Ross Bjork

One day after Ole Miss head football coach Matt Luke addressed the Rebel fan base at a press conference, athletic director Ross Bjork released a letter Wednesday addressed to the university's supporters. Below is Bjork's letter in its entirety.

Greetings and Happy Holidays! I want to express my appreciation for the passion and love you have for Ole Miss and our athletics program. Over the past few weeks, I have heard from donors, fans and friends of Ole Miss and have had the chance to speak with many of you over the phone or in person. The viewpoints expressed are appreciated, and I take all input seriously.

In the last several years, we have experienced some incredible highs around our program. On the field, we played in back-to-back New Year's Six bowl games and brought the Sugar Bowl trophy to Oxford. Off the field, The Grove hosted one of the most iconic airings of ESPN College Gameday in history. In athletics, and thanks to your help, we built over $200 million in new or renovated facilities, and currently our student-athletes have the best academic profile in our history. The list of accomplishments goes on and on.

In addition to the successes, we’ve endured some real challenges. The unique complexity and length of the NCAA case created a cloud over our program for an unfair amount of time, and the sudden coaching change before the 2017 season infused more uncertainty.

The peaks and valleys of the last several years combine to create high expectations for future success, and like you, we feel the angst and disappointment when we don’t meet them. As Coach Luke stated on Tuesday, no one has higher expectations for this program than we do, and we must lock arms through the challenges to reach our potential. In fact, one of the earliest themes I shared with you when I was hired was the grand potential of Ole Miss - if you recall, I said our ceiling is yet to be defined, and our attitude will be “why not Ole Miss?”

Our 2018 football team has been through more adversity than most teams will experience in a decade, so our goal this year was to give them as much positivity and stability as possible. And despite the challenges we have faced, these student-athletes banded together under Coach Luke’s leadership and gave us everything they had each and every week, even when others said they had nothing to play for. They are to be commended for their perseverance, and we will always remember their commitment, especially the 2018 senior class.

Coach Luke is built to get our program back to where it should be and break through the next ceiling. He went through a rebuild as a Rebel during his playing days, he has been involved in turning around an historically unsuccessful program as an assistant coach, and he has been here when Ole Miss has successfully competed on the biggest stages in college football. Coach Luke is a great coach and knows what disciplined, blue collar and hard-nosed football looks like, and he knows how to get through challenges. Now that NCAA case is behind us, Coach Luke and his staff will have all of the resources to sell this great University and maximize our potential.

As the Athletics Director, my responsibility is to cast the vision for Ole Miss Athletics and to support our student-athletes with the best leaders and resources. Specifically for football, my plan is to do the following:

Support Coach Luke in making any and all adjustments to fix deficiencies.

Maximize our full potential by constantly improving every aspect of the program: salary pool, Manning Center (locker room and training room), student-athlete experience, gameday experience, academic support, etc.

Continue to enhance the recruiting operations to ensure long term success.

Maximize the recently completed restructure of our NCAA compliance and athletics legal counsel operations to proactively ensure we never have a major NCAA issue.

Build more fan support, one person, one meeting, one event, and one interaction at a time through personal relationships and delivering results.

We have prided ourselves on being a department that is accessible to all fans - constantly looking for new ways to gather feedback and fan thoughts. To that end, we will be announcing a series of “town hall” style meetings for early 2019. Look for more news in the coming weeks about specific times and locations.

In closing, I made a request to the Ole Miss family when I arrived in 2012 - I asked everyone to pull the rope in the same direction because you love Ole Miss and our student-athletes. Now is the time to get behind Coach Luke, our staff, our players and help showcase this great University so that we can attract the next wave of exceptional student-athletes like so many that have come before. To fully maximize our potential, we must show up every day with an optimistic mindset and execute with an unbelievable work ethic. We are Ole Miss.

Hotty Toddy and Go Rebels!

Ross Bjork