Well, now. Was that a wild Sugar Bowl last week or what?
Ole Miss defied the oddsmakers, not to mention six decades of college football futility, to beat Georgia 39-34 and advance to the semifinals of the College Football Playoffs. They play Miami on Thursday night.
The Rebels did it with a stunning 20-point fourth quarter, led by a quarterback who decided to imitate Patrick Mahomes at the perfect time.
Trinidad Chambliss, a transfer portal player who was at Ferris State last year, repeatedly made can-you-believe-that scrambles and completions in the fourth quarter. He capped it off with a clutch third-down deep pass with half a minute to play that put Ole Miss into position for the game-winning field goal.
His highlight plays occurred back to back to back. Rolling left and under pressure, Chambliss shoveled forward a completion for a few yards along the sideline.
Next play, two Georgia guys chased him back by the goal line. Chambliss reversed course in a huge circle, ran left again and threw for a first down. This was the drive that gave Ole Miss the fourth-quarter lead, and renewed their confidence that they could win.
But the best part of the play was the well-coached Ole Miss lineman who, with his hands up as Chambliss scrambled in his direction, got in the way of the nearest Georgia pursuer — instead of laying out the defender with what today would be an illegal block.
And on the very next play, he zipped the ball 40 yards downfield, where an Ole Miss receiver had gotten behind a Georgia defender. The catch set up the go-ahead touchdown.
Extra points if you know where Ferris State is located. I didn’t until I looked it up: Its main campus is in Big Rapids, Mich. That school got plenty of free publicity Thursday night.
So now Ole Miss is one of four teams left for the national championship. We are living in a new world when the Rebels are the only Southeastern Conference team in the playoff. It is the same world in which perennial loser Indiana justified its No. 1 seed by hammering Alabama in a game just as surprising as the Sugar Bowl.
How much fun would an Ole Miss-Indiana national championship game be? It would not signal a changing of the guard in college football power, but it sure would prove that the game, for all that it has to work through right now, is giving more schools a chance to compete.
Here are topics for discussion after the Sugar Bowl:
• I cannot believe Georgia coach Kirby Smart said the Superdome crowd sounded like an Ole Miss home game. It sounded like he was making excuses. He’s the guy who went for it on fourth-and-2 around his own 30 and got stuffed by the Rebel defense.
As for the crowd noise, what did he expect? Mississippi is closer to New Orleans than Georgia is. Besides, when an SEC team plays in the Sugar Bowl, the crowd is always stacked in its favor. It just so happened that this year, there were two SEC teams.
I’ll bet some Georgia fans skipped the game, betting the Bulldogs would advance. That’s what happened last year when they lost to Notre Dame.
• The best sign that TV showed this year was from an Ole Miss fan. It said, “Lane Kiffin is sooooo last year.”
The Sugar Bowl certainly implied that Ole Miss has moved on from Kiffin’s dramatic departure. I give his assistants points for returning to Oxford to coach playoff games. They had a great year; they deserved to see it through.
And the new Ole Miss coach, Pete Golding, who moved up to the job when Kiffin left a month ago, has not been overwhelmed. There was every reason to expect Ole Miss to cave in the national spotlight, because that’s what usually happens.
Next season is a long way off, but for now Golding appears to be a good choice. No other Ole Miss coach has won two playoff games, right?
• One reason Kiffin went to LSU is because he thinks the Tigers can compete for national championships. Maybe so, but I’ll bet the Sugar Bowl puts a lot of attention on the Rebels — the same way Indiana is rewriting its story this year. How many small-school players will see what Chambliss did and think, why not me, and why not a place like Ole Miss?
• Finally, there is much to dislike about college football: Swollen conferences, unlimited NIL payments, the ability to transfer at will, ridiculous ticket prices, endless TV commercials.
I have been one of its critics, but maybe we need to let these changes sort themselves out. There is nothing wrong with a young man “changing jobs,” as Chambliss did. Too much money is involved to call college athletics an amateur business, but the Sugar Bowl showed just how much fun these games still can be.
