A new element has slowly creeped into college football and that is not knowing when a season will end.
Before the implementation of the College Football Playoff, teams had their regular season games, maybe a conference title game and then a bowl game. Everyone knew when their season would end.
Now there are at least 12 teams with players whose collegiate careers could be suddenly over with. One of those players is Ole Miss offensive lineman Diego Pounds.
For Pounds that realization hasn’t fully set in.
“It hasn’t hit me yet. I’m just so focused on game after game,” Pounds said Tuesday. “I’ve noticed myself trying to enjoy the small things, like just going out to practice. Like, I get to practice today, you know? I don’t get too many more of these. I don’t get too many more promised ones.”
All that is promised for Pounds, and the rest of the Ole Miss team, is one more game at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium.
“I’m really just trying to take it all in,” Pounds said. “It’s just good. Sometimes when you just sit back and you remember the dog days of practice, the dog days of fall camp, it really flew by. I’m not going to lie. It flew by.”
It does seem like the September 20 game against Tulane was years ago, not months. A lot has happened in that time, most notably the drama around Lane Kiffin leaving for LSU.
“With everything that was going on, we just tried to ignore the noise and stay locked in,” Pounds said. “I just feel like it’s good that it’s game week because everybody’s back on track.”
New head coach
From that Sunday when players left the Manning Center in Oxford saying “it’s the Pete Golding era” all the way to now, players have been high on Golding.
“He’s just an awesome guy,” Pounds said. “He’s an awesome coach. I mean, he knows everybody by name. He’s just an awesome dude. He’s got great energy. He’s fun to be around, and at the same time, we’re just happy that we got a coach that we can still go do this thing.”
Future plans
Whenever the Rebels’ season ends it won’t be the end of Pounds’ football career.
Pounds is projected to be a late round draft pick in the spring, but that’s nowhere close being on his radar right now.
“I’ve just been trying to stay focused on the next game, just balling out with my boys, and everything can take care of itself,” he said. “I just feel like once you start to just try to look too far in the future and start trying to play for yourself and accolades and stuff, that’s when everything goes downhill.
“So, me personally, I think I’ve been doing a good job of just being able to keep the main thing the main thing, and that’s just going 1-0 every week.”
