OXFORD ― You won't hear pads popping at Ole Miss football's spring game, but you might catch the exertions of a ketchup bottle or the rustling of a pack of buns.

The 2024 Ole Miss Grove Bowl Games will feature a hot dog eating contest, coach Lane Kiffin said Tuesday. And it will come with quite the headliner.

Joey Chestnut, a competitive eater famous for gobbling hot dogs better than anyone else on Earth, will be in attendance, Kiffin said.

"I did what everybody does nowadays," Kiffin said. "I just DMed him. Slid into his DMs."

The hot dog eating competition comes as part of a spring game revolution engineered by Kiffin.

There will be no 11-on-11 football played at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium on Saturday (3 p.m., SEC Network+). Instead, the Rebels will play some seven-on-seven football paired with skills competitions designed to be fun. Kiffin compared it to what NFL fans see at the Pro Bowl every year.

Kiffin said the event will include fan involvement with Ole Miss' fraternity and sorority organizations. The Rebels will also compete in a dunk competition and an obstacle course.

With Chestnut on site, there's little doubt that the hot dog competition will be the headline event, though.

Asked to handicap the field, Ole Miss offensive lineman Nate Kalepo said fellow lineman Diego Pounds is the favorite. Pounds, an offseason North Carolina transfer, stands 6-foot-6 and weighs in at 330 pounds.

"That's a big boy," Kalepo said.

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Kalepo predicted that Pounds would eat somewhere in the neighborhood of 17 hot dogs. Chestnut, the world-class glutton, ate 76 hot dogs in 10 minutes in 2021 to set a record.

Someone who could rival Pounds, in Kalepo's mind, is redshirt freshman Lane Hewett, who comes in at 6-foot-2, 280 pounds.

Kiffin said he believes the traditional spring game model doesn't offer much value from a self-evaluation perspective. Its usefulness would be particularly minimal this season, with offseason injuries and procedures sidelining several key contributors and no doubt distorting the depth chart.

"If you watch ... unless a coach is worrying about being on the hot seat and trying to please the fans, very rarely do they run more than a few types of plays and schemes," Kiffin said. "I don't know that the traditional spring game really gives you very much."

Kiffin said he thinks traditional spring games have persisted in other places simply because that's how things have always been done.

"I think if you think outside of the box and the traditional way of doing things, I think over time the spring game really isn't of much value," Kiffin said.

"We'll see what this is like."

David Eckert covers Ole Miss for the Clarion Ledger. Email him at deckert@gannett.com or reach him on Twitter @davideckert98.

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Why Lane Kiffin will bring Joey Chestnut to Ole Miss football Grove Bowl