Ole Miss is 3-0, 1-0 in the SEC and ranked fourth in the country, and the Rebels are three days from their first true road game of the year down in The Swamp. Wednesday’s show was football all the way through: the receiver who finally broke through against LSU, a head coach who said the same sentence twice on purpose, and what Trinidad Chambliss is actually chasing over the next two months. Hotty Toddy.
Ole Miss finally has a third receiver
Here is the number that should wreck Florida’s week: Traylon Ray ran 26 routes against LSU and turned them into seven catches for 115 yards and a touchdown. Deuce Alexander ran 52 routes on 70 snaps and also caught seven balls — for 60 yards. Same catches, half the routes, nearly double the yardage. Ole Miss has spent this season running the offense through two primary targets. On the biggest night of the year, a third one went for 115 yards. You can double two receivers. You cannot double three.
It took two years to get here. Ray came to Ole Miss from West Virginia to play receiver, got dinged up, and wound up at cornerback last fall — Pete Golding said he moved him to defense midway through the season. Ray never hit the portal, and he kept telling the staff he was a receiver. After his score Saturday he said God “just kept telling me to wait, wait, wait.” There is a bigger point buried in that game, too: everyone said this offense would crater when it changed coordinators, and it did not. John David Baker was already in the building, and Florida’s Jon Sumrall said it himself this week — “I see a lot more of the same than different offensively.” Continuity is the most underrated thing in college football right now.
Golding said it twice — and told on himself
When a head coach says the same thing twice in one press conference, that is the thing he came to the podium to say. Pete Golding kept circling back to The Swamp on Monday: “My last memory of going to this place was being number 14 in the country versus a 5-5 football team and getting beat.” It is a brutal place to play — Florida has won there at roughly an 80% clip over the last decade — and Golding made it clear that if anyone in his building is overlooking this trip, something is wrong with them.
He also refused the victory lap. Asked where his 3-0, top-five team sits a quarter of the way through the year, Golding said no, they are not where they want to be, and warned that the moment you get comfortable in this profession is the moment you get your tail beat. Meanwhile Vegas has Ole Miss as a field-goal underdog on the road despite that No. 4 ranking, and the show leaned all the way into the disrespect. The answer to it is simple, and it is the only one that counts on Saturday.
What Chambliss is actually chasing
Trinidad Chambliss tied Eli Manning on Saturday for the third-longest touchdown-pass streak in school history at 16 straight games, and his 363-yard night was the 10th 300-yard passing game of his Ole Miss career — which ties Eli for the most in program history. He arrived from Division II, won SEC Newcomer of the Year, and is now SEC Offensive Player of the Week, all while the program changed head coaches and coordinators around him. This was not supposed to happen.
But the records are not the point, and the show made that the whole argument. Every week from here decides where Ole Miss plays in January — not whether, but where. Win Saturday in Gainesville and the Rebels are in the conversation for a January game in Oxford, and maybe for the No. 1 team in the country. Lose it and January becomes an airplane and a road game. That is what Chambliss is really chasing: the right to play the most important month at home, in front of the crowd that just set a stadium record.
Also on the show
Wednesday’s guest was Ole Miss legend Bill Flowers, who dug into what it takes to bounce back off a huge win and walk into a tough road environment as an underdog. His read on the noise around this team was blunt: “The way that you get your respect is by going in there and winning.” He likes this group’s maturity in the portal era and trusts Golding to keep the emotional high in check on the way to Gainesville.
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