Will the Ole Miss grind include a seamless Simmons transition or reliance on the run game?

• Head Coach Lane Kiffin said last week that the team “needs to really have a blue-collar mindset to outwork people and to grind people out in games.”

Football is back, I say, though some may disagree.

Some need to see that first kick spinning end over end, that first touchdown or, for the less fortunate, that first fumble.

I mark the change of seasons differently. When the cliches ramp up, I know we’re there.

So, when Lane Kiffin says his blue-collar Ole Miss team needs to “grind” I know football is back.

Impact players and their coaches are often before cameras and mics and, in fairness to those guys, the questions are often similar. From their perspective, a question can be suspect at best, maybe meaningless.

But they soldier on, and “grind” is a go-to response. It can be a noun or verb, multi-functional, as Ole Miss wide receiver Caleb Odom could be this season, so it’s always at the ready.

Odom, 6-foot-5, 215 pounds, is in his first season after transferring from Alabama. He’s a new name in a season of new names for the Rebels who are transitioning to life without quarterback Jaxson Dart, a first round pick of the Giants a few months ago.

Dart began his college career at Southern Cal. As the Rebels’ quarterback from 2022‑2024, the school record books became a personal memoir. Career records for wins, passing efficiency, passing yards, total offense, quarterback rushing yards and 300-yard passing games all belonged to him.

Last year he led the nation in total offense and ranked in the top 10 in passing efficiency, passing yards, yards per completion and yards per game.

It’s a coin toss as to whether the Rebels’ chief concern is the loss of Dart or the loss of immense talent from last year’s defensive line.

A smooth Simmons transition?

For Austin Simmons, expectations, his two years in the program and his 15 minutes of fame as he led that touchdown drive against Georgia when Dart was briefly sidelined all point toward a smooth transition. That’s a reasonable hope.

It was Kiffin last week who said, “…this team needs to really have a blue-collar mindset to outwork people and to grind people out in games.”

That could be coachspeak or it could be recognition that Dart, the first Ole Miss quarterback since Eli Manning to be recognized as first team All-SEC by league coaches, was elite at the game’s most important position.

Hopefully for the Rebels Simmons to QB1 will be smooth, but there will be transition nevertheless. A lot will become clearer in Week 2 at Kentucky, his first road start.

Could Kiffin’s “grind” comment, combined with his cautious response to a schematic question involving Simmons, signal more reliance on the ground game?

Ole Miss ranked No. 44 in rushing last season, amid injuries, questionable management of Ulysses Bentley and a significant contribution from Dart. The coach says he doesn’t expect Simmons to be a big part of the run game.

Unless its a smokescreen, grind doesn’t sound like Kiffin is counting on replication of Dart’s impeccable deep-ball accuracy.

Ole Miss logged 93 plays of 20-plus yards last year, third in America. The Rebels averaged 7.33 yards per play, ranking second.

Grind or no grind there are high expectations in the program. SEC media took a “wait-and-see” approach, placing the Rebels’ seventh in their preseason poll when they all got together in Atlanta.

It would take a great effort to duplicate the numbers on offense, but Kiffin believes he has the receiver group to do it if Simmons comes along.

“I hope I’m not wrong. That very well could be the strength of our team,” he said.

That’s encouraging in a year of new names. Playmakers will emerge.

One of them could be Odom, who caught the attention of beat writers in the first days by moving from wide receiver to tight end in the absence of injured Arkansas transfer Luke Hasz.

A rebuilding offensive line is a question mark, but Kiffin has shown he can win with an inherited quarterback who had lost his starting job and with his own transfer quarterback that he recruited.

He’s shown an eye for talent, and he’s led Ole Miss football to its most consistent success in decades.

He arrived at an interesting coaching time in Mississippi with Mike Leach taking over at Ole Miss and Deion Sanders at Jackson State.

Hanging around

Many said Kiffin would be the first one gone. Now he’s beginning his sixth season. When it’s complete he’ll tie David Cutcliffe for the second-longest tenure of an Ole Miss coach since John Vaught. Only Billy’s Brewer’s time has been longer.

It’s quite common these days to hear Kiffin praise the Oxford community for what it has meant to him as he’s lost both parents in roughly a year’s time from last summer to this summer.

His name is constantly attached to other jobs, but Kiffin is still at Ole Miss. Is the career wanderer settling in?

New names aside, Kiffin doesn’t expect to skip a beat this fall.

“These players have been talked to a lot about that, what we’ve been able to achieve, the level we’ve been able to play at and expect to play at. The three winningest programs since Covid in the SEC, including the new programs, are Georgia, Alabama and Ole Miss. That’s our standard and how we expect to play.”