Paul Finebaum puts an enormous amount of pressure on Lane Kiffin, Ole Miss this year

Plain and simple, the Ole Miss Rebels need to be one of the 11 best teams in college football this fall or else. While Ole Miss is not going to fire head coach Lane Kiffin for going 9-3, his football team is built to win double-digit regular-season games and make the expanded College Football Playoff. They might get to Atlanta for the first time ever, but I firmly have them as the league's third-best program.

Fate would have it, Paul Finebaum kind of shares some of my sentiments. While appearing on McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning, he made it abundantly clear that anything short of a playoff berth this year for the Rebels would be a huge embarrassing failure for Kiffin and his Ole Miss program. They are simply too talented and too experienced in all the right places to not make it in as an at-large team.

Here is what Finebaum said about Kiffin and Ole Miss while on McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning.

“There’s no sugarcoating it. It would be a complete and total failure if Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss don’t make the playoffs."

After doing the math, the SEC will be getting between five and six teams into the expanded playoff. While I have Georgia and Texas as locks, I have Ole Miss and Missouri in the same tier as almost locks, with the likes of Alabama, LSU, Tennessee and I guess Oklahoma duking it out for the final spot or two. For the first time ever, Ole Miss has pretty much every advantage it needs to be a playoff team.

The big question that I have is if Kiffin is mature enough to handle these tough, but fair expectations.

It should be College Football Playoff or bust for Ole Miss and Lane Kiffin

To be quite frank, no team in the SEC benefited more from the league doing away with divisions than did Ole Miss. While they will still probably have three annual rivals once the league intelligently goes to a 6-3 model in 2026, well, because they should, Ole Miss does not have to play the likes of Alabama, Auburn, LSU and Texas A&M annually. Only the Mississippi State rivalry is being preserved.

I would venture to guess that LSU will be an annual rival along with Mississippi State once the SEC league office comes to its senses. There are plenty of other teams that could be their No. 3, including traditional cross-divisional rival Vanderbilt, who is so unbelievably screwed in all this. Vanderbilt was always screwed. Regardless of what is coming down the pipeline, the time to win is now at Ole Miss.

Seemingly everyone of note is back, sans Quinshon Judkins, who transferred to Ohio State this offseason. Kiffin continues to be the king of the transfer portal, landing perhaps the biggest pickup of the offseason in Walter Nolen from Texas A&M. To me, Ole Miss is a top-six team in the country right now. They are arguably the worst team that I think could conceivably win the national championship.

To be on that short of a list signifies that yes, it should be playoff berth or bust for Kiffin and Ole Miss.