The most viewed college football post-season in history reaches a crescendo tonight with the first half of perhaps the most unlikely Final Four we’ve seen in any major sport, let alone football. If you had told me back in August that the last teams standing would be three schools who’ve never won a single title between them and the one that had (their most recent now being full quarter-century in the rear-view mirror) being a double-digit seed that through the grace of a handful of committee voters even got the chance to compete, I would have what your were smoking, and if you had any to spare.
But arguably the most shocked fan base of all revolves around the tony hamlet of Oxford, Missisisippi and their beloved Rebels, who are playing meaningful January football for the first time in their storied history and invading Atlanta tonight for a Fiesta Bowl showdown with those upstart Miami Hurricanes, fresh off an improbable conquest of fellow SEC rival Georgia. That win brought the Pete Golding coaching era all the way up to 2-0. And it yet again was proof that games are ultimately won on the field and not merely by sideline architects.
The last time we mused about Ole Miss we were noting that Lane Kiffin was literally being run out of town on a rail after the gave the middle finger to the team he had led to an 11-1 regular season record and gleefully took a nine-figure blood money deal to take his talents to Baton Rouge. It was emotional, chaotic and disruptive, all the more so for a school in its first de facto post-season football tournament. A lesser team and less talented interim coach would have most certainly caved by now. Instead, Golding has now become the new poster child for fair play and karma, as ESPN’s Mark Schlabach noted this morning:
After No. 6 Ole Miss upset No. 3 Georgia 39-34 in the College Football Playoff quarterfinal at the Allstate Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day, Rebels athletic director Keith Carter tracked down coach Pete Golding on the field at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans. “What you’ve done in the last three or four weeks has just been incredible,” Carter told Golding. “The multitasking, the short-term stuff and long-term stuff, and recruiting. It’s just been awesome.”
For Carter and others involved in the Ole Miss program, what Golding and his staff have accomplished since he replaced Lane Kiffin as Rebels coach on Nov. 30 has been nothing short of astounding. It’s not only that Golding has guided the Rebels to their first two CFP victories and has them one win away from playing for their first national championship since 1962. It’s that Golding has accomplished that and more in perhaps the most difficult circumstances any coach in the CFP has ever faced — let alone as a 41-year-old former defensive coordinator with no previous head coaching experience.
It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen in college football–in part due to the fact this is only year two of a gauntlet with an expanded field. But that’s the way it’s been in basketball for decades, and the Rebel faithful can draw inspiration from the fact there is indeed precedence, as THE ATHLETIC’s Seth Emerson observed yesterday:
Terry Mills has watched the Ole Miss story with a knowing smile. He followed the Lane Kiffin saga. He made the connection with his own history…Maybe not the same way as Steve Fisher. Maybe not even the same way as Mills, Glen Rice, Rumeal Robinson, Sean Higgins and the others on one of the most improbable NCAA Tournament champions of all time: The 1988-89 Michigan team, whose coach left for another job the week the tournament began, then won it all anyway.
After weeks of the Kiffin-to-LSU story dragging out, Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter did what Bo Schembechler did in 1989: told the coach his departure was effective immediately. Carter gave Pete Golding the reins as the Playoff began, the way Schembechler did with Fisher as the NCAA Tournament began.
But in 1989, head coach Bill Frieder’s move to Arizona State was done “as quickly and quietly as possible,” as (MIlls’ teammate Mark) Hughes recalled this week. Frieder informed Michigan on Tuesday of the NCAA Tournament week that he was taking the job. Schembechler, the athletic director and legendary football coach, memorably rejected Frieder’s request to finish the season: “A Michigan man will coach Michigan.”
And hence tonight a Mississippi man will coach Mississippi, and in a fit of irony his quest and fate will likely be determined by the performance of a rising star from–you guessed it, Michigan. As Emerson additionally noted:
Trinidad Chambliss, the driving force of this Ole Miss football team, is in fact a Michigan man… by way of Ferris State, the Division II school in Michigan.
And it’s quite arguable that Chambliss, even more than Kiffin, is the reason his team is in Phoenix tonight, a set of facts which CBS SPORTS’ Shehan Jeyarajah painstakingly laid out yesterday:
The Rebels quarterback started his career at Division II Ferris State, only transferring to Ole Miss as a backup to Austin Simmons. After an injury to Simmons, he stepped in and delivered one of the best seasons ever by an Ole Miss player.
The senior has thrown for 3,660 yards, rushed for 520 yards and scored 29 total touchdowns during a sensational campaign. He had 362 yards passing and two scores in the stunning 39-34 upset of No. 3 Georgia in last week’s Sugar Bowl quarterfinal.
You want even more inspiration, Rebel Nation? Perhaps the only other prominent interim leader to lead a team to a title was one Bob Lemon, who stepped in to replace Billy Martin as the skipper of the 1978 New York Yankees after Billy had a mid-summer meltdown in a bar. All Lem did was take a team that at one point was 14 1/2 games out of first place on a late season run that eventually resulted in a memorable one-game playoff win to capture a division title on the field of their hated Red Sox rivals, score a third consecutive playoff win over Kansas City that included a ninth inning tie-breaking rally in the fifth and deciding game, and then rattle off four consecutive World Series wins after dropping the first two against the Dodgers in Los Angeles. His first baseman’s last name? Mmm hmm, Chambliss.
Will all of this karma and irony be enough to rock the Hurricanes from their own Cinderella juggernaut? We’ll know soon enough. But before whatever happens happens praise should be transferred to the proper, ahem, lane.
Courage…