By GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
No. 7 LSU is ranked slightly higher than No. 8 Ole Miss and is a slight, 2.5-point favorite.
And Ole Miss (2-0) will be at home in Oxford, Mississippi, when the Rebels host LSU (2-0) on Saturday at 6:30 p.m. on ABC.
But the onus is on Ole Miss and its first-year head coach Pete Golding, says LSU head coach Lane Kiffin, who left Ole Miss after the regular season last year to be the Tigers’ head coach. Golding, whom Kiffin hired after the 2023 season to be his defensive coordinator at Ole Miss, replaced Kiffin after the regular season last year with the Rebels.
“I told the players today that, ‘Man, like, you don’t have anything to worry about as far as the attention on you all week and everything. There’s just going to be so much attention, hatred, everything on me. Really, the pressure’s on them,'” Kiffin said at his weekly press conference on Monday.
“LSU only won seven games last year. They won 13,” Kiffin continued. “They return two Heisman candidates. How often does that ever happen in the same backfield?”
Kiffin is talking about two players he recruited to and developed at Ole Miss – quarterback Trinidad Chambliss and running back Kewan Lacy, who led Kiffin’s offense at Ole Miss to an 11-1 regular season with a 7-1 mark in the Southeastern Conference to put the Rebels in the College Football Playoff. Ole Miss finished 13-2 and in the CFP semifinals.
LSU finished 7-6 (3-5 SEC) last season with a loss in the third-tier Texas Bowl.
“You just get to go play. The pressure’s not on you,” Kiffin said he told his Tigers.
Kiffin was at USC as an assistant coach when the Trojans had two Heisman Trophy candidates in quarterback Matt Leinart and running back Reggie Bush. Leinart won it in 2004 with Bush fifth, and Bush won it in 2005 with Leinart third.
“We had it one time with Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush,” Kiffin said. “And we had the longest winning streak in the country.”
USC had a 34-0 run from 2003-05 (9-0 in 2003, 13-0 in 2004, 12-0 in 2005) with Leinart and Bush for the No. 1 winning streak in the nation at the time, including national championships in 2003 and ’04, before losing the national championship game to Texas to conclude the 2005 season.
Ole Miss currently has the third longest home winning streak in FBS college football at 13-0, including 11 by Kiffin.
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