Latest moves made in the transfer portal has Ole Miss in the 2025 NCAA Tournament mix
There is no more offseason for any Ole Miss sport. The college athletics landscape does not sleep after NIL and transfer portal decided to become a 24-7, 365-day alarm clock keeping everybody awake.
With that in mind the national prognosticators that usually are enjoying downtime when their respective sports are not in season are now being woken up out of hibernation and asked to get back on the horse.
This is the case for ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, who posted an early May ‘Bracketology’ update on Thursday. He noted that due to over 1,800 Division I basketball players changing teams via the portal that it is causing the sport to fluctuate year round, not just October to March.
Chris Beard is one of those coaches that is causing the fluctuating as Ole Miss has been very busy in the spring portal. Football under Lane Kiffin is not the only sport making waves.
In Lunardi’s previous NCAA Tournament field update he had the Rebels living the bubble life, but after the latest portal commitments Beard’s second-year squad is now firmly in the Field of 68.
Ole Miss is the 7 Seed of the East Region (Newark, New Jersey) and placed in Milwaukee for the first and second rounds. Maryland is the projected 10 Seed in the East by Lunardi, with the winner between the Terps and Rebels facing the winner of 2 Seed Iowa State and 15 Seed Samford in the second round.
Ole Miss currently has five transfer commitments and is not done heading into the summer.
The most recent addition to the Rebels is Virginia Tech’s Sean Pedulla, who recently spoke with Ole Miss Spirit’s Chuck Rounsaville about his impending move to Oxford.
There were nine slots that Beard needed to fill from portal departures and players having exhausted eligibility. He is on the way to taking care of the remaining needs.
“We won’t have a final roster for a while yet,” Beard told The Ole Miss Spirit earlier this week. “Around the first of June we will have a pretty good idea what the final roster will look like.”
Lunardi noted he will update his projections monthly leading up to the start of the 2024-25 season.
