One of the best parts of the 12-team College Football Playoff is the first round playoff games played on a school’s campus.
This year, folks in Oxford, Miss., Norman, Okla., College Station, Texas and Lubbock, Texas all get the experience of a home playoff game.
“It means everything in the world for this community,” Ole Miss coach Pete Golding said on Sunday. “for a chancellor that’s been all in on athletics, right? For an athletic director that has given everything, right, to this school.
“For a Grove Collective, right, that has got a million members for this community, right? Friends, right, for me around that own hotels and restaurants and bars and everything that they’ve given to this program for one day to have another opportunity to be able to host a playoff game, I think is awesome.”
As an added bonus, two college towns will host ESPN’s College Gameday and neither is Oxford.
ESPN announced it would be sending its crew of Rece Davis, Desmond Howard, Pat McAfee, Nick Saban and Kirk Herbstreit to Oklahoma and Texas A&M for their playoff games.
Two days. Two shows.
Next week, we're heading to Norman on Friday and College Station on Saturday for the first round of the College Football Playoff! 🤩 pic.twitter.com/eipZaAB2Ge
— College GameDay (@CollegeGameDay) December 10, 2025
That’s probably for the best considering the reception they would likely get from Ole Miss fans.
Remember it was only a couple weeks ago most of that panel was urging Ole Miss to allow Lane Kiffin to coach the Rebels in the CFP (a completely ludicrous idea that wasn’t even trying to hide the blatant PR campaign CAA and Jimmy Sexton were undertaking).
But no matter what college football pregame show sets up in Oxford, if any, Golding and the Rebels aren’t going to treat this game any different. (Added “if any” because no announcement about SEC Nation has been made and it wouldn’t be going to Texas Tech.)
“To me, it’s no different,” Golding said. “I think you start making this thing bigger than it is and blowing this thing up and asking guys to press and do things that they haven’t done all year. My big thing for those guys is just don’t look back and say, ‘My bad. I wish I would have.’ You get very few opportunities once you get into this to take advantage of it.”
Even with all of changes to the coaching staff and the ones still to come, Ole Miss will still look like it has all season long.
“No, I’m not changing a system that has put us in the position that we’re at, that’s led the country in offense for multiple different years and been very productive,” Golding said about the upcoming playoffs and future seasons. “We have a locker room full of good players that have been recruited to play within that system and got really good coaches on our staff that coach that system.”
