Let’s remember the Ole Miss football good times, 2013-2016

Ole Miss is out a 2017 bowl game (and maybe more) and about $10 million so far, all while waiting to see which sanctions the NCAA tacks onto the self-imposed stack. The future is bleak. Nobody wants to slump into spring like this.

(Dedicated Ole Miss haters, you may skip ahead to the links, if you like.)

So let’s have a festive Monday and remember the Ole Miss good times! They were somewhat deceptively good, if we choose to accept the NCAA’s reality as the real one, but they were still good!

A top-10 recruiting class outta nowhere, never mind how! Beating Nick Saban, then taking us on a tour of Oxford to find the missing goal post! That moment in 2014 when the state of Mississippi was undeniably the center of the sport! Beating Saban twice in a row and nearly making it three! Having three first-rounders in 2016, even though they were names who attracted varying levels of NCAA attention! That moment last year when it looked like the Rebels were about to overcome the losses of those guys, whoop Florida State, and enter Playoff contention! Laquon Treadwell beating a horrifying injury and finishing with one of the country’s most entertaining careers!

And that time a star lineman finished his suspension-marred career by running in a touchdown during a blowout win in the hallowed Sugar Bowl:

Never mind which star lineman. OK, it was Laremy Tunsil, the player whose recruitment and whose draft night both dragged eyeballs toward this thing. But still! Look at the big man run off on the plug twice.

In these mighty dance steps, you can see the weight of scandal slipping aside. The Rebels’ highest-ranked recruiting class ever was in the middle of delivering a major bowl win, and from here on out, decades of gray skies had finally given way to sunshine. We now know the ending, but we didn’t at the time, and it was more fun then.

Ole Miss fans have their own memories that’ll surface back up in time, but for me, an uninvested neutral, that was the high point. That and Katy Perry, queen of Oxford.