Stakes are high as Kiffin, Rebels prepare for Death Valley

• If rivalries are your thing this week’s game should get your insides stirring.

Rivalries are more fun when the games have meaning beyond overused cliches like “bragging rights.”

Those are for fans with long memories of big wins and painful losses.

Players come from all over the country, and when a rivalry has to be explained it loses impact among the participants. Plus, rosters in the modern era turn over way too quickly for players to get caught up in regional biases.

But for generations, rivalries have been part of the glamour of college football, and the Ole Miss-LSU series has been among the best in the SEC.

This is what I was told as a middle schooler and high school student growing up in Denham Springs, not far from LSU.

It’s what I’ve learned as a Mississippi resident for the last 35 years.

But in a lot of those years things looked kind of murky from a rivalry standpoint.

In one of his last interviews John Vaught talked about the rivalry with Daily Journal sports editor Gene Phelps and myself when we visited his home in the summer of 2003.

“I don’t mind talking about LSU,” Vaught said. “They made me famous.”

One of the most recalled games in the series was an LSU victory on the strength of Billy Cannon’s punt return on Halloween night in Baton Rouge in 1959.

A few weeks later Ole Miss won a Sugar Bowl rematch 21-0.

“People don’t want to talk about that game,” Vaught said.

Vaught would win many more games against the Tigers, but after a 24-22 Rebels win in Jackson in 1971, the first season of Vaught’s successor, Billy Kinard, the Rebels went 1-9-1 in the next 11 games. Ole Miss won 27-24 in its first season under Billy Brewer in 1983. Brewer went 4-7 against LSU.

LSU won often during the football awakening of my youth, and more than once the margin was quite one-sided.

Other Ole Miss coaches have gotten in their licks through the years, but for many of those seasons Ole Miss wasn’t competing on the national scale or in the upper tier of the SEC like it is now.

If you talked about rivalries with LSU fans during that time you were likely to hear Auburn for a stretch then Alabama as the Crimson Tide thrived under former LSU coach Nick Saban.

LSU hasn’t had an in-state rival since the dwindling of Tulane’s program. Those two haven’t played since 2009, haven’t played regularly since the early 1990s, and LSU has won the last 18.

If rivalries are your thing this week’s game should get your insides stirring.

The NCAA has playoffs now, something unheard of when Cannon juked Jake Gibbs and reached the end zone. Twelve teams make it, and Ole Miss and LSU are contenders, each with just one loss right now. Ole Miss comes in ranked No. 9 in The AP Top 25 after a 27-3 win at South Carolina, LSU at No. 13 after an open date. The Tigers beat South Alabama 42-10 two weeks ago. They pulled away from UCLA in the heat of a Tiger Stadium day game before that.

This rivalry game matters.

Controlling a game in a road stadium

It will be the night game in Tiger Stadium environment with which Ole Miss fans are familiar, but having just come from a raucous road venue will be a plus. South Carolina fans, with teams far worse than the one the Rebels just dominated, fill the house and engage.

The Rebels were able to have early success and establish a flow at Williams-Brice Stadium.

Part of that was because they stuffed the Gamecocks on a fake punt on fourth-and-2 on their end of the field early in the first quarter.

South Carolina coach Shane Beamer told his players that call was “on him,” and ESPN play-by-play voice repeatedly went back to Beamer’s conversation and used the word “mistake” to describe Beamer’s decision.

I looked at it more as aggressive play-calling than a mistake. He’d have looked like a genius had it worked.

In some ways the LSU game will be a matchup of strength against strength. Ole Miss leads the SEC and ranks third nationally with four sacks a game.

The LSU offensive line is considered by some folks down there to be the Tigers’ best ever. Tackles Will Campbell on the left and Emery Jones on the right are projected first-round picks.

LSU leads the SEC and ranks fourth in sack allowed, giving up less than a half sack per game.

Pressure against South Carolina quarterback LaNorris Sellers was a big part of Saturday’s success for Ole Miss.

Even if he had been protected, Norris isn’t close to the accuracy the Rebels will face in LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier.

The Rebels also contained Sellers, a runner, with a spy to follow his movements. Nussmeier won’t be interested in moving, and his OL makes sure he doesn’t have to move much.

This week’s sliding scale

There’s a sliding scale here. LSU has not been as disruptive defensively as South Carolina, which spends a lot of time in opponents’ backfields.

The Tigers are No. 13 in the SEC in scoring defense, 14^th in yards per game allowed and 15^th in pass defense efficiency.

The numbers suggest the Rebels will have opportunities.

Lane Kiffin is one of those Ole Miss coaches who’s gotten in his licks against LSU, winning in 2021 and 2023 in Oxford.

He very nearly led the Rebels to a win in Baton Rouge in 2020, his debut season, but a late turnover was costly, and the Tigers won 53-48.

Kiffin’s last trip to LSU was pretty big too. The Rebels were 7-0 when they lost 45-20 after leading 17-3 in the second quarter.

Maybe Kiffin and the Rebels can turn the tables Saturday night.

If so, the folks who remember rivalries will remember this game for a long time.