Ole Miss Rebels football
The Ole Miss Rebels football program represents the University of Mississippi, also known as "Ole Miss". The Rebels compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) as members of the Southeastern Conference (SEC). The Rebels play their home games at Vaught–Hemingway Stadium on the university's campus in Oxford, Mississippi.
Ole Miss Rebels football
1893; 131 years ago
Lane Kiffin
4th season, 34–15 (.694)
Vaught–Hemingway Stadium
(capacity: 64,038)
Jerry Hollingsworth Field
1915
Natural grass
Independent (1893–1898)
Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association (1899–1921)
Southern Conference (1922–1932)
675–547–35 (.551)
25–15 (.625)
1 (2003)
13
Cardinal red and navy blue[1]
Forward Rebels
Pride of the South
Founded in 1893 as the state's first football team, Ole Miss has won six Southeastern Conference titles, in 1947, 1954, 1955, 1960, 1962, and 1963. The team has been co-national champion once, with Minnesota in 1960 (the only time that Ole Miss has been acknowledged as national champion by the NCAA).[2] Ole Miss, however, has never finished a season No. 1 in the AP or Coaches' Poll.[3][4] With a record of 24–14, Ole Miss has the second-highest post-season winning percentage of schools with 30 or more bowl appearances.
As of 2023, the team's head coach is Lane Kiffin.[5]
Ole Miss has been affiliated with the following conferences.[36]: 179
Championships[edit]
National championships[edit]
Ole Miss has been selected as national champion three times by NCAA-designated major selectors in 1959, 1960 and 1962.[37][38][39][40] But the two major wire-service polls of the time (AP Poll and Coaches' Poll), named Syracuse, Minnesota, and Southern California as the national champions in those years, respectively.[41][7]
In 1960, the final Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI) polls placed the Rebels second and third, respectively, behind the national champion Minnesota Golden Gophers. Students made "AP" and "UPI" dummies, hung them from the Union Building, and burned them while chanting, "We're No. 1, to hell with AP and UPI."[42] The Gophers, however, subsequently lost the Rose Bowl to Washington, and Ole Miss defeated Rice, 14–6, in the Sugar Bowl, leading the Football Writers Association of America (FWAA) to vote Mississippi as national champions and present them with the Grantland Rice Award.[43][44]
Confederate symbols[edit]
The team has long associated itself with the Confederacy. Since 1936,[66] the team has gone by the name Rebels, a nickname for the secessionist military force that fought against the United States during the American Civil War.
In 1936, the team introduced a mascot, Colonel Reb, a cartoonish, older-aged gentleman in plantation-owner's garb whose name alludes to service in the Confederate States Army; in 1979, the team would add a student costumed as Colonel Reb to the cheerleading squad. In the 1940s, students began waving the Confederate battle flag in the football stands; the team followed suit.[67] The marching band began playing "Dixie" around 1948,[68] according to David Sansing, Ole Miss professor emeritus of history and author of the sesquicentennial history of the university. "I think it really was adopted around the combination of the [university's] centennial and the Dixiecrat movement in the South," Sansing said. "1948 was the centennial celebration, and that's when Ole Miss was cloaked and covered with all the memorabilia of the Confederacy."[69]
Though the team is still called the Rebels, its embrace of Confederate symbols began to change in 1983, two decades after the school was integrated at bayonet point. That September, John Hawkins, a Black cheerleader for Ole Miss, refused to carry the battle flag onto the home stadium's football field, as was long custom.[67] To quell the outcry that followed, school Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Jr. banned the official use of the flag but said students could continue to wave it.[70]
In 1997, the university banned flag poles at games, an attempt to stop the waving of Confederate flags without directly confronting fans who wanted to do so.[71] The step was taken after head coach Tommy Tuberville complained that the flag-waving had hampered his attempts to recruit top-notch Black athletes.[71] Coaches before Tuberville also expressed concerns about the difficulty of recruiting black athletes.
In 2003, the school ended the use of the costumed Colonel Reb mascot at athletic events,[72] though it would sell official Colonel Reb merchandise through the end of the decade. An unofficial Colonel Reb mascot still makes appearances in The Grove, Ole Miss' tailgating area, before home games.
In 2009, the university chancellor asked the school's marching band to stop playing "From Dixie with Love", an early-1980s fight song that combined elements of "Dixie" and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic". Students had customarily chanted "The South will rise again", a reference to the Lost Cause pseudohistory, during the song's final line.[73]
In 2010, the university began to phase out the use of Colonel Reb on official merchandise such as hats and shirts; it reclassified the Colonel Reb trademark as a historical mark of the university.[74] After a polling and a February 2010 campus vote, officials announced on October 14, 2010, that students, alumni and season ticket holders at the university had picked Rebel Black Bear as their new mascot.[75][76] The bear beat out two other finalists, the Rebel Land Shark and something called the "Hotty Toddy," an attempt to personify the school cheer. (The bear would be replaced in 2018, by the Landshark, a reference to a celebratory hand symbol that players began using in 2008.[77][78][79][80])
In 2016, the athletic department banned "Dixie" itself as well as a medley that included a "Dixie" theme.[68][69] Later that year, Chancellor Jeffrey Vitter asserted that the name "Rebels" was no longer used to refer to the Confederacy but "is used today in a completely different and positive way: to indicate someone who bucks the status quo, an entrepreneur, a trendsetter, a leader".[81]
Future opponents[edit]
Conference opponents[edit]
From 1992 to 2023, Ole Miss played in the West Division of the SEC and played each opponent in the division each year along with several teams from the East Division. The SEC will expand the conference to 16 teams and will eliminate its two divisions in 2024, causing a new scheduling format for the Rebels to play against the other members of the conference.[86] Only the 2024 conference schedule was announced on June 14, 2023, while the conference still considers a new format for the future. Notably, Alabama and Auburn are off the schedule for the first time since the SEC expanded to 12 teams in 1992, and Texas A&M is off for the first time since the Aggies joined the conference in 2012.[87]
