As it flounders in familiar irrelevancy, what is the best Ole Miss Basketball can be?
The Rebels are uncompetitive, so what does the program's future hold?
If you’re still one of the few tortured souls who still subjects yourself to watching Ole Miss Basketball on a regular basis, I must assume that some version of a multi-pronged question lingers in your mind as you consume an unwatchable product: what can Ole Miss Basketball be? And does this current version of it remotely resemble the best version of what it can be?
Let’s start with the second part of the question. In short, the answer is a resounding no. This is not remotely close to what the best iteration of what Ole Miss Basketball — a lack of history, resources and attention be damned — can be.
Let’s speak frankly for a minute: The 2022-23 Ole Miss Rebels are terrible. They are arguably (though quickly making it seem inarguable) the worst team in a top-heavy, but ultimately loaded, Southeastern Conference.
The product, as mentioned above, is completely unwatchable. Ole Miss is as offensively-challenged as any major college basketball team as I have ever seen. After last Saturday’s predictable but excruciatingly ugly defeat to a Mississippi State team — who is also incredibly offensively challenged — Ole Miss had scored 30 or more points in both halves of a game just once in their last 11 contests. Think about that for a moment. That is a remarkable statistic.
College basketball’s rules declare that teams play two 20-minute halves. The nation’s leading offense, the Gonzaga Bulldogs, average 85.1 points per game. Ole Miss ranks 258th of 363 Division-I programs at 67.4 points per game. To reiterate the remarkable stat mentioned above, after the Mississippi State loss, the Rebels had cobbled together more than 30 points in both halves of a game just once since November 18th — and the one time they did so was against a Valparaiso team (save your avenging the Bryce Drew Game jokes!) that has beaten one division-I opponent since late November.
In a given half-court possession, Ole Miss does things that defy both logic and perverse imagination. The Rebels are abhorrent when it comes to shooting perimeter jump shots. Their 28.8 percent mark from three-point range ranks 341st among 363 Division-I programs. That ranks dead last in the Southeastern Conference, too, not that it even needed to be mentioned. Even the way they miss perimeter jump shots is astounding and looks different than opponents. The way the ball bounces off the rim, when an Ole Miss shooter is fortunate enough to draw iron, seemingly defies physics.
Ok, so what? There are quite a few competitive college basketball teams that lack three-point shooting. Look at Arkansas and Auburn(!). Sure, I guess that is a plausible defense, despite living in an era of basketball that has uncovered the revelation that the value of the the three-point shot is worth more just about any other offensive stat. But the unfortunate reality for the Rebels, and unlike the two other teams mentioned, is that this stat is merely a symptom of an overarching problem — one of them being that Ole Miss doesn’t do anything else demonstrably well enough to counteract that deficiency.
From an eye-test perspective, the Rebels defend their ass off, which is a staple of the Kermit Davis brand. Whatever qualms you might have about this underachieving product, it is indisputable that this team gives great effort on the defensive end of the floor. But because they spend so much time on that end, the statistics don’t mirror the effort. Ole Miss ranks 5th in the SEC in scoring defense, which is a damn fine mark when you consider the league’s collective talent and depth. But if the Rebels can’t score enough to keep themselves in games, what does that actually mean?
Ole Miss ranks 10th in defensive rebounding in the SEC. It is 8th in offensive rebounding (which is not for a lack of opportunity, I might add). The Rebels are 11th in the league in assists and 10th in turnover margin. You get the picture. I need not continue.
But why is it this way?
Should the offense be this bad? Depending on whether or not (a clearly still physically compromised) Daeshun Ruffin starts, Ole Miss has two former top-45 recruits, and three former top-55 high school prospects, on the floor on a nightly basis. Mississippi native and Duke transfer Jaemyn Brakefield was the 42nd ranked player in the country out of high school, according to 247 Sports’ composite rankings. Matthew Murrell, the highest rated recruit in program history at the time of his signing, was the 40th ranked player. Ruffin (52nd-ranked player) was a McDonald’s All-American.
