The SEC picked Ole Miss 13th of 16 in its preseason media poll, with no Rebels on a preseason All-SEC team. At SEC Tipoff in Birmingham on Tuesday, Chris Beard was asked whether that is motivation. He did not hesitate.
Absolutely, it’s motivation. You know, in our program, we don’t have a lot of bumper stickers, koozies. We don’t have a lot of slogans, but we do have a few that we believe in. And one of them is never lose your chip.
He came back to it later in the same answer. “A lot of you in this room aren’t expecting much from Ole Miss, but that’s why we play the games. And so we’ll see. We got a good team.”
Nine newcomers and a race against time
Beard described the roster as “a melting pot”: three returners, three freshmen and nine newcomers. Two of the returners, Patton Pinkins and Ilias Kamardine, “played major minutes and had some individual success in the SEC last year.”
Building a team mostly from scratch is not new to him, he said, going back to his junior college days and his teams at Little Rock and Texas Tech. “If I ever had the chance to coach a team where everybody returned, it would be like an out-of-body experience for me.”
I think the way we’ve always kind of described it is with our staffs and then ultimately with our players is that we’re fighting time. That’s our biggest challenge when you put together a team with new players.
His answer is to squeeze more out of every day, down to lunch: “maybe we have that lunch where everybody puts their cell phones in the golden bucket and we invest 30 minutes with just some conversation at lunch.” The team spent seven weeks practicing in Oxford this summer and an eighth in Puerto Rico, under an NCAA rule change that now allows a foreign trip every year.
Alabama, this Thursday
Ole Miss plays Alabama in an exhibition on Thursday, Oct. 15, at Boutwell Auditorium in Birmingham. Beard believes it is the first SEC-against-SEC exhibition, “at least in modern history,” and thanked Alabama coach Nate Oats for the invitation.
When we think about exhibition games, it’s very simple what we’re looking for. We’re looking for great competition. We’re looking to put our teams in tough situations. We’re looking for things to be revealed about our team.
Pinkins, Siulepa and the new faces
Pinkins, who shot 42.2% from three as a freshman, the second-best mark in program history per Ole Miss Athletics, told SEC Network he spent the offseason becoming “more of a playmaker and more of a guard. I feel like last year I was like more of a shooter.” Beard said of him, “Patton’s kind of in a league of himself in a lot of ways.”
Roman Siulepa, a forward who started every game at Pittsburgh last season, said he came to Oxford for one reason. “Winning. I think our whole sort of program is based around winning, and that’s something I’m drawn towards. I don’t like being a loser.” Beard said it “was love at first sight before I ever talked to Roman,” after he heard about Siulepa’s background, which includes growing up playing rugby in Brisbane, Australia.
Beard called point guard Budd Clark, a Philadelphia native who transferred from Seton Hall, exactly what the program needed: “we got to have some grit in that PG-1 spot.” He also pointed to new assistant coach Petar Aleksić, the former head coach of the Swiss national team, as “kind of a sneaky story in college basketball.”
One thing is still unresolved. Asked about the eligibility of Micah Handlogten and Corey Stephenson, Beard said, “I wish there was” an update, and called the timing of the NCAA’s new eligibility rule “very perplexing.”
Unfinished business
Last season was the first losing season of Beard’s Division I career, but the Rebels reached the SEC Tournament semifinals, where they lost to Arkansas. Beard said that team was “just a basket away from a 40-minute opportunity to make the big dance again.”
I would argue at the end of the season, we were playing like a Sweet 16 type team. So this year, what worked for us late in the year, let’s repeat some of those things.
Ole Miss opens the regular season against Alcorn State on Nov. 2, and plays Clemson in the first round of the Maui Invitational on Nov. 23. Hotty Toddy 🦈
Quotes from Chris Beard’s SEC Tipoff press conference and the Ole Miss SEC Network interview with Beard, Patton Pinkins and Roman Siulepa, Oct. 13, 2026, Birmingham. Photo: Chris Beard at SEC Basketball Tipoff, Oct. 13, 2026. Mandatory Credit: Butch Dill-Imagn Images.