Ole Miss under Lane Kiffin embodies college football's new era. Is a Playoff bid next?

Editor’s note: This article is part of the College Football Playoff Prospectus, previewing and predicting the top CFP contenders and Power 4 conferences for the upcoming season.

Lane Kiffin and Nick Saban have had an interesting relationship, whether working together or as opponents: Kiffin the needler, Saban the annoyed authority figure. Now that Saban has traded in his coaching job to be an ESPN analyst, he sidled up to Kiffin at SEC media days with some advice about his Ole Miss team.

“This is a rat poison type situation here,” Saban told Kiffin.

Kiffin was already well aware. And he has been embracing it, posting rat poison emoji on social media and letting the words — first popularized by Saban to describe the danger of too much praise for one of his Alabama team — flow around his Ole Miss team.

“Rat poison has been one that’s gone around our facility,” quarterback Jaxson Dart said.

These are heady times at Ole Miss, which is starting its most anticipated season in a long time. Ole Miss has a chance to be a symbol of everything major about the new era: NIL, the transfer portal and the expanded College Football Playoff. And the Rebels have one of the most colorful coaches in the sport. This is arguably the most intriguing team in this most intriguing of football seasons.

It’s easy to wonder, of course, whether this is just setting up the Rebels for the fall. Is a roster made up of so many transfers too much of a risk? Can Kiffin be trusted? Is too much being made of a team that won 10 games last year but, in its two biggest games, face-planted in the second half against Alabama and was blown out at Georgia?

Lane Kiffin’s Ole Miss Rebels have 29 wins the past three seasons, their most since 1960-62. (Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)

For the optimistic rebuttal, we go to … Saban.

After stopping Kiffin in the hallway to warn about the rat poison, Saban appeared on the SEC Network to appraise Ole Miss. His assessment is very much worth noting, considering how well Saban knows the Rebels but considering the importance Saban put on the line of scrimmage during his coaching career.

“I think this is the first time Ole Miss can really match up up front,” Saban said. “It’s always been their issue. They lost to Georgia, they lost to us because they can’t match up up front. They can this year. They’re going to look more like an SEC team.”

Some of the data for what Saban was talking about:

• Ole Miss’ rush defense hasn’t ranked in the top half of the SEC since Kiffin took over. It was ninth last year, and against Georgia, it was gashed for 300 yards and 8.6 yards per carry. (Georgia struggled to run the ball against Alabama a few weeks later.)

• While Ole Miss’ rush offense has been better — between fifth and ninth during Kiffin’s tenure — much of that can be attributed to going outside the tackles and up-tempo. The style can get shut down at the worst times, as it was by Alabama, which limited Ole Miss to 1.93 yards per rush last year.

• Pass protection and a lack of pass rush contributed to the two losses last year. Dart didn’t have a touchdown pass in either game. Ole Miss’ defense had four sacks against Alabama to help keep that game close for a while but had zero against Georgia, letting Carson Beck sit back and enjoy his day.

That Georgia game was consequential because it brought home to Kiffin that he needed to get better players. He said so after the game, saying it wasn’t a shot at his current players, just that it was clear a talent gap existed between Ole Miss and the top of the league, and that gap needed to be bridged immediately.

The Rebels did just that:

• The defensive front added two big names: edge rusher Princely Umanmielen from Florida and defensive tackle Walter Nolen from Texas A&M. And linebacker Chris Paul Jr., who was Arkansas’ second-leading tackler, was added.

• The offensive line, which returned three starters, added Nate Kalepo, who started every game last year for Washington.

• Juice Wells from South Carolina joined an already talented receiving corps. Dae’Quan Wright from Virginia Tech will team with tight end Caden Prieskorn.

There were others as Ole Miss got the nation’s No. 1 portal class, according to 247Sports. The Rebels did lose tailback Quinshon Judkins, who transferred to Ohio State, and that’s significant. But the hope is the improvement along the lines more than makes up for that.

“That’s something that is a topic in our locker room. We have a lot of guys that pass the eye test, for sure,” Dart said. “You just see it from the O-line and the defensive line, the sheer size we have this year. And I think it’s going to contribute a ton, especially down the road late in the season.”

Will a portal team lack the continuity and chemistry needed to win, especially against teams like Georgia, which are built more on the traditional model? Perhaps, but this new era doesn’t have enough data to make firm conclusions yet.

But a couple of data points from last year can be pointed to in Ole Miss’ favor: Florida State had a big portal presence last year and went 13-0, before its blowout loss to Georgia in the Orange Bowl. And Ole Miss had plenty of transfers last year: receiver Tre Harris, Prieskorn and 21 other new transfers, Dart himself a transfer the year before. And that team jelled enough to go 11-2.

And while it didn’t get as much attention as the portal additions, Harris and fellow receiver Jordan Watkins elected to come back. Dart, Prieskorn and other core members of the team also returned.

“I do think it’s a good mixture,” Kiffin said. “There’s a lot of good portal players. But there’a lot of players coming back, which wasn’t the situation two years ago.”

Ultimately, Kiffin added, the answer to being a championship-level program isn’t to always have the best portal classes. That will be a test for the program, whether it held on to enough younger players who can develop behind the established players, not depending on the portal.

But the offseason spending spree was a conscious one for Ole Miss: It knows it won’t always have this opportunity. The Rebels have 29 wins the past three seasons, their most in three years since 1960-62. Rather than coast on those laurels, Kiffin and his administration saw the expanded Playoff field and realized they had a chance to do something special.

So they went for it. And now we’ll find out whether it worked.

