Ole Miss sits ninth in the polls during its bye week, and its recruiting board moved four times in eight days while the attention was on a 52-28 loss at Florida. The centerpiece is Keegan Croucher, a 6-foot-4 1/2, 200-pound quarterback ranked the No. 10 passer in the 2027 class and 122nd overall. Over his last two games he has completed 27 of 35 for 551 yards and seven touchdowns without an interception.
Locked On Ole Miss host Steven Willis argued the ranking is beside the point. Croucher committed last October to Lane Kiffin, and when Kiffin left for LSU and Georgia, Kentucky and Indiana came after him, he never reopened his recruitment. That, Willis said, is a Pete Golding data point, not a Lane Kiffin one.
Willis traced a second effect to the LSU win. A top-60 athlete committed to Oregon watched the 32-24 win over a seventh-ranked LSU from Vaught-Hemingway, and the reporter who covers him wrote afterward that the recruitment got a lot tighter behind the scenes. Two four-star safeties who were in the building that week committed to Ole Miss within days, both with Tennessee among their finalists.
The pattern Willis found is a school rather than a state. Croucher transferred to the Baylor School in Chattanooga for his senior year, and two of the five 2028 predictions on Ole Miss’s board attend the same campus 400 miles from Oxford. His read is that the talent inside Tennessee is not all committed to Tennessee, and much of it has Mississippi roots.
The closing number was the seeding. Florida is eighth, Ole Miss ninth, and Willis pointed out that a bracket built off today’s poll would send the Rebels back to Gainesville in the first round. The committee’s first rankings arrive in about five weeks.
Photo: LSU and Ole Miss fans in the Grove, September 19, 2026, at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Petre Thomas-Imagn Images.
Adapted from the September 29, 2026 episode of Locked On Ole Miss, hosted by Steven Willis, part of the Locked On Podcast Network. Watch the full episode.