Ole Miss receives a vote to win the SEC. No, really.
Meet Ole Miss — the 2012 SEC champions.
At least that's what one media member anonymously proposed Thursday when the SEC media poll was released prior to the start of the final day of media days in Alabama.
The Rebels, which finished 2-10 a year ago, fired coach Houston Nutt and dismissed their best player Nickolas Brassell during the offseason, not only received a vote to win the SEC West, they received a vote to win the SEC as a whole.
I'm all in favor of optimism, but this is ridiculous.
[Related: Underachiever Texas A&M has to prove it belongs in the SEC]
Ole Miss has never represented the SEC West in the championship game and for good reason. It plays on the same side of the league as LSU, Alabama and Auburn, which have combined to win four of the last five national championships. Not to mention a pretty good Arkansas team also plays in that division.
Need more perspective on how crazy this is? Ole Miss has not won a league game since beating Kentucky 42-35 in 2010 and that's the only league game the Rebels have won in the past two seasons.
Luckily it was just one vote and there's not some sort of media uprising brewing to throw off the natural order of things. Most media voted sanely and picked LSU to win the league championship with Alabama in second.
It's probably just as well that the identities of the 222 media members who vote in the media poll are not publicly revealed. Still, when the league office received that ballot, it had to be wondering whether giving that person a vote was the right thing to do.
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