On paper, even in a hyper-competitive SEC, that talent level, even if depth is lacking, should still comprise a pretty competitive team, right? Well, apparently not. You’ve seen the results. Again, why is that the case? Why is this team so offensively challenged? And why is this program seemingly lacking any sort of a concrete direction? While I believe the answer is layered and requires nuance, the simplest version of it centers around the man at the helm: Kermit Davis.
Davis was hired in March of 2018 after Ole Miss finally ripped off the proverbial band-aid that was the end of the (now perpetually under-appreciated) Andy Kennedy era.
It’s worth remembering that Kennedy had pretty talented roster entering the 2017-18 season, as the pressure to achieve more consistent postseason success mounted. That year was a do-or-die scenario in its truest sense, and everyone knew it. Multiple staff members who worked for that team have told Rippee Writes that the overarching pressure and tension was palpable from the time they rolled the ball rack out for their first practice. Remaining on brand and not helping the tenuous cause, were Ross Bjork and Jeffrey Vitter, who handicapped Kennedy and the program at the knees before his final as the Rebels head coach, thanks to a combination of growing apathy among the fanbase that stemmed from not making the NCAA Tournament more consistently in post-Marshall Henderson and Stefan Moody era, an infamous, a short-sighted and utterly ridiculous powerpoint presentation, and an unrealistic expectation of the program rooted in the delusional idea that building a $96 million palace to replace a complete sh*thole of an arena would solve the perpetually-neglected program’s problems. You know the rest of the story. Kennedy was fired and Davis was hired.
Davis, in his first season, one that saw him named SEC Coach of the Year, took a roster that was voted to finish dead last in the SEC in the preseason polls to the NCAA Tournament with relative ease. The Rebels won 20 games and finished 10-8 in an SEC that was in the midst of an upswing toward being one of, if not the toughest, league in the sport. Despite ultimately being run off the floor by Oklahoma in the NCAA Tournament Round 64 that year, the season was a remarkable moment for a program looking to become more consistently relevant. But history often has a way of better contextualizing what was once the inexplicable present and now the past.
It taught us that Davis had the luxury of an NBA wing in Terence Davis, a borderline NBA two-guard in Breein Tyree, and a once highly-coveted recruit in sophomore Devontae Shuler. That team never struggled for offense. It was limited in both depth and competence in the post, as it scraped by with Dominik Olejniczak and Bruce Stevens, and it defended better than any Ole Miss team had in the previous half decade. The 2019 NCAA Tournament team ranked 6th in the SEC in points per game at 75.3 per contest, and was 0.5 points away from being a top-5 offense in the league. It was a middle-of-the-pack defense, allowing an 8th-best 71.1 points per game, but again, was about 0.5 away on average from being a top-6 defense in a really damn strong league that year.
What has happened since, in my opinion, encapsulates the overarching problem that has led to the situation the program currently finds itself in: the shot creators, and more importantly, shot makers, exhausted their eligibility and none reappeared.
I understand that this sounds like a simplistic label to a complicated issue, and Davis has forgotten more about basketball than I will ever know, but as the end of his tenure in Oxford becomes more inevitable, that simplistic viewpoint is ultimately how he will be remembered.
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What happened after that NCAA Tournament appearance?
From a roster standpoint, Ole Miss added with the likes of four-star guard Austin Crowley, three-star forward Shon Robinson, Virginia Tech transfer forward Khadim Sy, junior college guard Bryce Williams, high school wing Antavion Collum and Bahamian forward Sammy Hunter. But he also added Oxford native and Cal State Bakersfield transfer Jarkel Joiner — who, under-recruited out of high school, had to sit out that season, but after averaging double figures in scoring for Rod Barnes out west as a freshman, was seen as a dynamic scoring guard who could become a major contributor the next year.
