Lane Kiffin blasts SEC's annual opponents selection for Ole Miss

Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin isn’t a huge fan of his team’s three annual opponents revealed by the SEC on Tuesday night. Or, rather, he’s not happy with one of them.

Kiffin was asked about the new setup Wednesday on an SEC teleconference call and he unexpectedly went off on one of the selections. He began:

“Yeah, Oklahoma is really disappointing,” Kiffin said. “We don’t have anything in common with them or our fans, so that doesn’t make any sense at all. And so that’s unfortunate with so many great teams that we’ve played for a long time here, especially from our SEC West years. So that’s unfortunate.”

Ole Miss and Oklahoma have played only twice in school history, with one of the meetings coming last year following further league expansion. Ole Miss has won both contests, with the other a 1999 Independence Bowl game.

Bottom line: Kiffin wasn’t big on the selection of Oklahoma as a third team. He thought there were better options for the program.

“It is what it is,” he said. “It’s great to… obviously the Egg Bowl is staying, so they only had two choices. So the LSU makes sense, and that’s great. The other one makes no sense.”

The good news is that with the SEC adopting a 3-6 model, where teams play three annual opponents across a four-year period and then rotate through six other teams, there won’t be large gaps where programs don’t play each other.

Every SEC team will play every other SEC team home-and-away within a four-year cycle. Kiffin just would have preferred to preserve another more historic game for the Rebels.

You can view Ole Miss’ 2026 and 2027 schedules below. Dates for the games are expected to be announced later this winter.

Ole Miss 2026 SEC Schedule
LSU
Mississippi State
at Oklahoma
Auburn
Georgia
Missouri
at Florida
at Vanderbilt
at Texas

Ole Miss 2027 SEC Schedule
at LSU
at Mississippi State
Oklahoma
Alabama
Kentucky
South Carolina
at Arkansas
at Tennessee
at Texas A&M