Lane Kiffin still haunted by last year's loss to Kentucky: 'Horrible on all fronts'

Kentucky’s win over Ole Miss last season was one of the few highlights of a rough year. Unfortunately, the upset of the top ten Rebels didn’t ultimately matter for the Cats, who would go on to win only one more game that season, against Murray State. The same cannot be said for Ole Miss, which finished the regular season 9-3 and missed the College Football Playoffs, due in large part to the loss to Kentucky.

On Sunday, Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin admitted that the loss to Kentucky haunted him all season. Not only did Mark Stoops take a page out of Kiffin’s playbook, uncharacteristically going for it on 4th and 7 late in the game, a gamble that paid off with a 63-yard bomb from Brock Vandagriff to Barion Brown to set up the winning touchdown, but the Rebels made plenty of mistakes, missing a 48-yard field goal with 48 seconds to go that would have tied the game.

“Yeah, it was horrible,” Kiffin said during his Zoom with local reporters. “I mean, it was horrible on all fronts because it was such a bizarre game that, and in football, everything can go different ways, but it was like all these plays. …It’s just so many ways that game could have went our way and so many things went their way.

“It was really hard to deal with because I just didn’t think we played that well, either, and still had the ball ahead later in the game. Then drive down, and then the missed field goal was just, it all sucked.”

After the game, Kiffin gave Stoops credit for his 4th down call, quipping that it was “not anything [Stoops has] probably ever done in his life.” When asked in Monday’s press conference, Stoops confirmed that Kiffin gave him grief for the gamble during the offseason, but scoffed when asked if he believes Kiffin will try to retaliate by running up the score in Saturday’s rematch in Lexington.

“Ole Miss tries to score every time they touch the ball, no matter who they’re playing. That’s not going to change with Lane, you know what I mean? So it’s your job to stop them.”

Ole Miss is a two-score favorite in Saturday’s game, but history tells us it could be close. Each of the past four meetings between Kentucky and Ole Miss has been decided by three points or less, with the 2020 game going to overtime. Clearly, the Rebels will be out for revenge, Kiffin eager to prove that last year’s loss to Stoops and Kentucky was a fluke. The stakes are even higher on Kentucky’s sideline, where the Cats will be looking to break an ugly SEC home game losing streak. Since beating LSU in 2021, Kentucky is just 2-11 against SEC teams at Kroger Field, losing the last seven. Ole Miss comes into the game after thumping Georgia State 63-7, while Kentucky is coming off a 24-16 win over Toledo.

On Monday, Stoops insisted he’s only thinking about the game at hand, not the losing streak, but it will undoubtedly be on fans’ minds.

“Not to diminish any of that, but I don’t even think about that,” Stoops said in his press conference. “It’s what do we have to do this week? I think we all understand that the focus of that the focus is on this week. This game.”

Saturday should be a great atmosphere at Kroger Field; it’s not quite a sellout, but it’s close. The weather forecast looks absolutely perfect, and Kentucky has dubbed this a Blue-White Game, asking fans to wear either blue or white depending on which side of the stadium they’re sitting. The last two games in the series kicked off at 11 a.m. CT/Noon ET in Oxford, but this one starts at 3:30 p.m. ET on ABC. Kentucky caught Ole Miss off guard last season; I very much doubt that will happen this go around.


”We spent a lot of time in the offseason on these guys and hopefully, that’ll help,” Kiffin said.