Ole Miss 2017 recruits went through a lot for 2021 stability (2024)

When Ole Miss linebacker MoMo Sanogo reflects on his recruiting class, one thought prevails.

“We’re the ones that stuck around,” Sanogo said. “We’re the ones who saw it through.”

Sanogo is one of the few members of the Rebels’ 2017 signing class still on the program’s roster as the 2020 season comes to an end. Ole Miss’ ‘17 class won’t be remembered as great. It would be extremely difficult to make the case that it was even a good class.

But the seven players who remain — Sanogo, Brown, receiver Braylon Sanders, defensive linemen Ryder Anderson and Sincere David, linebacker Zikerrion Baker and running back Isaiah Woullard — have had to exhibit extreme resilience. They were recruited under a cloud of uncertainty. They’re on their third head coach in four years. They waited out a two-year postseason ban. They suffered through the embarrassment of the 2019 Egg Bowl ending. And now, their fourth year on campus has been upended by a pandemic.

On Saturday, when Ole Miss faces No. 11 Indiana in the Outback Bowl, their perseverance will be rewarded. It’s the Rebels’ first bowl game since the 2016 Sugar Bowl — the high point in recent Ole Miss history — and the first postseason game for the ‘17 class.

After four turbulent years, those seven players have positioned themselves to play a role in the program’s upward trajectory.

“That’s been the mindset since the beginning,” Sanogo said. “I decided to come here, and we’re going to see this through and we’re going to make it through.”

Ole Miss’ 2013 recruiting class was the program’s best of the decade. That class ranked eighth in the country, according to the 247Sports Composite, led by four five-star players and four future first-round picks (Laremy Tunsil, Laquon Treadwell, Robert Nkemdiche and Evan Engram).

But on paper, the 2016 class represented the Rebels’ recruiting peak. That class finished fifth nationally and boasted three five-star prospects (Greg Little, Shea Patterson and Benito Jones) in addition to current NFL stars A.J. Brown and D.K. Metcalf, who were both four-star prospects at the time.

As Ole Miss ushered out the stars who carried them to that Sugar Bowl, the ‘16 class was supposed to continue the program’s upward ascent. But as the ‘16 recruiting cycle neared its conclusion, the final weekend before national signing day set the tone for the year ahead.

Yahoo! Sports broke the story that Ole Miss’ football, women’s basketball and track and field programs had been formally charged with NCAA violations as the program was hosting its last official visitors of the recruiting cycle on what was typically the Rebels’ biggest recruiting weekend each year.

Through no small amount of crisis management, Ole Miss was able to hold on to a majority of the stars it signed that cycle, but the uncertainty about NCAA wrongdoing was already in the air, and the Rebels’ recruiting was bound to suffer for it.

“Rival schools, specifically at the time in-state and Tennessee and a couple of other ones, could basically make up anything and the kids didn’t know what to believe,” said Brennon Chapman, Ole Miss’ former assistant director of player personnel. “Tell them that they’d never play on TV. Tell them there was no chance they’d ever play in a bowl game. We were going to get a four-year bowl ban. We’re going to get the death penalty and they’re going to have to transfer.

“And we’re sitting there telling them none of that’s true. And they’re saying, ‘Well, this coach who’s reputable told me it is true and I don’t know which one of y’all’s lying.’ There was so much uncertainty they could make up anything. We lost out on a ton of kids that year that we were never really even in it that I feel like we would have gotten.”

The Rebels held a commitment from four-star in-state linebacker Willie Gay for several months during that cycle before Gay eventually re-opened his recruitment and signed with Mississippi State. They put on a full-court press for five-star in-state running back Cam Akers. A bar in Oxford held a watch party for Akers’ announcement, only for him to announce that he was going to sign with Florida State.

Then-head coach Hugh Freeze, the central target of the NCAA investigation, said at his signing day press conference that recruiting under those uncertain circ*mstances was essentially an NCAA penalty of its own.

It didn’t help that the Rebels, who improved in each of Freeze’s first four seasons, had finished 5-7 in 2016. A year after finishing the season with a Sugar Bowl victory, Ole Miss closed with back-to-back losses to Vanderbilt and a sub-.500 Mississippi State team, both by 21 points or more.

The Rebels’ recruiting class finished third in the SEC in 2016. In 2017, they finished third-to-last.

“It was definitely a way different feeling on signing day when you’re looking up and (three-star linebacker) Thomas Johnston is signing with UAB over Ole Miss,” Chapman said. “And (four-star offensive lineman) Obinna Eze is signing with Memphis over Ole Miss. You’re like, ‘Well, last year we were in dogfights with LSU and Texas A&M and Georgia and Florida to finish high. Now we’re in a dogfight with UAB.’”

A year after signing three five-star prospects, Ole Miss signed just three four-stars. The highest-rated player in the class was four-star corner D.D. Bowie, who lasted one season in Oxford before leaving the program. Four-star defensive end Chester Graves was a sign-and-place prospect who never made it to Oxford. And four-star linebacker Breon Dixon transferred right after the 2017 season ended.

One of the Rebels’ 23 signees, Tae-Kion Reed, was released from his letter of intent just a month after signing day after his arrest for attempting to burglarize a home.

Ole Miss’ class ranked No. 31 nationally and No. 12 in the SEC that cycle. Sure, it produced a few under-the-radar players, like Jordan Ta’amu, who came out of nowhere to become a productive starting quarterback for the Rebels, but in retrospect the class performed worse than those rankings even suggested.