On the heels of landing Blake Hinson and K.J. Buffen in Davis’ maiden recruiting class shortly after he accepted the job, this second class was seen as a pretty damn fine talent reload.
The results did not mirror the success on the recruiting trail. With Terence Davis moving on to the NBA, a short-term rebuild was hardly a cause for concern. Ole Miss survived a pretty competitive non-conference schedule that next year, despite losing its only real chances at resumé-building wins against ranked foes in Memphis, Butler, and Wichita State, but ultimately slipped into a horrid January slump that saw it lose seven of its first eight SEC games. That team ranked 11th in the conference in points per game at 69.0 (nice) and allowed an 8th-ranked 68.5 points per contest — in an indisputably deeper SEC. So, basically, the defense mostly held up, but the offense suffered without Terence Davis. Losing an NBA rotation player and seeing your offense suffer is pretty reasonable, on the surface. If you remember watching that season, most games hinged upon Tyree going absolutely nuts on the offensive end. If he didn’t? Well, the team didn’t stand much of a chance. That college basketball season was ultimately canceled due to a global pandemic wrecking the planet, but few remember Ole Miss was actually one of the few teams to complete its ill-fated season because it lost to Georgia on Wednesday night at the SEC Tournament in Nashville in a game that concluded on the same night the world, quite literally, shut down.
Because of where its season falls on the calendar, college basketball was, unfortunately, one of the few sports that essentially had the better part of two seasons wrecked by COVID-19.
The next year, now without the dynamic Tyree, Ole Miss, reshaped its roster into what was, at the time, dubbed as one that was “closer to resembling a Kermit Davis team.” Davis added the talented Matthew Murrell, Arizona State grad transfer forward Romello White, Ryder transfer wing Dimencio Vaughn and Samford transfer forward Robert Allen. Davis had long made it known that he coveted long, defensive-minded forwards to better fulfill his vision of positionless baketball.
In summation: the additions were Murrell, a lifeline of a power forward in Romello White, a marginally productive wing, and another forward who barely contributed in Allen. It is also worth noting that Joiner became eligible for this season.
Ok, fine. The roster still had veteran guard and Andy Kennedy holdover Devontae Shuler, and a year more-seasoned Crowley, along with the highly-touted Murrell and the newly-eligible Joiner. Ole Miss was essentially idle for the first month of that season due to covid cancellations, finished 16-12, but notched a respectable 10-8 mark in SEC play. That team boasted the second-worst offense in the SEC in terms of points per game at 68.8 points per game, ahead of only Texas A&M (Buzz Williams’ first Aggies team as he inherited a wreck of a program), but were the second best defense the league in terms of points allowed at 63.6 and were 0.1 points behind Tennessee as the best. The Rebels finished one win short of cementing the second NCAA Tournament appearance Kermit Davis era. Had Ole Miss beaten LSU on Friday night of the quarterfinals of the SEC Tournament, it very likely may have earned an at-large bid to the Big Dance — which would’ve drastically changed how people viewed the Kermit Davis era, both then and now.
I must pause here and pose this question to you, the reader: do any of you remember that year at all? Do you recall it as enjoyable or fun to watch? Look, I get that fans not being allowed inside arenas for virtually all of that season played a role in its retrospective perception, but that team lacked an offensive identity for two months, and basically defaulted to playing through White (who is an all-time under-appreciated player at Ole Miss) in the final six weeks of the season sheerly due to a lack options in the backcourt.
Onward to last season. Shuler, who, despite battling through a litany of nagging injuries, still averaged 15.7 points in the aforementioned year prior, graduated. To counter his absence, Ole Miss brought in an All-American in Ruffin, high school guard James White, someone allegedly called Eric Van Der Heijen, and another person named Grant Slatten from the high school ranks, along with Georgia transfer Tye Fagan, Duke transfer forward (Jaemyn) Brakfield and a Miami transfer center named Nysier Brooks.
