OXFORD, Miss. — Pete Golding spent the last minutes of his high-stakes debut as the head football coach for Ole Miss taking in the smiling faces of his players on the sideline.
“To know what they’ve been through, and know the direction that they could have gone … they were able to battle through that,” Golding said, alluding to coach Lane Kiffin’s departure for LSU. “And for them to get the outcome that they deserve was awesome.”
Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss ran for two touchdowns and passed for another, and the sixth-seeded, sixth-ranked Rebels looked unfazed by Kiffin’s absence, beating 11th-seeded, 17th-ranked Tulane 41-10 on Saturday at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in the first round of the College Football Playoff.
“The juice was there for sure,” Chambliss said. “We executed really well.”
For both the Rebels (12-1), whose lone loss this season was in league play to two-time reigning Southeastern Conference champion Georgia, and the Green Wave (11-3), the American Conference champions, this was their first appearance in the CFP, which became a 12-team tournament last season after a first decade with a four-team bracket for the Footbal Bowl Subdivision’s national championship event.