College Football Overtime: Lane Kiffin’s Ole Miss transfer portal success, LSU’s failure top Week 11 takeaways

College football continued as expected in Week 11. It got weird.

A powerhouse walked into Bloomington in a matchup between Indiana and the defending champion Michigan Wolverines. Of course, the Hoosiers won and moved to 10-0.

Georgia? The bully of the SEC and winners of 52 straight against teams not named Alabama? It lost as the Portal King — all hail Lane Kiffin — earned a signature win in Oxford.

Remember when Death Valley felt like a house of horrors for the visiting team? Alabama fans sang “goodbye” to the Tigers in a blowout win.

Throw in a top-10 team going down (Miami), a Colorado statement and a historically bad performance by Florida State, and the week that was in college football delivered.

Week 11 is over and you know how this works: Let’s run through College Football Overtime, highlighting everything you need to know from the week that was in college football.

Ole Miss came into the 2024 season with a brash stated goal: Make the College Football Playoff. It became a north star for the program in 2022 when the 12-team playoff was first announced.

The Rebels, who haven’t won a conference championship since 1963, no longer wanted to be a nice story or a surprise 10-win team. They wanted to contend.

“The days of Ole Miss playing second fiddle and being happy with the middle of the SEC are over with,” Grove Collective executive director Walker Jones told 247Sports this offseason. “That’s not why I’m in it. That’s not why coach (Lane) Kiffin is in it, (basketball coach) Chris Beard or (athletic director) Keith Carter.

No moral victories in sight for the Rebels on Saturday in Oxford as their eight-figure roster helped upend No. 3 Georgia, 28-10, for a program-defining win. The No. 16 Rebels (8-2) needed a win to keep their playoff hopes alive. Now, they’re thriving with only Florida and Mississippi State remaining on the schedule.

Things lined up well for 2024 for Ole Miss to push all their chips into the center of the table. The Rebels had an All-America candidate at quarterback in Jaxson Dart. Thirteen starters were back around him. The schedule, sans teams like Texas, Alabama and Tennessee, set up extraordinarily well.