Quarterback Camelot: Who Will Fill Matt Corral's Vacant Ole Miss Throne?

Matt Corral will begin his steps into an NFL career this week, leaving Ole Miss with a huge question mark entering the 2022 season.

Sports teams are a lot like kingdoms.

Eventually, a ruler gives up his throne for one reason or another, and someone has to take his or her place. Sometimes in our history books, there are power struggles for who will gain possession of the vacant throne. After a ruler of particular power and popularity abdicates his royal title, there is always clamor as to who can step in and keep the kingdom's trajectory on a positive path.

Our proverbial Camelot, in this case, happens to be Ole Miss.

A quarterback is not a king, and a king is not a quarterback. That analogy here is used merely to illustrate a point: Ole Miss is losing one of its greatest signal callers in program history to the NFL this week, and as the calendar inches towards the month of May, no heir apparent has been found for one Matt Corral in Oxford.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, however. Two young gunslingers bearing different methodologies and skillsets have become the leaders in the clubhouse to replace the California native: his understudy Luke Altmyer and incoming transfer and challenger Jaxson Dart. Both have very limited collegiate experience, so growing pains will be expected, but Lane Kiffin has the challenge of selecting who will navigate his offense now that Corral has moved on to greener pastures.

Fortunately for Ole Miss fans, this isn't a new occurrence in their team's recent history.

Since Eli Manning's reign in Oxford came to an end with the 2003 season, Ole Miss has seen many quarterback battles, some of which were never really resolved, and the team suffered as a result. Others saw a clear frontrunner emerge rather quickly. Others, still, mirrored the 2022 installment of this phenomenon with a transfer quarterback battling for a spot with a high school signee.

What unfolded with the replacement of Eli Manning is something that Ole Miss hopes to avoid in 2022. The 2004 season saw Michael Spurlock, Ethan Flatt and Robert Lane take snaps in a 4-7 campaign for the Rebels that doomed their head coach and ushered in the Ed Oregon era in Oxford. Despite having won 10 games and a Cotton Bowl the year prior, David Cutcliffe found that without a sure quarterback (and without much other talent to speak of), fan base angst mounts quickly. 

Lane Kiffin has the advantage of a more talented roster at his disposal for 2022 than Ole Miss had in 2004, but the point remains the same.

Michael Spurlock

Eli Manning

David Cutcliffe and Eli Manning

Fast forward to 2016. Ole Miss has just come off another 10-win season (its first since Eli left town earlier in our story), but this time, it gets to keep its quarterback for another season in Chad Kelly. 

For a while, at least.

Kelly tore his ACL late in the year in a game against Georgia Southern, Shea Patterson's redshirt was burned, and Ole Miss still finished 5-7 and failed to reach the postseason. Patterson, a five-star recruit out of IMG Academy, entered the 2017 season as the clear starting quarterback, but he went down with a season-ending knee injury of his own, and in stepped Jordan Ta'amu, a transfer from a military school in New Mexico. 

Although this was never an official "quarterback battle," Ta'amu's late-season success (including an Egg Bowl win over Mississippi State in Starkville), had many fans wondering what the quarterback position would look like in 2018 once Patterson returned to health.

Of course, Patterson would take his talents to Ann Arbor, Michigan, that offseason once the NCAA levied its penalties against Ole Miss, so that was a moot point. But what can't be avoided is that a quarterback controversy was brewing in the wake of one of the greatest talents in school history exhausting his eligibility. 

Chad Kelly

Shea Patterson

Jordan Ta'amu

From Spurlock to Patterson, those stories all ended badly for Ole Miss, but there were other factors at play, most of which were tied back to some form of recruiting. Ole Miss didn't recruit well to replace talent when Eli Manning left, and the NCAA made sure that Ole Miss couldn't recruit well once Kelly was gone. That's not the case now.

For the first time in a long time, Ole Miss is coming off a 10-win season without those problems. Recruiting has been strong under Lane Kiffin, transfer portal included, so regardless of who plays quarterback, this team's floor has likely been raised by that alone.

Still, not having a strong quarterback takes notches out of your win column, regardless of how talented the rest of the roster is. Just like a lack of a strong king renders a talented army useless on the field of battle. 

Who will take Matt Corral's throne? We may not know until well into the 2022 season, if we're being honest. The front half of Ole Miss' schedule lends itself perfectly to extending a quarterback competition to ensure the right choice is made. So, for a while, that question remains up in the air.

Regardless of who the final choice is, he will have big shoes to fill when he trots out onto the field in September. 

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