Ole Miss opened the 2025 season on a high note on Saturday night as they dominated Georgia State 63-7 while Austin Simmons delivered a remarkable first game as the starting quarterback of the Ole Miss Rebels. After the disappointing reality of last season, this new group of Rebels was ready for Saturday night to showcase their potential to deliver Coach Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss to the College Football Playoff. Coming into the season, there were a few glaring questions, including how Austin Simmons would fare as the starting quarterback with no starting experience. 

With every game comes the Sunday takeaways and thoughts from the day before, no different with the season from Ole Miss, where the Rebels turned up the heat on Georgia State on Saturday night and never looked back. 

First and foremost, it was Georgia State, but Austin Simmons looked the part last night and lived up to all the hype of the last two seasons when he decided to pursue football full-time instead of being a dual-sport athlete with baseball. Simmons picked apart the Panthers’ defense, throwing for 341 yards and three touchdowns, while completing 65% of his passes. There’s always room for improvement after throwing two interceptions last night, but overall, the hype around Austin Simmons is very real. He’s different from Jaxson Dart, who is more of an old-fashioned gun-slinger quarterback type; the margin of injury decreases because he’s not one to scramble out of the pocket. Overall, though, Simmons provided Ole Miss fans with a lot of hope for his future this season. He’ll face a bit better competition next week at Kentucky as a final tune-up before three straight games against Arkansas, Tulane, and LSU. 

Second, the wide receiver room might be even deeper than everyone realized. As a unit, the Ole Miss receivers combined for 400 yards, with four touchdowns. Harrison Wallace led the way with 130 receiving yards and a touchdown. From the unit as a whole, Ole Miss saw four different guys catch touchdown passes from Austin Simmons and Trinidad Chambliss. Heading into next week’s game against Kentucky, Ole Miss now boasts one of the most talented wide receiver rooms in the entire country, providing Coach Kiffin and his offensive staff with more weapons to choose from and light up the scoreboard. 

Lastly, the fan support. For the first few years of the Coach Kiffin era in Oxford, the fan support wasn’t there; the students would leave early to hit the bars, or the everyday fan would leave at halftime to go back to the Grove, where they would finish watching the game from their tailgates. However, last night was different. Nearly every seat had a person in it as the official attendance numbers of 66,378, indicating a larger-than-capacity crowd for the season opener, proved once again that Rebel Nation is starved for Coach Kiffin to take this program to the next level. As we’ve seen in other sports, Ole Miss fans now understand that to be successful as a program, they must do their part in making Vaught-Hemingway a feared place for opponents to come and play. 

Overall, Saturday night was a special night for Coach Kiffin and the Ole Miss Rebels as they started the journey to reach the College Football Playoffs. Unlike last season, there wasn’t much made of this Ole Miss team in the offseason, not much flash, not many expecations outside of the state of Mississippi, but yet, Ole Miss did what they had to do in the season opener agaisnt Georgia State and have now since given the Rebel Nation somthing to be excited about as they look to play spoiler for the rest of the Southeastern Conference. 

Ole Miss will return to action next Saturday afternoon as they travel to Kroger Field in Lexington, Kentucky, to take on the Kentucky Wildcats. 

Photo Credits- Ole Miss Football on X