for us to mesh in that stuff so we got to get that done quickly and that’s been a huge point of focus for us.”

Last summer was a crash course for Ole Miss and all of college football as the sport gets another offseason of the NIL and transfer portal under its belt. A valuable learning tool for Dart and his teammates.

Still, Dart keeps going back to more specific teaching moment and that is the back half of Ole Miss’ season a year ago. Starting 7-0 and then closing things out 1-5 is still the proverbial sign Dart looks at as motivation when forging 2023 Ole Miss’ identity and culture.

“We saw the flaws in the back-half of our season and we saw that not with talent, it was culture and being able to overcome adversity,” Dart said. “When something hit us hard at times we’d just fall back and we weren’t able to get over something fast. Our focus is being able to respond to adversity. With our schedule and that stuff, we’re going to hit it. We’ve got to have everybody buy into the program and what we’re trying to accomplish.”