Ole Miss may have survived against Louisville, but Lane Kiffin and LSU loom large after a Week 1 beatdown

By Dan Wolken — In News — September 7, 2026

   ​NASHVILLE, Tenn. — For better or worse, and in Trinidad Chambliss’ estimation it’s mostly for worse, fourth quarter chaos seems to be Ole Miss’ happy place. It’s not by choice or design, but it’s where he often seems to find himself as the quarterback of a team that has raised its fan base’s collective blood pressure to alarming levels, even if his own seems to be steady in place. “I honestly hate these games,” he said late Sunday night. “I don’t know why we do this every time.”Chambliss, the coolest of cool customers, had just led a drive to set up kicker Lucas Carneiro for a walk-off, 48-yard field goal as time expired, giving Ole Miss a 41-38 win over Louisville to open the season. It was, in many ways, a more complicated game than it should have been for Ole Miss but also a familiar one. Last season, as the Rebels marched to the College Football Playoff semifinals in the midst of Lane Kiffin’s departure to LSU, having the ball in Chambliss’ hands late in one-score games practically became their security blanket.  And now that there’s just 13 days before Kiffin comes back to Oxford dressed in purple and gold, hopped up on vengeance and armed with a team that delivered pure devastation to Clemson on a muggy Saturday night in the Bayou, we won’t have to wait much longer to find out what was better preparation for a blood feud more than nine months in the making.LSU looked terrifying. Ole Miss looked battle-tested under pressure. And with each passing hour, the first installment of college football’s nastiest, most personal rivalry draws ever closer. It’s almost here. “I watched probably two quarters,” Ole Miss coach Pete Golding said when asked if he had kept an eye on LSU’s 51-10 humiliation of Clemson. “I thought they played really good on defense. They’ve got some really good players up front. I think they are what everybody thought they were going to be on paper.”Ole Miss QB Trinidad Chambliss celebrates a touchdown against Louisville on Sunday. (Carly Mackler/Getty Images)Carly Mackler via Getty ImagesUnlike Nick Saban, whom he worked under for five seasons, Golding is not the type to avoid the Landshark in the room. What’s going to happen two Saturdays from now is monumental — for Kiffin, for the school he left behind, for the SEC and for the never-ending soap opera of college football where what happens on the field is only a fraction of the intrigue. It’s the game that looms over Ole Miss’ entire season. Thanks to Kiffin’s eternal quest to dominate the zeitgeist and his unquenchable thirst to burn the program he left behind to the ground, it’s the night we’ve been talking about since Kiffin walked out on a playoff team and tried to take everything that wasn’t nailed down. And knowing what we know about human nature, Golding has not had it easy in these past several months. While everyone on the periphery of his ecosystem has been talking about Sept. 19 above all else, he has known that Louisville loomed as a real challenge th  

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