In summation: Ruffin — the only guard who ever had a shot of playing in the immediate future, Brakefield, a marginal rim protector in Brooks with a limited offensive skillset, and . . . well, no one else that could contribute.
That, my dear readers, is the smell of a trend, and not a good one. It was back-to-back classes that consisted of one highly-touted high school guard, a couple more high school guards, who were highly-praised (internally, at least), and a couple of transfer forwards whose scoring capabilities were a secondary priority to their length and defensive prowess — seemingly remaining on brand to Davis’ desired roster.
The results were predictable.
Last year, Ole Miss finished 13-19 and 4-14 in an increasingly loaded SEC. The Rebels ranked 13th in the league in points per game, 11th in three-point percentage and 9th in field goal percentage. Joiner and Murrell never co-existed well on the court, and Ruffin missed most of the year due to injury. The team was largely uncompetitive, and the product was equally, if not more so, harder to watch.
Then came a pivotal offseason that saw the program reach a proverbial crossroad. Davis lost two top assistants — Ronnie Hamilton to LSU and Levi Watkins to N.C. State. Joiner followed Watkins to Raleigh. Ole Miss badly needed to overturn its roster with more scoring firepower. Instead, it brought in three transfer forwards from Buffalo, Louisiana-Lafayette and Jackson State — all three seemingly limited offensively but more competent on the defensive end, and an NAIA transfer wing Myles Burns. The Rebels also added three high school guards Amaree Abram, T.J. Caldwell and Robert Cowherd, along with center Malique Ewen.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.
The idea regarding this team’s ability to score points, albeit a delusional one, was that Ruffin (coming off a torn ACL he suffered last February) paired up with Murrell — who flashed All-SEC potential in his sophomore year — would be enough firepower for a defensive-minded team to compete in a league that, again, got deeper, more talented and tougher. That idea has not panned out, to say the least. Ruffin doesn’t look himself, or at least the version he flashed in the few games he played last year, and Murrell is not dynamic enough to overcome the ineptitude around him and supplement enough scoring for the team to be a remotely competitive offense— a nearly impossible ask, to be fair.
How did the 2019 SEC Coach of the Year fall so far, so fast?
Most of it is due to what we outlined above — an inability to reshape his roster on a year-by-year basis. But there is a lack of development component in all of this, too, and it’s partially underscored by the players who have left Davis’ program, and what they’ve done since.
Davis brought in Hinson and Buffen in his first ever recruiting class in the months after he took the job, two centerpieces of what was seen as an incredibly strong initial class, particularly given the roster Davis inherited. Both played as true freshman, mostly out of necessity, and showed promise. Buffen played 20 minutes per game and averaged a shade over six points and four rebounds per game. Hinson played 24 minutes and averaged 8.9 points per game. Hinson’s 26-point road performance at a ranked Mississippi State team in early January of that year will forever be remembered a seminal moment in that team’s improbable season. Both were invaluable depth pieces on an NCAA Tournament team. Two years later, neither were on the roster. Both were processed out as a byproduct of needed roster reshaping. How did that end up being the case? And why? In hindsight, it should’ve been a sign. And those two are hardly the only ones. Here’s a list of some (now-former) Davis players at their current schools.
Hinson is averaging 16.2 points and 6.6 rebounds per game on a Pitt team that is 12-6 with eight quad-one wins and started 4-0 in ACC play.
Buffen averages 10.6 points and 7.1 rebounds for a Kennedy-led UAB team, on the heels of year in which he averaged the same mark for an NCAA Tournament Blazers team.
Austin Crowley averages 17.4 points per game for a Southern Miss club that is 15-4 and sits atop the Sun Belt standings.
Bryce Williams left Ole Miss to become a starter on an Oklahoma State team that, in 2021, made the Round of 32 in the NCAA Tournament and featured a future No. 1 overall pick in the NBA Draft in Cade Cunningham. Williams averaged 7.3 points per game that year, and 8.3 as a spot starter and rotation player the next season. He averaged 3.1 points per game in his lone season in Oxford.
