Ole Miss heads into its season opener with a roster that is mostly settled, but one issue still hangs over the offense: the wide receiver room is full of questions.
The Rebels are set to open in nearly a week against Louisville at Vaught-Hemmingway Stadium, and while the ongoing eligibility litigation over players in the 2022 class has been addressed by the SEC and other conferences through rules that bar those players from eligibility, the bigger football concern is what Ole Miss has to replace on the outside.
Quarterback Trinidad Chambliss and running back Kewan Lacy give the Rebels a dangerous foundation. Beyond that duo, though, Ole Miss is counting on a group of unproven targets to deliver, especially at receiver.
The most obvious loss is the volume of production that walked out the door. Ole Miss must replace four of its top five pass-catchers from last season, and the only returner from that group is Deuce Alexander. The former Wake Forest transfer finished with 684 yards and two touchdowns on 44 catches, which ranked third on the team.
The departures hit everywhere else. Harrison Wallace II, De’Zhaun Stribling, and Dae’Quan Wright are gone to the NFL, while Cayden Lee transferred to Missouri. That leaves a major gap in an offense that leaned on balance and depth in the passing game a year ago.
This wasn’t a case of Ole Miss riding one superstar receiver. The Rebels spread the ball around, and that made the losses even heavier.
Wallace and Stribling paced the team with 1,745 combined yards, while Alexander, Wright, and Lee added 1,954 more. In all, Ole Miss is staring at the task of replacing 3,000 yards of production from last season.
Alexander’s return at least gives Chambliss a receiver he already knows and can trust early. The rest of the picture is still coming into focus, even after the Rebels dipped into the transfer portal for Johntay Cook II, Horatio Fields, and Darrell Gill Jr., among others.
That’s where the uncertainty really lives. Production at a previous stop does not always carry over, and Ole Miss is again asking a portal-heavy group to settle in quickly. Under Lane Kiffin, the Rebels built a reputation for finding answers that way.
Now that Kiffin and offensive coordinator Charlie Weiss Jr. are off to Baton Rouge, offensive coordinator John David-Baker is the one left to sort out how all these pieces fit.
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