Three Years Ago This Week

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Three years ago this week Ole Miss suffered the double humiliation of being routed at home by Louisiana Tech and watching LSU take a knee with way too much time on the clock. It was a mercy knee. Les Miles actually felt sorry for the Rebels. Scoring on such an outmatched team just didn't feel right. Miles want the only one who felt sorry. The Rebels also felt sorry for the Rebels. Houston Nutt was dismissed. The athletic department was in shambles after Pete Boone was essentially chased from his job by a fed-up fan base. The players, well, they just wanted the season to be over, and the faster the better. "You can have this Golden Egg Trophy, Dan. We just want to go home." Freshmen like Cody Prewitt and Senquez Golson were probably wondering if signing with Ole Miss had been the wrong decision.

Fans didn't have much hope, either. he idea of competing for an SEC Championship or a January bowl game one day was nowhere on the radar. To bring it up would have brought ridicule. Winning wasn't so much the goal at the time as putting out the fire. Bring on basketball.

Three years ago Hugh Freeze was finishing up a fantastic season as the head coach at Arkansas State. His rise from high school coach to major college coaching candidate had been almost meteoric. He had quickly built a reputation for being an inspirational turnaround artist. Word was getting out about this young coach who could win at Arkansas State of all places. Freeze heard there was an opening at Ole Miss, but he tried not to think about it. Yes, it was his dream job, but Freeze still had games to coach. He pushed it out of his mind and went back to watching more Sunbelt film. But when he laid his head on his pillow at night and let his mind wander....it wandered back to Oxford. He dreamed of returning the Rebels to glory. Of becoming the greatest Ole Miss coach since Vaught. He wanted to make Mississippi proud. What if...?

Three years ago Bo Wallace was satisfied. After lighting up the junior college record books he had proven the doubters wrong. Big time scholarship offers were coming his way. Mack Brown, Les Miles and Dan Mullen were calling. A year in Scooba, college football's version of hard time, had paid off. Now it was just a matter of deciding where to go. Wallace knew one thing for certain - leaving Arkansas State and Hugh Freeze had been the right move. Now he just had to find the coach and the place that would be the right fit and give him his best chance to win...maybe even win a conference championship. The gunslinging quarterback from Pulaski dreamed of being a hero.

It's funny how much can happen in three years. A lot of life has been lived. Lessons learned. Meaning found. Big wins. Painful losses. And now here we are. Ole Miss is ranked 8th in the country with a chance to play for some really big things. Redemption. Glory. Championships.

These next two, possibly even three, weeks are what it's all about. These next two weeks are the weeks players, coaches and fans dream about.

Three years ago, Hugh Freeze and Bo Wallace probably wishfully hoped for a chance such as this. Three years ago Rebels like Senquez Golson, Cody Prewitt, Vince Sanders and DT Shackelford probably wondered if an opportunity like these next two weeks would ever be possible.

But here we are.

It took three years to get to these next two weeks. It's time to make those three years count.

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