The Ole Miss Rebels have long been viewed as an offense-first program under the leadership of coach Lane Kiffin, but that script was somewhat flipped in 2024.
Kiffin’s Rebels were good on offense, yes, but their bread-and-butter came on the defensive side of the ball with a unit led by coordinator Pete Golding and a host of new transfers. On Tuesday, light was shed on just how strong the Ole Miss defense was this season in a story from ESPN.
It was there that the “stop rate” among college football defenses in 2024 was broken down. Stop rate is a pretty basic stat that tells a big story: the percentage of opponent drives end in a punt, turnover or turnover on downs.
For Ole Miss, that number was 75.9 percent, good for fourth in the country. To put that into perspective, that means that the Rebels surrendered an average of 1.28 points per drive this season.
Those numbers will win you a lot of ballgames.
And that’s what Ole Miss did in 2024, despite not reaching the College Football Playoff. The Rebels finished with their third 10-plus-win season in the last four years, claiming a blowout victory in the Gator Bowl over Duke to cap off the campaign. And the calling card for most of the year was defense.
That side of the ball for the Rebels was led by a host of All-American talent, including names like DL Walter Nolen, EDGE Princely Umanmielen, DL JJ Pegues and LB Pooh Paul who helped the team allow just 80.46 rushing yards per game at a 2.2 yards-per-attempt clip. Ole Miss also finished third in the country in sacks, getting to the quarterback 52 times throughout the year.
All of that is good news for the Rebels, but there is some bad news that follows it. Ole Miss is set to lose a lot of its defensive production this offseason to the NFL Draft, and it is looking to shore up those spots with a heavy push in the transfer portal. The Rebels have added some help at edge rusher in Princewill Umanmielen (younger brother of Princely) and Da’Shawn Womack, and they have also added some linebacker talent in Jaden Yates and others.
Will that be enough to keep the program near the top of this statistical category in 2025?