Ole Miss football bounced back once this season. A tougher challenge faces Lane Kiffin now

OXFORD — Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin has executed the task in front of him once already this season.

After taking a thrashing on the road against LSU on Oct. 29 for their first loss, Kiffin's Rebels earned a win at Texas A&M that kept their season on track and gave Kiffin the opportunity to dunk on Jimbo Fisher on national television.

Now Ole Miss (8-2, 4-2 SEC) had to rebound again. It has to find a way to beat Arkansas (5-5, 2-4) after a loss that ate away at Kiffin's emotions. It has to lift itself after it had the ball at Alabama's 14-yard line with just over a minute to go and could not score in a six-point game. It has to move on from what might have been its best chance to beat Nick Saban and the Crimson Tide since it last did so in 2015.

"They don't usually understand what that moment is and how rare that moment may be," Kiffin said Monday. "I was just frustrated for our players to be that close, to have the ball in your hands against Alabama, controlling the outcome. If you take some time off the clock and score, you beat Alabama. That's a rare thing. I was in that situation 13 years ago, ball in our hands at Tennessee, going down to kick a field goal to beat Alabama. It doesn't happen very often. It's why there's a lot of frustration."

The way the Rebels channel that frustration will decide what the rest of this season becomes. Will Ole Miss stack back-to-back 10-win seasons for the first time since the days of John Vaught? Will it fold under the weight of its own disappointment instead?

"I've kind of moved on already, after I watched the film," Ole Miss safety AJ Finley said. "I probably moved on (Sunday), honestly. Just watch the game, get all of that stuff out of the way and move on."

Discarding the circumstances and the emotional weight provided by the opponent and the manner of defeat, a second loss at this stage of the season these days is challenging enough to cope with.

It means that the little voice living in the brain of every Ole Miss fan, player and coach that dreamed of an SEC West title — and maybe even something a little bigger after that — has been silenced. A second loss relegates the Rebels to the hoard of college football teams playing for something that isn't tangible, something they can't quite reach out and touch.

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Reporters and media types typically ask around about players who can lead a team out from underneath that reality. Kiffin, notably, declined to defer to the leaders in the locker room, shouldering the responsibility himself.

"You want players to do that stuff, but again, as a head coach, that's part of your job to do that, not rely on the players to do that and walk these guys through it," Kiffin said. "This will be challenging."

For a model, the Rebels need only look at the Alabama team that just beat them. A national championship is expected from the Crimson Tide just about every season. Saban's group knew it wouldn't be playing for one before they set out for Oxford. More than a few talking heads said their season was over. They handled their business anyway.

Nobody is saying that about Ole Miss right now, nor should they. Still, the emotional impact of a sizable missed opportunity can be quite an obstacle.

What happens next will tell us a lot about Kiffin and the fortitude of the Ole Miss program he's quickly built into a group that made Rebels fans dare to dream.

David Eckert covers Ole Miss for the Clarion Ledger. Email him at deckert@gannett.com or reach him on Twitter @davideckert98.

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Inside the challenge facing Ole Miss football after loss to Alabama