The Duke Blue Devils won several games the college football world didn’t expect them to win this season.
In the first season under head coach [autotag]Manny Diaz[/autotag], Duke scored two overtime touchdowns to take down Northwestern on the road in Week 2. The Blue Devils erased a 20-point deficit against the North Carolina Tar Heels in Week 5, beat the Florida State Seminoles for the first time ever, and scored a 39-yard touchdown on the final play of the game to knock off Wake Forest in the finale.
Thursday’s postseason battle in Jacksonville will be their hardest test yet.
The Ole Miss Rebels, after coming up inches short of a College Football Playoff bid, bring a top-10 scoring offense and a top-5 scoring defense with them to the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl. And despite the current college football landscape, most of their best players want one final chance to suit up.
Here are the Ole Miss players that Duke football fans need to watch out for the most on Thursday.
Jaxson Dart, QB
In his third year as the Ole Miss starter, Dart led FBS quarterbacks with 10.7 yards per attempt in 2024. His 3.875 passing yards put him in the company of Kyle McCord, Cam Ward, and Shedeur Sanders at fifth in the country, and he was one of six players with at least 25 passing touchdowns and six or fewer interceptions en route to First Team All-SEC honors.
Dart announced his intention to enter the 2025 NFL draft last week, but he also reiterated his excitement to play one final game for the Rebels. With seven 300-yard performances (including a 515-yard, six-touchdown game against Arkansas), he’ll be the best quarterback Duke has seen since Cam Ward by a sizable margin.
Suntarine Perkins/Princely Umanmielen, EDGE
It’s cheating a bit to lump these two together, but I’m not wasting two spots on two different edge rushers and they deserve equal mention with 10.5 sacks apiece.
Umanmielen, a former Florida Gators star, joined Dart on the First Team All-SEC squad with 13.0 tackles for loss and 46 pressures in his first season with the Rebels. Perkins, a sophomore, did even better on paper with a team-leading 14.0 tackles for loss, 58 total tackles, and 42 pressures. Bradyn Swinson and Sai’von Jones of the LSU Tigers were the only other SEC duo to both notch 40 pressures.
Walter Nolen, DT
With everything mentioned above, neither of those aforementioned edge rushers are the best defensive lineman on the Ole Miss roster. A former five-star prospect who started his career with the Texas A&M Aggies, Nolen notched 30 pressures, 14.0 tackles for loss, and 6.5 sacks from the middle of the Rebels’ line. The Rebels led the nation in sacks (52) and tackles for loss (116) in 2024, and this First-Team All-American is the engine who makes the Ole Miss defense run.
Trey Amos, CB
Yet another First Team All-SEC star on this Rebels defense, Amos makes sure that escaping the daunting Ole Miss pass rush is only half the battle. The Alabama Crimson Tide transfer who first played for the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns interecepted three passes and broke up 13 others, leading his conference in passes defended, and PFF credited him with an 82.0 coverage grade.
Ulysses Bentley IV, RB
Bentley’s volume numbers (349 rushing yards and three touchdowns) aren’t exceptionally impressive at first glance, but he spent much of the year behind Herny Parrish Jr. in the Ole Miss backfield. After a leg injury ended Parrish’s season three games early, however, Bentley roamed around for 136 yards and a score on 20 carries against Mississippi State in the regular-season finale.
That was just Bentley’s third game of the season with at least 10 attempts, and the sixth-year back will shoulder the load once again on Thursday. It’s up to the Duke defense to slow him down.