No. 9 Ole Miss opens the season with the kind of test that can tell you a lot right away.
The Rebels meet No. 24 Louisville in the only ranked game on the Week 1 slate, with the matchup set for Nashville. For Pete Golding, it comes as his first regular-season game as head coach, and it lands after he already guided Ole Miss through three playoff games last season, beating Tulane and Georgia before a loss to the Miami Hurricanes.
Louisville enters with enough firepower to make this a dangerous opener. Jeff Brohm has the Cardinals looking like a team Ole Miss cannot afford to treat lightly, especially after Brohm led Louisville to a win over Miami in the 2025 season - the same Miami team that knocked the Rebels out in the playoffs.
The biggest name to track is Isaac Brown. The Louisville running back is the kind of player who can flip a game with one crease in the defense.
In 2025, Brown ran for 884 yards and seven touchdowns on only 101 carries, and his 8.8 yards per carry led the nation. That kind of burst is exactly why Ole Miss spent the transfer portal targeting linebackers Keaton Thomas from Baylor and Luke Ferrelli from Cal.
Both will be asked to help slow down a Cardinals ground game that could hit fast and hit often.
Louisville also brings a receiving threat in Tre Richardson, who transferred over from Vanderbilt in the offseason and is expected to be the centerpiece of the passing attack. Richardson put together a strong 2025 season with 806 yards and seven touchdowns on 46 catches. He also showed he can rise in bigger moments, including a 75-yard, one-touchdown outing against ranked Tennessee and multiple games with more than 100 receiving yards.
Ole Miss made it clear through its portal additions that it wanted more help on defense, and the secondary looks as talented as it has in recent years. Still, that unit is going to get tested immediately.
Nashville should give the Rebels a measuring-stick opener, and the Cardinals have the personnel to make it uncomfortable from the start.
In Other News...
Louisville Fans Just Landed In A College Football Debate Nobody Saw Coming
A new study of thousands of Reddit posts has thrown a fresh, and admittedly unusual, lens on college football fan behavior by ranking fanbases on vulgarity. Mississippi State came out on top with a perfect Vulgarity Score of 10.00, Arkansas finished just behind, and Louisville showed up third nationally in the analysis, giving the Cardinals a surprising spot near the top of a list few schools would be eager to lead.
The numbers also offered a broader snapshot of how the sports online tone varies by conference, with the Big 12 posting a slightly higher average vulgarity score than the SEC. At the other end of the spectrum, Sacramento State fans were judged the least vulgar in the study, a reminder that internet chatter can produce some strange little pecking orders, even when it is filtered through college football rivalries. [Read more 🡒]
Ole Miss Faces A Bigger Talent Test Than Louisville In Week 1
The opening-week matchup with Louisville is being framed as more than a simple early test for Ole Miss, because the talent gap in college football has become one of the clearest predictors of who can actually finish the season in the national title conversation. A look at championship teams from 2013 through 2025 shows the same pattern again and again: the programs that win it all usually sit near the top of the recruiting-composite mountain, with only rare outliers breaking through.
For Ole Miss, the deeper point is what those rankings reveal about the roster it is building now, especially when measured against the Cardinals' own collection of high school signees and transfer additions. The Rebels have invested heavily in blue-chip talent of their own, but the Week 1 spotlight is less about who starts fast and more about whether this roster has enough top-end depth to handle the kind of talent test that usually separates a good September from a real playoff chase. [Read more 🡒]
Tennessee Has A Real Chance In One SEC Recruiting Battle
The early recruiting picture for Lee Steele is already crowded, and that is no surprise for a 2028 three-star tight end from Orange Beach, Ala. He is looking at eight SEC programs, including Ole Miss, and the pitch is about more than logo strength at this stage. Steele has said he is weighing the people in each program, the success of the current coach and, maybe most importantly, how he would fit into the offense.
For the Rebels, that means the tight end plan matters as much as the SEC brand. Steele sees himself as a hybrid option who can line up both inside and outside the box, so he has been paying close attention to how each school uses the position. Tennessee is in that mix, along with Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Kentucky, LSU and Vanderbilt, and the way each staff deploys tight ends could end up making this one of the more interesting recruiting battles to follow. [Read more 🡒]