Joiner averages 16 points per game on an N.C. State team that is 14-4 and has beaten Duke, Virginia Tech and a ranked Miami club in its last three games.
Luis Rodriguez averages a career-high 12.5 points per game, along with 5.9 rebounds, for a 12-5 UNLV club that boasts wins over Dayton and New Mexico, who were both ranked at the time of the victories.
Former Ole Miss forward Shon Robinson averages 12 points per game at Austin Peay. Robinson averaged 7.5 points and 4.6 rebounds per contest the year prior at San Jose State. He played in just six games at Ole Miss and averaged 1.3 points per game.
The point of the above exercise was not to simply, and lazily, point out that a lot of players who have left Davis’ program have excelled elsewhere. That declaration lacks needed context. A lot of the aforementioned names went to smaller programs in weaker leagues, which is pretty normal for players who get processed out of SEC programs. But it would be foolish to ignore these occurrences entirely. Ole Miss badly lacks scoring for a third consecutive season. Are we supposed to pretend the Rebels couldn’t use some version of Joiner, Hinson, Buffen or Crowley? Particularly given how they’ve performed elsewhere? Why did none of these guys pan out in Oxford? But have somehow found a fit at other programs? What was lacking in their development? Why couldn’t Hinson and Buffen take the next step? Why were Joiner’s and Crowley’s services deemed unneeded, given the current state of this Ole Miss teams offense?
Even current players, like Murrell, have not continued on a linear trajectory in terms of development. Murrell’s field goal and three-point percentage have dipped significantly this year.
“There are a lot of good players in this league,” Davis said at SEC Basketball Media Day in October. “I think Matt is one of the best players in college basketball.”
Why haven’t the results proved that to be prophetic?
On numerous occasions last year, Davis lamented the loss of Robert Allen, who missed most of last season with a knee injury, as a major reason for the 2021-22 team’s struggles. Yet, this season, Allen has started one game and has played double-digit minutes once since December 10. Ruffin has yet to regain the form he flashed in the tiny sample size he accumulated in his limited freshman year.
“He has a lot pop back,” Davis said of Ruffin in October. “I am not saying he is 100 percent, but I think his knee is better than it’s ever been. He looks healthy… He will be one of the very best point guards in our league.”
It was reported that Ruffin suffered a bone bruise two weeks before the season that set him back slightly. Ruffin missed the first two weeks of the season. It is now mid-January and Ruffin is still a borderline liability for the team. I haven’t the slightest clue as to whether or not that is due to injury, and am certainly not blaming Ruffin and his abilities, but the preseason messaging juxtaposed with the results is perplexing.
“It’s the best depth that we’ve ever had since I have been the coach at Ole Miss” Davis said in October.
Ole Miss has just three players who average 20 minutes per game in SEC play. You get the point.
So, now, here Ole Miss sits, 0-5 in the league for the second time under Davis (a mark the program had not previously stooped to since the 1999-2000 season) and aimlessly toiling in irrelevancy. Barring a miraculous turnaround that would require feats that this roster is incapable of accomplishing, a coaching change is imminent. The reason for this cannot merely be chalked up to a lack of history, resources and facilities. That’s not to say those aren’t legitimate issues. Ole Miss is lacking in NIL compared to the vast majority of other SEC programs. That deficiency needs to be rectified, at least to some degree, if the program ever wishes to ascend beyond its current status as a perennial bottom feeder. But Ole Miss Basketball has never been flush with resources, whether it be a hell hole of an arena that somehow was in use until 2016, a lack of dark money needed to land coveted recruits before NIL was legal, or a lack of investment from the fanbase.
In the past, these deficiencies sprung adaptation. Kennedy miraculously worked around not being able to show recruits the building in which they’d play their home games. Once he lost out on a handful of highly-touted prospects in the South, he pivoted to recruiting internationally. When I was a student reporter, Kennedy once gave me a quote that stuck with me: “We used to be a roster filled with Mississippians and Memphians. Now, we are a roster filled with a bunch of Polish dudes and Latvians.”
