(Photo from Ole Miss Football on X)
- You don’t lose a guy of Jaxson Dart’s caliber and not feel it, but there’s a lot of excitement for Austin Simmons.
Jaxson Dart will hear his name called in the NFL Draft this week, possibly Thursday as a first-rounder on opening night.
When he does, Lane Kiffin will be two-for-two.
Kiffin, defying expectations, probably even his own, will start his sixth football season as Ole Miss coach this August.
After the Egg Bowl, he’ll have matched David Cutcliffe for the second-longest tenure of an Ole Miss coach in the post-John Vaught Era.
Only Billy Brewer’s turbulent 11 years are a longer stint in the same window.
Cutcliffe was known as a quarterback whisperer. He successfully recruited Eli Manning and coached him with the Rebels before Manning spent 16 years with the Giants.
But Kiffin is about to produce a quarterback draft pick for the second time.
The offensive prowess that made Kiffin attractive to Ole Miss AD Keith Carter showed in the turnaround of Matt Corral’s college career.
A year before Kiffin arrived, Corral in 2019 had lost the starting job to John Rhys Plumlee, a faster, more gifted runner.
Corral was a different player from Day 1 under Kiffin, when he threw for 395 yards and three touchdowns in a 51-35 loss to No. 5 Florida in the season opener.
With Corral at the wheel Ole Miss would play in the Outback and Sugar Bowls, showing great leadership and command of the offense.
He was drafted by Carolina in the third round in the spring of 2022.
Corral and Dart are the only two starting quarterbacks Kiffin has had at Ole Miss.
Dart greatly improved his stock through the off-season with his combine performance and interviews with various teams.
Dart developed under Kiffin. He led the nation in passing efficiency and ranked third in passing yards last year.
His increased confidence led to better decisions.
He threw 11 interceptions as a sophomore in 2022 compared to just 11 over the next two seasons.
Dart threw 398 passes in 2024 and only six interceptions. Sadly for him and the Rebels, two of those came in the late minutes at Florida last November as Ole Miss slipped from playoff contention.
Still, Dart’s two-season body of work and other intangibles helped him climb in draft projections.
The question for Dart is not whether the Kaysville, Utah native, who began his career at USC, will be drafted, but whether he’ll continue to develop and eventually stick as an NFL starter.
Corral, with some bad injury luck, did not. In fact, the last Ole Miss quarterback to stick was Eli Manning. And the last before Eli, his father Archie.
Dart has the potential to be next. Kiffin is preparing for life after.
You don’t lose a guy of Dart’s caliber and not feel it, but there’s a lot of excitement for Austin Simmons, a 6-foot-4, 215-pound third-year sophomore.
Simmons, who stepped on a campus as a two-sport player before giving up baseball to focus on football, hasn’t seen a lot of meaningful game reps.
But regardless of what happens in 2025, he carved a place for himself in Ole Miss lore when he stepped in for an injured Dart and led a touchdown drive in one of the biggest wins in school history.
When Dart was briefly out of commission against No. 3 Georgia, Simmons came off the bench cold and went 5-for-6 for 64 yards.
He had a 20-yard completion to Cayden Lee, and no pass went for fewer than 10 yards.
The touchdown came on a 9-yard run by another seldom-used player, Ulysses Bentley.
Kiffin has expressed confidence in Simmons. If he didn’t have it, he’d have been much more active among transfer quarterbacks, perhaps even surveying the landscape on former Tennessee starter Nico Iamaleava.
Instead, Kiffin added a Division II transfer, Trinidad Chambliss from Ferris State, after an injury to A.J. Maddox, a redshirt freshman who was competing to back up Simmons.
Pro Football Focus gave Simmons a graded of 82.5 on its 100-point scale for 2024. That’s a high mark for a guy who hasn’t played very much.
It’s hard to get too excited about young potential with multiple seasons of eligibility since the modern era of college football is a year-to-year proposition.
But maybe Simmons, who seems to have an easy-going personality, sees something in Kiffin’s two-for-two.
Maybe the two of them can team up and in three years make Kiffin three-for-three.
