And if they do, I'll congratulate them and say I was wrong. But the burden of proof is on them.muddybrazos said:Ole miss may very well make it to the SEC champ game this year but they will have to beat UGA,OU and LSU among others. NIght game in Baton Rouge will be pretty tough.bear2be2 said:The difference is we (non-UT Big 12 fans) made Texas go win a conference championship and make a playoff before we started buying into the "Texas is back" hype. They had a burden of proof to reach and did, so they've earned more benefit of doubt this season. Ole Miss has literally never earned that benefit of doubt.Chuckroast said:bear2be2 said:Your last sentence is why history matters. Texas' program ceiling is so much higher than Ole Miss' it's not funny. When you ignore Ole Miss' history, you start to fool yourself into believing they're something they've never been and are not currently.Chuckroast said:I'm not talking about the past. While they've been good enough to be top 10 a few years . . . definitely not good enough to emerge out of the SEC for a chance at a championship.bear2be2 said:The fact that Ole Miss has never even sniffed one of those championships should tell you something. They've never even played for one -- even in the rare years they beat Alabama.Chuckroast said:When 5 different SEC teams have been good enough to win a championship in the last 20 years, many good SEC programs are going to have 2-3 losses per year at a minimum. The league beats up on itself. Ole Miss has been average to really good but never elite on the scale of Bama, Georgia, or LSU. Neither has any other team in the country.bear2be2 said:
I think it's funny that TCU won 13 games (two more than Ole Miss has ever won) and reached the national title game in 2022, and we still have people here who would say that wasn't really a good team.
And now we have Ole Miss and Missouri, who have four 10-win seasons between them in the last decade, and we're supposed to bow down and kiss the ring because SEC! SEC!
If you want an example of how and why college football is broken, that's it in a nutshell. We have people who are wrong literally all the time making guarantees about who would beat who in games that should be but are never played. And the ones that aren't played don't have any impact whatsoever on national perception.
I believe this year's Ole Miss team is their best. They will still likely have a couple of losses, but there's nothing wrong with speculating how they might do in another conference.
That program isn't what you guys are trying to sell them as. And they've played absolutely no one this year. We'll see how good they are in SEC play. Until then, they have the same burden of proof that every other non-SEC team in America has.
They apparently did really well in the portal this last offseason. With their portal success and key ingredients coming back from last year's 11-2 team, they could be a playoff contender.
They had a similar trajectory to Texas over the last 20 years, and Texas finally emerged last year.
On the rare occasions they get their **** together, Texas is a legitimate national title contender. They've proved it under three different coaches in my lifetime. Ole Miss is at the pinnacle of its existence and still can't even get into an SEC championship game, much less win one.
This could well be their best team in history. But the burden of proof is on them to display that. Until they do, they're still Ole Miss.
No question, they have to prove it, and they certainly don't have the same tradition as Texas. But with all of its tradition, Texas rarely even won its own conference. Whoever won the big 12 was guaranteed a beat down at the national level … often at the hands of whichever SEC team made the playoffs. But since Vince Young left, I think Ole Miss has been consistently better than Texas until last year.