A genuine, gracious man from his first day to his final day as Ole Miss head coach, Kennedy was doing his absolute best to explain to a naive student reporter, who had no idea what he was doing at the time, that he and his staff were trying to find any way possible to stockpile talent due to a lack of resources. What (I’d like to think) he really wanted to say was: “Yeah, we don’t have any financial backing to land top American talent, so now I am forced to learn Polish to tell Tomasz Gielo to stop f**king shooting threes!”
The point of all of this is to note that Ole Miss has been relevant, on a somewhat consistent basis, in the past, with even fewer resources that the program currently boasts. And it was due to innovation and adaptation. Davis has done neither, and truthfully, his lack of adaptation has less to do with a lack of resources and is more so due to a sheer unwillingness to conform to the evolution of what basketball — at all levels — has become. In a world in which the three-point shot, dynamic guard play, spacing and positionless basketball reigns, Davis seems hell bent on building rosters around a defensive-minded front-court, with offensive skillsets and dynamic guard play being a secondary priority. It’s a head-scratching pivot given the current state of the game and the common thread among successful programs in this league, and it’s a calculated strategy that has cratered the program to its current existence of being non-competitive.
Which brings us to the question I posed at the top of this long-winded column: what is the best version of Ole Miss Basketball? And how does it differ from this current unwatchable product? Again, Ole Miss has been (somewhat) consistently relevant in the 21st century. Kennedy accomplished this with fewer resources than the current staff has. Kennedy’s teams almost never sucked. He finished with fewer than 20 wins just twice in his 12-year tenure. One of those years, he finished with 19 wins, and the other was his disastrous final season (which, again, was partially tanked before it started due to Chancellor Gumballs and Wrestle Belt Bjork).
It should be noted that, for most of his Ole Miss career, Kennedy competed in a weaker SEC than what Davis has faced, but Kennedy’s formula cannot be ignored when comparing the two eras. Kennedy always had shot-creators and shot-makers on his team. From Chris Warren, to Marshall Henderson, Stefan Moody, Jarvis Summers, Tyree, Terence Davis and everyone in-between, Kenndy always had at least one player (and often two) who could fill it up on a nightly basis and give the team a chance. And he found them in every nook and cranny on the globe — from Texas and Florida junior colleges, to Poland, Puerto Rico and everywhere in-between.
Even Kennedy’s bad team’s were entertaining. That matters at a place like Ole Miss. If you aren’t going to be good, at least put asses in the seats. Kennedy mostly accomplished that. Davis has not. Davis had a good team two years ago that no one enjoyed watching.
The best version of Ole Miss basketball is an entertaining product that is competitive most every year, an NCAA Tournament team once every 3-5 years and a team that, at least, flirts with making the Big Dance in February more years than not. That is not an impossible ask for the next coach of Ole Miss. Fans will buy into an entertaining product. Davis’ second year is a great example of that. That team, led by Tyree, started 1-7 in SEC play, before rebounding in late January and early February. There were great, loud environments in The Pavilion that year, despite the team’s poor record. Why? Because Tyree was must-see TV and gave his team a chance every time it walked into a gym.
Whoever takes the reins of this program next year has one of the nicest arenas in the country at his disposal, and it’s still an SEC job. Despite the lack of resources from an NIL standpoint — which, again, needs to be improved — being competitive on a yearly basis is an expectation rather than a luxury, and it is up to Keith Carter, an Ole Miss Basketball alum himself, to find a man capable of meeting this standard.
Above all else, at a school that favors football and baseball heavily, with basketball as the forgotten hobby sandwiched between the two, all the average Ole Miss Basketball fan wants is to be entertained for two hours. This current product breeds the opposite of that: painstaking boredom. That, above all else, is why a change is all but a formality at this point.
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