Spruce Derden-USA TODAY Sports
The Ole Miss Rebels defeated the No. 10 Missouri Tigers on Saturday in an unexpected upset of one of the top teams in the SEC. Now, the Rebels are leading the SEC and yet still Ole Miss is not ranked. They deserve to be.
The Ole Miss Rebels play like a top team in the country. If you saw what Marshall Henderson and Murphy Holloway did to Missouri, you would see that this team can hang with the best. Jarvis Summers even guarded the best passer in the country, Phil Pressey, very well. Ole Miss would destroy ranked teams like UCLA and Illinois. Why is Illinois even still in the top 25 after losing four games?
So, Ole Miss lost to Indiana State in OT and MTSU by three. Indiana State was a fluke, but Indiana State has only lost to ranked teams (and one bad loss to Morehead State). I’ve been saying that MTSU (if the Blue Raiders make it to the tournament) will defeat whichever team they play in the first round. MTSU was the first team to even remotely hang with Florida back when Florida was winning every game by twenty points or more. Ole Miss’s losses were not bad losses, just unfortunate ones.
Ole Miss is not a mid-level team from a mid-major conference, but the top of a league that has won three of the last seven national championships. The Rebels defeated a team that was in the talks for a potential national championship, if they aren’t ranked by the end of the week – something’s wrong with the NCAA.
