There is a certain myopia that comes from following your one team very closely, where everything is about them. Events are seen through the lens of what it means for your team, and the difference between winning and losing comes down to what that team does or doesn’t do.
I have a bit broader of a perspective on most SEC teams because I used to co-run a website that covered the entire conference. I did it from the late Meyer years to early McElwain tenure, which was something of a golden era for the league. A lot happened in general, so I got to see a lot of sides of the various programs.
I can tell you from that experience that Billy Napier might, for once, not be the coach feeling the most pressure this weekend.
We’ve all become so accustomed to Napier hot-seat talk after the Miami debacle that each new game has felt like a referendum on his performance. Finally, this weekend’s game isn’t really such an event. Scott Stricklin announced before the Texas game that Napier would continue on as UF’s head coach, and after DJ Lagway returned, the Gators scored an impressive upset win over LSU.
Obviously you’d prefer to win every game, but just beating a dreadful FSU team to cap the regular season with bowl eligibility would maintain the momentum. Napier has begun getting commitments from recruits again, and “you get to play with Lagway” is a pretty compelling pitch for both high school and transfer prospects. Winning out would enhance that pitch, but getting to the postseason along with having the most promising young signal caller in the country is the baseline for Napier to go into next year on more stable ground than we thought possible six week ago. And it’s attainable even without a win this weekend.
Lane Kiffin is not in any danger of losing his job any time soon, but the pressure is on. Even Florida made mincemeat of his Egg Bowl opponent before making what proved to be successful changes to the defense, making this weekend’s game easily the tougher of the Rebels’ two remaining games.
Ole Miss really stepped up its NIL spending after last year to make a playoff run this year. Everything was aligning: Jaxon Dart is a senior, Nick Saban retired, LSU was headed for regression without Jayden Daniels, and the schedule missed Bama, Tennessee, preseason darling Missouri, and both Texas teams. A lot of the spending went to the defensive front, and it has paid off with the Rebels leading the country in sacks by a significant margin.
And indeed, the team won a game that in years past it would typically lose when it handled Georgia two weeks ago. A truly big win had been like Lucy and the football for the Rebels’ Charlie Brown. Fans even took what was originally intended to be a rallying cry, “We Are Ole Miss”, and made it into a sarcastic statement of frustration. If you find it on various social media platforms, WAOM is more likely to be synonymous with “oh no, we stepped on a rake again” rather than “we are so awesome right now”. But Kiffin overcame that history with the dominant victory over the Bulldogs.
Failing to win the big one is only one half of the WAOM lament, however. The team has a history of dropping winnable games to fall short of a breakthrough. The most infamous example was in 2015, when the Rebels beat Alabama early and were in the driver’s seat for the SEC Championship Game at October’s end. However on the first Saturday in November, the team went to overtime with a then 4-4 Arkansas team. Things looked bleak for the Razorbacks, with them in 4th & 25 after Ole Miss had already scored a touchdown, when one of the most ridiculous conversions in the history of the sport happened:
But that’s not all. The Hogs scored two plays later and decided to go for two and the win. A rush end sacked the quarterback on the attempt, but he pulled the face mask in the process. Given a second chance, Arkansas ran a QB draw up the middle for the game-winning score. It was the WAOM game to end all WAOM games.
Because the Rebels had gotten smoked by Will Grier and the Gators earlier that season, they picked up their second SEC loss in that contest. They finished 6-2 in league play, while 7-1 Alabama went to Atlanta. If they had only beaten Arkansas, the would’ve gone to their first SEC Championship Game.
Ole Miss is still very much in the College Football Playoff hunt. They’re No. 9 in the current rankings, in fact. However, the Rebels have no margin for error. They provided Kentucky with its only SEC win of the season to date, and they lost to the fading LSU team that Florida just beat. The selection committee does generally care more about wins than losses, and the Rebels do have good wins over UGA and South Carolina. However, loss-counting as a means of stacking teams is still very much alive in college football, and dropping a third game will drop the team in a very crowded top-half of the top 25.
The game on Saturday will be a sleepy 11 am kick by Ole Miss’s body clocks. Even though they have everything to lose, there isn’t the big prize of beating a top-five ranked, recent national champion to be gained as there was a couple of weeks ago. Princely Umanmielen will be juiced for the game, but how many of his teammates really will? And Kiffin himself has generally struggled to complete full successful seasons, even if he did finally get a top tier win last time out. The only hardware he’s ever won is a couple of CUSA titles at FAU.
Despite early struggles, injuries, and a rough week-in-week-out slate of games, Florida appears rejuvenated. The team never stopped playing hard for Napier even when things looked darkest, and there were a lot of good vibes going around last week between Lagway’s return, Napier’s solid footing, and the win over LSU.
Again, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that UF has nothing to lose this week. For as bad as FSU has been, players still tend to get up for rivalry games. Plus, Lagway’s hamstring is not guaranteed to stay in good shape from here on out. All those good vibes would vanish if the Gators lose out, and that still is a possibility.
But in terms of meeting season goals, Ole Miss has way more pressure on them to win. Pressure has not been kind to the program in the past, and the circumstances — an early kick against a 5-5 team — are the kind that nevertheless often make a team come out flat.
If the Gators can be ready from the start, they might find an opponent that sleepwalks early and gets increasingly tight as the game goes along. They also might just find another win in what was supposed to be the hardest part of the schedule, against a coach who’d been rumored to be a potential replacement for Napier. Though the game is in the early slot, a UF win would elicit howls of “WAOM” deep into the night.