On Thursday night in Glendale, Arizona, the magic finally ran out for the Ole Miss Rebels in the College Football Playoff. In one of the best games of the entire season, the Miami Hurricanes outlasted the final SEC representative to make it back home to Florida for the national championship.
The game didn’t end without some controversy, however, as Pete Golding and Trinidad Chambliss screamed for a flag that wasn’t called following a final heave of the ball. Miami took the lead in the waning seconds of the game off a Carson Beck scramble, and then Chambliss, with only 18 seconds, almost made a miracle happen.
He somehow marched down the field with two perfectly placed long passes to give Ole Miss an actual fighting chance on the final play. As he launched the final ball, the Miami defenders began hand-fighting to make sure there was no chance of a walk-off miracle.
The ball fell, the refs went to their whistles instead of their pockets for a flag, and the game was over.
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Pete Golding left the field with his team behind him, but that didn’t stop Lane Kiffin, the former coach, from calling out the refs on social media.
Alongside his criticism of the refereeing staff in the Fiesta Bowl, Kiffin shouted out his former team, saying he was proud to have coached the best season ever at Ole Miss.
As Golding and Mississippi look towards the future, the question is whether any players on the current roster might enter the transfer portal in the coming days to play for their former coach at LSU.
Trinidad Chambliss has said he will be staying at Ole Miss if the NCAA grants him an extra year of eligibility, even though Kiffin is on the hunt for a starting QB to join a team he believes he can win it all next season.
Kiffin recently hosted star transfer QB Sam Leavitt and was linked to Washington’s Demond Williams before he retracted his name from the portal on Thursday. Husan Longstreet, the five-star freshman phenom out in Los Angeles, might be a target following his surprise exit from USC also on Thursday.
The transfer portal officially closes on Jan. 16, 2026.
