Ole Miss' Wilderness Status

Hugh Freeze spent much of his time leading up to this season speaking of the effort to get Ole Miss out of the wilderness, a reference to the 40 years the Israelites spent wandering the desert after leaving Egypt.  Now that we're at the halfway point of the season, it's time to conduct a wilderness check, complete with a custom map and corresponding Bible verses, as Ole Miss slowly marches towards The Promised Land of Regular Bowl Eligibility.

In the Bible, the Book of Numbers documents the 40 years of wandering mentioned above, which is mostly filled with the Israelites being MAJOR pains in the rump, whining and complaining about this and that (hey, just like the rest of us!).  So, using Numbers and some maps I found in a rigorous 10-minute Google image search, I was able to put together, in complete non-scholarly fashion, about where Ole Miss is in relation to the Israelites' journey.  Behold:

(right-click to embiggen)

As you can see, they're getting much closer, but they're not quite there.  At the very least, they've made their way out of a series of wilderness that dominate the Sinai Peninsula, which, by the way, seems like a very unfun place to be, especially trucking it around on foot. 

A few chapters before they arrived in battle with Auburn and the Chizikites (in the original Hebrew, it means, "ALL IN"), they tried to invade The Promised Land and got SMOTE TO THE NTH DEGREE by the Amalekites and Canaanites, represented here by Texas, Alabama, and Texas A&M, due to their lack of buy-in.  But, after repenting and re-buying in, they were awarded their first victory that allowed them to think this just might work out, which brings us to the corresponding Bible verses:

Numbers 21:2-3
And Israel vowed a vow unto the LORD, and said, If thou wilt indeed deliver this people into my hand, then I will utterly destroy their cities.  And the LORD harkened to the voice of Israel, and delivered up the Canaanites; and they utterly destroyed them and their cities; and the place was named Hormah.

Fittingly for the wilderness status check, Hormah means "devoted to destruction", which pairs up nicely with what Gene Chizik is doing.

So, while Ole Miss is currently on the outside looking in, they tallied their first victory and have perhaps made a few of the others inside The Promised Land of Regular Bowl Eligibility feel not so comfortable about facing them.