The coach

Kiffin mostly has turned the narrative on his career. He used to be a polarizing figure who fled Tennessee, was fired on the airport tarmac by USC and who Saban got so sick of he was pushed out in the middle of the Playoff. Now Kiffin is the program builder at Florida Atlantic and Ole Miss and a coach respected by his peers, as evidenced by the amount who spent their time at SEC media days offering condolences for the passing of his father, Monte.

This season offers Lane Kiffin a chance to complete the climb into the upper tier of college coaches. Making the Playoff at Ole Miss would say a lot, and winning games in it would say more.

The expectations bring risk. Falling short of them will remind critics of what they don’t like about Kiffin, whether it’s his personality or his coaching.

This is a big season, it appears, for the long-term arc of Kiffin’s career.

The QB

Dart, in a way, is the perfect quarterback for a portal-dominated team: He was also a transfer but not an immediate one. Even in this age of transfer quarterbacks, nobody has won a national title with one who had arrived within the previous year.

Dart began his career at USC, starting three games as a true freshman, then left when Lincoln Riley was hired and it was clear Riley was taking Caleb Williams with him. But Dart still had to fight to earn and keep the job at Ole Miss, where as late as last year Oklahoma State transfer Spencer Sanders was brought in to compete for the job.

Now Dart is in the Heisman Trophy mix after passing for 3,364 yards and rushing for 389 yards with eight touchdowns last season. He has proven receivers and tight ends. The question now isn’t whether he’ll put up big numbers, but if he can lead his team to big wins and become one of the nation’s upper-tier quarterbacks.

Impact players

Tre Harris, WR: Six SEC receivers had at least 900 yards last year. Four of them were NFL first-round picks, the other two are Harris and Missouri’s Luther Burden.

Walter Nolen, DT: He’s the headline transfer in the strong transfer class and the main reason Saban and others believe Ole Miss has the line play to win big now.

Princely Umanmielen, Edge: He combined for 11.5 sacks, 21 tackles for loss and 78 tackles overall at Florida the past two years.

Ulysses Bentley IV, RB: He was the second-team running back but now steps into the starting role. He had 540 rushing yards and 87 receiving yards last year.

Jared Ivey, DE: Another former transfer — he started his career at Georgia Tech — Ivey had nine sacks and 83 tackles the past two seasons, was the Peach Bowl defensive MVP last year and is a preseason second-team All-SEC pick.

Scouting report

The Rebels are ranked in the top 10 for a reason. Opposing teams see a talented group.

Offensively, the Rebels should be tough to deal with.

“I’m high on Dart,” an opposing SEC scouting director said. “I think he’s an NFL talent that can hurt you both ways.”

The receiving duo of Harris and Wells will be “one of the best receiver duos in America,” the scouting director said. He said Harris is someone who can hurt teams downfield because of his size and strength.

Although Ole Miss lost Judkins to the portal, the scouting director still believes the Rebels have solid talent at running back. At tight end, Prieskorn could potentially be “one of the top five or six” tight ends in the league, he said.

On defense, the front is the one to watch, but it’s a mixed bag across the three units.

“Their four down guys will get legitimate NFL looks, especially with Princely being a top-50-caliber (draft) prospect, but the depth as a whole is mostly average,” the scouting director said. “The linebacker group does not excite me right now. The secondary has SEC experience with different skill sets that can take the ball away and should pair well with their ability to get after the passer.”

Why Ole Miss will make the Playoff

Not to belabor the point, but the SEC is won in the trenches, and the combination of Nolen, Umanmielen and Ivey will be hard for teams to manage. As Ivey said: “You’ll see some pictures of us this year really moving the offensive line back in unison.”

The defense should be helped being in the second year with Pete Golding.

“I think it’ll clean up a lot of the mental errors that we had, just another year of familiarity with the defense,” Ivey said. “Now you can really open things up, get crafty, guys can take on more and handle that.”

The offense has all the weapons to gain a lot of yards through the air, with Dart’s scrambling ability being a problem for defenses. The departure of Judkins may hurt the running game but can be overcome by Kiffin’s play-calling and an improved offensive line.

Biggest hurdle to making CFP

The pass defense wasn’t great last year and still looks gettable. This is another area the Rebels targeted in the portal, with three transfers likely to start: cornerbacks Trey Amos (who started one game at Alabama last year) and Isaiah Hamilton (Houston’s fourth-leading tackler last year) and nickel back Brandon Turnage (six starts in three years at Tennessee).

The safeties are returning seniors, Trey Washington and John Saunders Jr. They were part of a unit that had good moments last year but allowed five opponents to connect on at least 70 percent of their passes.

Path to the Playoff

Based on preseason expectations, this is favorable: Only three opponents are ranked in the top 20, with two of those games in Oxford, and none of those games are back-to-back.

But it’s not totally spread out. A trip to LSU is preceded by a trip to South Carolina — and also a home game against Kentucky that may not be easy. The showdown with Georgia is between road trips to Arkansas and Florida, which right now have coaches on the hot seat, but things may look different in November.

Austin Mock’s projection

This is the most hyped Ole Miss team in a long time, and it’s easy to see why. Our model has the Rebels as a top-five offense and they were huge transfer portal winners this offseason. They have only a 7 percent chance to win the SEC but a 48 percent chance to make the College Football Playoff.

— The Athletic’s Sam Khan Jr. contributed to this report.

The Playoff Prospectus series is part of a partnership with Allstate. The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.

(Top photo of Jaxson Dart: Alex Slitz / Getty Images)