“There were some guys in a normal year we wouldn’t take,” Chapman said. “Whether it’d be a grade situation or a character situation, development situation. In a normal year leading up to that, we wouldn’t have taken them, but we had to. We were in a position where we didn’t have many other options. There weren’t many kids lining up to come to Ole Miss. … The kids that came wanted to be here. Did we miss on some? Absolutely, but we didn’t have many options to fall back on or go after also. So the ones that did want to come, really wanted to be at Ole Miss and obviously really wanted to stay if they’re still there.”

Exactly three weeks after Ole Miss finalized its 2017 recruiting class, it published a video on YouTube. Then-chancellor Jeff Vitter, then-athletic director Ross Bjork and Freeze sat at a podium together to announce a self-imposed one-year postseason ban and that the program had received 21 allegations of rules violations from the NCAA.

That was sort of an omen for what was to come for the ‘17 class.

“When we signed up here, the word was we were going to be getting a one-year bowl ban and I was thinking, it’s OK,” Sanogo said. “It’s a one-year bowl ban, it’s fine, people will look past it.”

Sanogo hadn’t arrived on campus when the self-imposed bowl ban was announced. He didn’t get to Oxford until that summer by which point the drama had taken a different turn. On July 20, just weeks away from the start of training camp, Freeze was forced to resign after the university looked into his phone records and found that the coach had made inappropriate calls on his school-issued cell phone.

Offensive line coach Matt Luke took over as the interim coach, and those freshmen were already on their second head coach before their first training camp even began.

“No one really saw that coming, and we had a random team meeting that day,” said Ole Miss center Ben Brown, a former three-star prospect who has become the best player from that ‘17 class. “Obviously, like a lot of my teammates and coaches, I was definitely shocked. But we knew we were all in the right hands with Coach Luke whenever he was hired as a head coach. Placed in the interim position, we were all confident he would lead us to success and do a great job unifying our team.”

Luke kept the team motivated that year, fixing one issue that plagued the 2016 team, and the Rebels finished 6-6 with an upset win in the Egg Bowl. Ole Miss surprised many by removing the interim tag and naming Luke the permanent coach three days after the win over Mississippi State.

But the NCAA finally handed down the verdict from its investigation and the subsequent hearing five days after Luke was given the full-time job. The NCAA added another year to the Rebels’ postseason ban and placed them on probation for three years. That probation finally expired last month. Players were given waivers to transfer without penalty, and several of them, like Patterson (Michigan) and receivers Van Jefferson (Florida) and Tre Nixon (UCF), took the opportunity to do so.

“When you get told it’s a two-year bowl ban and not one year, and right before the season started our coach got fired, my position coach (left), it’s like is this the same situation I signed up for?” Sanogo said. “My two best friends at the time, Jarrion Street and Tre Nixon, they both left and I mean, I can’t even lie, I wanted to go somewhere else and I talked to my parents and everything and they were like, ‘What’s different than when you signed? Nothing really. You’re not signing to coaches, you’re signing to a program, to a school and play football at this level. You’re so blessed. Just go make it work. Forget the situation. Go make the situation work.’ Ever since then, that’s been my mindset. I’m going to make whatever comes my way work for me.”

Brown and Sanogo became full-time starters in 2018, but the Rebels finished 5-7 and lost their final five games of the season.

The fan base was never energized by the Luke hire and was growing increasingly apathetic. The bowl ban was lifted after the ’18 season, but Ole Miss was a young team in 2019 and it showed, particularly at the end of the season when sophom*ore Elijah Moore scored a touchdown and lifted his leg in the end zone, pretending to urinate like a dog, which led to a penalty and eventually cost Ole Miss the Egg Bowl when the ensuing extra point 15 yards farther back sailed wide.

The Rebels lost to Mississippi State, 21-20, and two years after earning the job because of a win over the Bulldogs, Luke was fired after the loss to the in-state rival. It didn’t take long for the university to set its sights on Lane Kiffin and make that hire official.

“It was exciting,” Brown said. “(Kiffin) was a big-time name.”

Kiffin gave Ole Miss a shot in the arm almost immediately. Ole Miss is only 4-5 entering Saturday’s game against Indiana, but it has played an exciting brand of football. The Rebels gave Alabama one of its toughest games of the season. They played Florida tough.

Kiffin utilized that on-field product to generate momentum on the recruiting trail and closed with a flurry of more than 10 commitments in December, vaulting Ole Miss’ 2021 class to 18th in the 247Sports Composite team rankings.

Some fans might have been won over by the performances against top teams or by the impressive close to the early signing period, but for Sanogo, the turning point came well before either of those.

“The first team meeting he had when (Kiffin) got hired,” Sanogo said. “We all just expected a little hoo-rah speech or wherever, then get on. But he came in and he was like, ‘Let’s go, we’re honest, we’re on a mission, we’re going to be honest about everything in how we’re going to attack it. This is real stuff and we’re going to go win games.’ That attitude and the swagger that he brought, I was like, all right, this is going to be good here.”

Was Ole Miss great this year? Definitely not. Does it still have a lot of ground to make up defensively? Absolutely. But the 2017 class holdovers were there for 66-3 and 62-7 losses to Alabama in consecutive years, blowout losses to LSU and Mississippi State in 2018, and the uninspiring defeats in 2019.

In 2020, Ole Miss had a legitimate chance in every game, which bodes well for its future as Kiffin tries to upgrade its talent. The journey was long and anything but smooth, but this is the position the 2017 signees always wanted to be in.

“It feels good. I was talking to Braylon about this,” Sanogo said. “We came in when it hit rock bottom and we worked every year and we’re turning this program around, and we’re going to leave this program off 10 times better than we walked in.

“And that’s just a good feeling.”

(Top photo of Ben Brown: Petre Thomas / Ole Miss Athletics)