How Ole Miss football handles hype, expectations
HOOVER, Ala. — The next person who says something negative about his team at SEC Media Days will be the first.
The whole point of SEC Media Days is to hype a season that's still two months away. Fourteen head coaches and 28 players descend on a hotel in Alabama to talk about why this year is going to be the year. There's no point in being cynical or dismissive about it. That's what this whole thing is for.
But even by SEC Media Days standards, Ole Miss quarterback Matt Corral has some high praise for his team.
"This team, this specific team right now, is something that I've never experienced in my entire life of playing football," Corral said. "When I envisioned a team a year ago, I didn't know what this was. This is the definition of a football team. I think a lot of people aren't going to understand that until they really see us in action."
Corral talks about this team like he's the jaded lead in a romantic comedy finally experiencing love for the first time. You can't know what true love is until you feel it, and you can't know what truly being a part of a team is until you're a part of one.
But is that good? Does teamwork and camaraderie win games? That's not normally the hype you hear in the Hoover Hype Factory. You hear about position battles and impact freshmen and seniors who forwent the NFL to make a difference and get their degrees.
That's not what Corral is talking about. Not at all.
"This team is just different," Corral said. "We might not have the best players on paper. We might not have the flash and all that. But I guarantee you we're going to be the best team that plays together."
That's the Corral guarantee. It's not that Ole Miss is going to be the best team. Ole Miss is going to play the best as a team. There's a slight difference. It's the difference between being better than everyone else and being the best version of yourself.
Maybe that's all talk. Scratch that. Of course it's all talk. That's literally what SEC Media Days is. It's just a bunch of people talking.
But a bunch of people agree that there's a reason to be excited about Ole Miss in 2021. From the second Ole Miss beat Indiana in the Outback Bowl, the Rebels started to appear on way-tooearly top-25 lists for the fall. Corral has the eighth-best odds to win the Heisman Trophy according to the Bet MGM sportsbook. Corral and running back Jerrion Ealy have their names plastered all over preseason awards watch lists.
Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin has dealt with hype before. He's coached teams that were preseason No. 1 and parlayed that hype into winning national championships. And he's coached teams like the 2012 USC Trojans that started the year ranked preseason No. 1 and ended the year 7-6 by losing five of their last six games.
Years like that are why Kiffin now believes preseason attention doesn't matter. Not only because it can be wrong. But because it can turn into a self-defeating prophecy of sorts.
"I didn't think we handled (2012) very well because I think we kind of embraced that too much versus just making sure we were doing the work," Kiffin said.
Tuesday was Kiffin's first appearance at SEC Media Days in 12 years. He barely remembered the layout of the hotel from his 2009 appearance as head coach at Tennessee. He had to have his memory jogged on the time he showed up to the podium with his ALL-SEC ballot in hand to prove he voted Tim Tebow first-team all-conference.
Kiffin's growth and maturation is an unavoidable topic. So is his history with Tennessee. And his history with Alabama. And his larger-than-life persona he backs up with zingers at the expense of anyone who dares ask him how he lost weight.
In that sense, Kiffin is just like all the other hype around Ole Miss. He's fun to talk about. But the reality goes deeper than the fun. The reality points to a coach trying to overcome the image he cultivated in his younger years who now just wants to be known as a coach who wins.
He's not trying to be the best coach in America. He's trying to the best Kiffin he's ever been.
"It's been a long 12 years," Kiffin admits. "A lot of things have happened. But I think you're just very different with 12 years no matter what. I've had experiences of being head coaches and this is my third place since then, and then in between that being able to work with Nick Saban, arguably the greatest coach ever. I think I'm very different."
Contact Nick Suss at 601-408-2674 or nsuss@gannett.com. Follow @nicksuss on Twitter.