BOULDER, Colo. -- Mississippi Coach Van Chancellor can easily count on one hand the number of mediocre teams he has coached in 14 years with the Lady Rebels. Early this season, Chancellor expected to add one more finger.

Preseason polls picked the Lady Rebels as a No. 17 team at best and placed them seventh out of 12 teams in the Southeastern Conference. After tiny St. Mary's College (Ca.) upset Mississippi in just it's third game of the year, Chancellor and his players couldn't help but wonder if the NCAA soothsayers had been right on the mark.

"We came back and everybody was pretty down because we had such a good preseason workout," Lady Rebels guard Kim Gilchrist said. "After the loss, it really just clicked and we had a better work attitude in practice."

Mississippi has lost one game since.

After the stumble at St. Mary's, the Lady Rebels rode a 25 game win streak into the SEC Tournament before losing to Georgia in the second round. They captured their first SEC regular season title with an 11-0 record and finished No. 5 in the final Associated Press Poll -- their highest finish ever.

Today, No. 9 Penn State must deal with "The Little Team That Nobody, including the coach, thought could, but did."

The third-seeded Lady Lions will face the second-seeded Lady Rebels in a Midwest semifinal at 10:38 EST in the Coors Events Center. The winner will face the Southwest Missouri State/UCLA winner Saturday for a trip to the Final Four and Los Angeles.

"We've been an Atlanta Braves success story," Chancellor said in his deep, southern drawl. "This has been an unbelievable year. I never dreamed that when St. Mary's College beat us in November they we could have come this far."

But No. 2 Tennessee can believe it, so can No. 13 Vanderbilt and No. 18 Alabama -- all of whom fell to Mississippi. Yet, how the Lady Rebels have managed to come this far remains a mystery -- even to their coach.

No Mississippi player stands taller than 6-foot, but that hasn't stopped the team from outrebounding 20 of 32 opponents -- including the Lady Volunteers and the Commodores. For those who may have forgotten, Tennessee outrebounded Penn State, 51-38, in its victory over the Lady Lions in December.

Chancellor doesn't consider the Lady Rebels to be "great" 3-point shooters, either. Yet Gilchrist is No. 2 in the nation in accuracy from behind the stripe, connecting on 53.2 percent of her attempts.

So what is it, then, that makes this team click? Chancellor still has no idea.

"I'm being honest, if you're asking me how we do it -- I don't know," he said. "One day its one player and one night its another player."

As their statistics indicate the Mississippi starters have all stepped up about an equal number of times. Four of the five average double figures in scoring, with senior forward Charlotte Banks leading the bunch at 14.6 points per game. Sophomore forward Clara Jackson, who averages 13.3 ppg, leads the sqaud in rebounding with an average of eight boards per game.

The Lady Rebels' preference for a slowed down, half court game provides a sharp contrast to the Lady Lions fast breaking, up tempo style. But it is Mississippi's athleticism that worries Coach Rene Portland the most.

"Not that we aren't an athletic team, but we play more of a structure game," Portland said. "We call a lot of plays from the bench and try to stay within the frame work of our game plan. We view Mississippi as going a lot of one-on-one, two-man, three-man game.

"Yes we do have size, but you have to be able to use size to your advantage rather than your disadvantage."