Ole Miss may have survived against Louisville, but Lane Kiffin and LSU loom large after a Week 1 beatdown

NASHVILLE — For better or worse, and in Trinidad Chambliss’ estimation it’s mostly for worse, fourth quarter chaos seems to be Ole Miss’ happy place. It’s not by choice or design, but it’s where he often seems to find himself as the quarterback of a team that has raised its fan base’s collective blood pressure to alarming levels, even if his own seems to be steady in place. 

“I honestly hate these games,” he said late Sunday night. “I don’t know why we do this every time.”

Chambliss, the coolest of cool customers, had just led a drive to set up kicker Lucas Carneiro for a walk-off, 48-yard field goal as time expired, giving Ole Miss a 41-38 win over Louisville to open the season. 

It was, in many ways, a more complicated game than it should have been for Ole Miss but also a familiar one. Last season, as the Rebels marched to the College Football Playoff semifinals in the midst of Lane Kiffin’s departure to LSU, having the ball in Chambliss’ hands late in one-score games practically became their security blanket.  

And now that there’s just 13 days before Kiffin comes back to Oxford dressed in purple and gold, hopped up on vengeance and armed with a team that delivered pure devastation to Clemson on a muggy Saturday night in the Bayou, we won’t have to wait much longer to find out what was better preparation for a blood feud more than nine months in the making. 

LSU looked terrifying. Ole Miss looked battle-tested under pressure. And with each passing hour, the first installment of college football’s nastiest, most personal rivalry draws ever closer. 

“I watched probably two quarters,” Ole Miss coach Pete Golding said when asked if he had kept an eye on LSU’s 51-10 humiliation of Clemson. “I thought they played really good on defense. They’ve got some really good players up front. I think they are what everybody thought they were going to be on paper.”

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Ole Miss QB Trinidad Chambliss celebrates a touchdown against Louisville on Sunday. (Carly Mackler/Getty Images)

Unlike Nick Saban, whom he worked under for five seasons, Golding is not the type to avoid the Landshark in the room. What’s going to happen two Saturdays from now is monumental — for Kiffin, for the school he left behind, for the SEC and for the never-ending soap opera of college football where what happens on the field is only a fraction of the intrigue. 

It’s the game that looms over Ole Miss’ entire season. Thanks to Kiffin’s eternal quest to dominate the zeitgeist and his unquenchable thirst to burn the program he left behind to the ground, it’s the night we’ve been talking about since Kiffin walked out on a playoff team and tried to take everything that wasn’t nailed down. 

And knowing what we know about human nature, Golding has not had it easy in these past several months. While everyone on the periphery of his ecosystem has been talking about Sept. 19 above all else, he has known that Louisville loomed as a real challenge that could send the Ole Miss season in an entirely different direction if it was not taken care of properly. 

“I could be naive, I guess, but I don’t think [the noise about LSU] had anything to do with the game,” Golding said. “We were not overlooking Louisville at all. It wasn’t like there were days [during fall camp] that we were using [to prepare] for other people. We knew we had a lot on our hands. We only get 12 opportunities at this.”

Though Golding was granted an extended honeymoon as a new coach — in part because he took over under difficult circumstances and led the Rebels to two playoff wins, in part because he simply isn’t Kiffin — there was always going to come a day when those feelings would be replaced by bottom-line comparisons. 

And if we are comparing their Week 1 exploits, it’s undeniable that LSU looked like a juggernaut and Ole Miss had enough issues that the outcome against Louisville was highly precarious. 

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Lane Kiffin’s LSU Tigers throttled Clemson on Saturday night. (Stephen Lew-Imagn Images)

You can probably chalk some of that up to typical season-opener sloppiness, along with some new personnel on the back end of the defense that gave up nine plays of 25 or more yards. And you can certainly assign much of the credit to Louisville for being a lively underdog that held up quite well physically in the trenches. Unlike Clemson, which is now an embarrassing shell of the program it used to be, Louisville was a real test that could serve Ole Miss well as it moves forward.

“I like that the bar is where it is right now because that’s a real football team and they’re going to have a good season,” Golding said. “That was a heavyweight fight and we got punched in the mouth a lot and we didn’t always respond the right way. It’s going to happen in the game. Are you going to pick yourself up or not? And I think we had a lot of guys that did that. But we’ve got to get a little tougher, and that starts with me.”

Logically, Golding is correct. Week 1 in college football is often a liar, and there’s tremendous value in beating a team like Louisville on a neutral field as you prepare for an even tougher heavyweight fight in two weeks. 

But emotionally, watching Ole Miss play like it did Monday against a team with lesser talent plants that seed of doubt for perhaps the first time since Kiffin left: Is this program really going to keep rolling the way it did? 

Golding may turn out to be a fantastic head coach, but his impeccable management of last year’s post-Kiffin playoff run is a different challenge than what he faces now that he’s fully in charge and reshaping everything in his own image. 

And it’s not just about losing Kiffin. When you lose a great coach, a brain drain follows out the door. That includes Charlie Weis, Jr., the outstanding offensive coordinator who stayed in place through the playoffs before going to LSU. 

Ole Miss may have some of the same stars on the field like Chambliss, running back Kewan Lacy and receiver Deuce Alexander, but it is a fundamentally different program. 

That might be hard for Ole Miss fans to wrap their minds around when Golding’s main job last December was to keep everything the same. It might be excruciating if Kiffin builds the kind of championship team at LSU that Week 1 suggests he might have built. 

As an institution, Ole Miss has invested a lot in this season. It was a tooth-and-nail fight for Golding to keep Chambliss and others that Kiffin wanted to take with him, and losing to Louisville would have been a disaster — even if playing in this kind of high-stakes, high-intensity game right out of the gate was likely the best thing that could have happened to them. 

Golding’s job as coach is to take the long view and build a sustainable program. But deep down, he surely understands there is no time to waste. 

“There’s flashes of an elite football team and there’s flashes of a bad football team,” Golding said. “There’s a lot to learn from this tape. That’s our job as coaches.”

Job One is done, but the Lane Train is coming — along with the chaos where Ole Miss feels most at home.