Knock, knock -- Ole Miss is bursting through SEC door
Andy Kennedy spent the night before Valentine's Day watching ESPN's Super Tuesday broadcast featuring an SEC showdown between Tennessee and Kentucky. What the Ole Miss coach witnessed was a fine game, a back-and-forth affair. But he also saw an error, and it bothered him a bit.
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| Guard Clarence Sanders (29 points) hit the game-winning shot against LSU. (AP) |
Baffled, Kennedy offered a rallying cry.
"We can't just knock on the door," he told his team. "We have to knock it off the hinges."
The door is now off the hinges.
Thanks to Wednesday's 71-70 last-second win over LSU -- and Alabama's loss at Florida -- there's no longer a need to apply the tie-goes-to-the-Crimson-Tide rule. Ole Miss is a full-game ahead of Alabama and Mississippi State, alone at the top of the SEC Western Division standings with just five league games remaining.
Not bad for a team picked dead last in the SEC. Or for a team that had won no more than 14 games in any of the past four seasons. Or for a team whose perceived best talent (Justin Cerasoli) withdrew from school in December. Or for a team that starts at least two players most thought weren't even SEC caliber recruits.
"Our guys are starting to believe," Kennedy told CBS SportsLine.com late Wednesday night by phone. "And with belief comes opportunity."
What Kennedy has accomplished in his first season at Ole Miss is a poor man's version of the job Tony Bennett has done in his first season at Washington State. Granted, the Cougars are ranked and the Rebels are not, and nobody is debating whether Washington State has been more impressive. But Bennett and Kennedy similarly inherited rosters of unheralded players who had done nothing but lost at the Division I level, yet both have somehow immediately turned them into winners against all logic and rationale.
And really, isn't that what defines a good coach?
It's one thing to walk into a brilliant situation and look brilliant or to recruit well and win with great prospects. But it is quite another thing -- an undeniably impressive thing -- when a person wins on a grand scale with roughly the same group of players who lost and lost and lost some more under the previous regime.
To be clear, that's all the Rebels had done lately.
Ole Miss never won more than it lost during the past four seasons, and its 17-47 league record in that span featured three 4-12 finishes. Predictably, that cost Rod Barnes his job. So the same school that had just bumbled through a recent football coaching search was off to find a new leader for its struggling basketball program, and who knew how it would end up?
