Is The TriniDaddy Back?

Ole Miss @ Louisville: The Only Ranked Matchup Week 1 Has

The number: Model favors Ole Miss by 5.6. 1 of 3 stars.

Here’s the thing about Week 1. Ninety-something games on the board and exactly one of them features two ranked teams. This is that game. No. 9 Ole Miss and No. 24 Louisville, Sunday night, Nissan Stadium in Nashville, and honestly that alone should tell you something about how loaded the rest of the slate isn’t.

Chambliss Fought For This, Don’t Forget That

Everybody’s talking about the numbers. 3,937 yards. 30 total touchdowns. Eighth in Heisman voting a year ago as basically a nobody who came out of Division II. But the number that actually matters heading into this season is zero, as in zero years the NCAA wanted to give him.

They denied him. Twice. Told him the medical paperwork from a respiratory issue back in 2022 wasn’t good enough. Ole Miss appealed. Denied again. So Chambliss and his lawyers took it to a Mississippi state judge instead of waiting on Indianapolis to change its mind, and won. Got the injunction. NCAA appealed that too. Lost again in March.

That’s not a guy who got handed a bonus season. That’s a guy who had to fight a bureaucracy in actual court to be standing on this field Sunday. Ole Miss knows it too, they’ve got him and Lacy plastered on the Sphere in Vegas and a billboard in Times Square running the H6I5MEN campaign. Heisman odds have him third in the country behind Arch Manning and CJ Carr. If you’re rooting for him, and I know some of you are, this is the season that whole legal fight was for.

Lacy Isn’t Just Riding Shotgun

Don’t sleep on the other half of that backfield. Kewan Lacy set the Ole Miss single season rushing touchdown record with 24, broke the all purpose touchdown mark too, and did it after Missouri only gave him 23 carries as a true freshman before he transferred out. Led the entire FBS in carries last year. A four star out of Lancaster, Texas that a lot of people slept on until he got to Oxford and started running through people.

Chambliss and Lacy together might be the best quarterback running back combo in the country right now. That’s not just Ole Miss marketing talking, other outlets are saying the same thing independently.

Louisville Isn’t Just Here To Get Beat

Real quick on the other side, because Louisville has a case too. They’re 24th in the country for a reason, 9-4 last year, and their defense actually returns real talent. The problem is up front on offense. Only one starter comes back on that offensive line, and they’re throwing it out there against an Ole Miss defensive front that should eat.

New quarterback for the Cardinals is Lincoln Kienholz, an Ohio State transfer who threw all of 36 passes in three years as a backup in Columbus. That’s the real question mark of this whole game. Can a guy with basically no game reps hold up behind a shaky line against a defense with something to prove.

Louisville’s not toothless though. Elite red zone offense last year, 90.5 percent, and a secondary that’s been described as opportunistic, meaning they take the ball away when you make a mistake. If Kienholz protects it and that defense forces a couple turnovers, this stays live longer than people expect.

Where This Actually Lines Up

Ole Miss is the better team on paper and our number says so too, just not by a landslide. One star means real signal but not conviction, and that feels right here. The offensive line mismatch favors Ole Miss hard. The quarterback experience gap favors Ole Miss hard. But Louisville’s defense is legit and this is Chambliss and Lacy’s first real live test since the Kiffin fallout and Golding’s first full season running the show.

Win this one comfortably and everybody starts looking ahead to September 19, when Ole Miss goes back to LSU and gets to see Kiffin in the building he left them for.

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Confidence grade capped at 2 of 3 stars league wide until real backtested Elo data covers every team.