I CAN REMEMBER THE TIME MY DAUGHter asked me, “Mom, what if I wanted to go to Ole Miss? Would you let me go?”
“You stop it!” I told her.
“No, really. I’m serious. What if I really wanted to go to Ole Miss? Would you still love me?” I could tell by the look on her face that she was trying to get my goat.
“Of course I’d love you, but there is no good reason for you to go to Ole Miss.”
We had already moved to Alabama, so I ended the conversation with this: “Between Mississippi State and the in-state tuition you get from Alabama and Auburn, every possible area of study is covered. There is no good reason for you to go to Ole Miss other than to hurt my feelings and kill your daddy.”
I always knew that there was something special about the Mississippi State–Ole Miss rivalry, but I never could put my finger on what exactly made it special until I traveled to California. I knew I was from a small part of the world, but it didn’t hit me how small until I traveled to Napa Valley for the first time. After my plane landed in San Francisco, I rented a car for the rest of the journey. Along the way, I saw billboards. So many billboards for teams. For football, the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders. For pro baseball, the San Francisco Giants, and for basketball, the Golden State Warriors. It made me think about Mississippi State football, and I wondered, Would I care so deeply about my team if I had a major-league team to distract me? Would my home state be as crazy about the Egg Bowl if we had other options? What if the people of Mississippi had the option of cheering against each other on Saturday night but then joined together to cheer FOR a professional team on Sunday? That’s when I realized that our crazy is so concentrated on two college teams’ rivalry that it erupts out on one night a year during the Egg Bowl.
You may ask, “Why is it called the Egg Bowl?” and I would say, “Why isn’t every bowl game called the Egg Bowl?” It gets its name from the big football on top of the trophy that looks like an egg. In the “Battle for the Golden Egg,” the winner of the Egg Bowl gets to keep the trophy and throw it in the losers’ faces until the next game. More often than not, the game is played on Thanksgiving, when both teams take turns hosting the beautiful Thanksgiving-themed tailgates for their friends and family! I had a friend from another state ask, “Don’t you want to spend Thanksgiving with your family?” and my response was, “We are.” Plus, a Thanksgiving tailgate is a sight to behold. Turkey and dressin’, casseroles, pies, and all the fixin’s. Somewhere buried deep in a storage unit is a VHS tape of my husband and his friends lowering a turkey into a fryer on ESPN.
It’s been said that Mississippi is a club, not a state,1 and that sums up Mississippi in a nutshell. It’s rural, and people move to the state usually for one of three things: work, family, or rehab. People might move inside the state, from Tupelo to Jackson or Biloxi to Natchez, but most of the people who were born in Mississippi tend to stay. It’s not that the state won’t let you leave; it’s more Why would you want to? In Mississippi, you’re surrounded by people who love you, and you get to rake up kin at every turn. (If you ever find that life is moving too fast, I invite you to take a Mississippi slowdown. Walk barefoot in the rich Mississippi Delta soil, listen to some blues, or sit on a dock and watch the fresh seafood flow freely on the Gulf Coast.)
Mississippi is on the small side, so everyone knows everyone’s business. Then you go ahead and put two SEC West schools only a hundred miles apart, and you have a recipe for a rivalry that is something special. Whether the game is played in Starkville or Oxford, the homes of State and Ole Miss, respectfully, the players and fans have been going to school, church, and work together for a long time, so their only chance to outdo each other boils down to sixty minutes on the football field at the Egg Bowl. There’s no Sunday game or a national championship—we have that one game, so those braggin’ rights mean everything. For perspective, the only other state with two SEC schools in the same division is Alabama: the University of Alabama and Auburn. But even though the Iron Bowl is always a nail-biter of a game, the state of Alabama has more distance between the two schools and a little more good sense among the population.
I once watched the Iron Bowl with some of our Alabama and Auburn friends, and it stumped me. The game was a close one that went down to the wire, but at no time did the Alabama and Auburn fans dog-cuss each other or call each other names. In my wildest dreams I cannot picture a joint Egg Bowl watch party going that well.
Mississippians are more serious about football than their Southern graces, so my beautiful Hospitality State gets madder than a wet hen at a rivalry game. After living on top of each other for almost a year, we’ve bottled up so much animosity toward each other that by the time the Egg Bowl rolls around, there’s a big pot of hate waiting to boil over.
Now, both schools do love their fans. All are welcome. There are many schools that use the term sidewalk fans in reference to people that cheer for a team but didn’t attend the school, but neither of our schools would degrade their fans by putting them in that category. Our fans are divided between uses the sense the good Lord gave them and half stupid.2 When it comes to the half stupid, a college degree won’t keep you off that list or get you on it. Any and all are welcome to either ring a cowbell or yell “Hotty Toddy.”
You won’t hear me yelling Ole Miss’s famous “Hotty Toddy” cheer, because I’d be grounded if my mother ever heard me say it. Not because it’s Ole Miss but because it uses curse words in the cheer. It goes like this:
Are You Ready?
H*ll Yeah.…… D@mn Right
Hotty Toddy Gosh almighty who the h*ll are we?
Flim Flam Bim Bam Ole Miss
By D@mn!
Ever the sophisticate, Mississippi State cheers for their team by ringing cowbells. That started with a game many moons ago when Mississippi State was losing to Texas A&M and a cow walked onto the field (cows are no longer allowed on the field), and State went on to win the game. The cow was (obviously) good luck, so why not keep the luck going? Fans started bringing their cowbells to cheer on the Bulldogs.
Ole Miss is home to the law school and medical school, and they have supporters like Gerald McRaney, Tate Taylor, and Morgan Freeman. Doctors and celebrities are nice, but Mississippi State has a dairy… on campus. And not just any dairy. Mississippi State is home to the only top ten collegiate Jersey herd. When Ole Miss fans call State a cow college, State fans take pride in being one of the best cow colleges in the United States. And even an Ole Miss fan is happy to receive a Christmas delivery of Mississippi State cheese.
Because the players on both sides have spent most of high school either playing with or against each other, they know how important this one night is. They’re some of the best and brightest in Mississippi who love their teams properly, and the ones that aren’t from Mississippi are taught how to hate the other team during the recruitment process. The Egg Bowl has always had its share of scuffles, but during one game, the tension was so thick that you could cut it with a knife. It reached its boiling point and both teams broke into a fight at the fifty-yard line. With so many players on the field either fighting or trying to stop the fighting, the referee had no choice but to say, “Unsportsmanlike conduct on all players on both teams.” When the State coach started yelling at the Ole Miss athletic director, I think ESPN had to go on to the next game. How many athletic directors get called into the SEC commissioner’s office for one message? “Tone it down!”
I’m glad to say that our rivalry has toned down to the normal levels of hate and disdain. It helped that Ole Miss hired Lane Kiffin and State hired Mike Leach to lead the teams, and both coaches shared a mutual respect for each other. In 2022, Coach Leach won what we would later learn to be his final Egg Bowl and final game of his career. He passed weeks after that Egg Bowl.
In a statement on Twitter, Lane Kiffin said this about Coach Mike Leach:
I truly loved Coach Leach and every minute I shared with him. I have been able to work with several of his former players and coaches, and they have told me so many amazing stories about the impact he had on their lives. Going back to our years together in the Pac-12, I have always felt tremendous respect and admiration for Coach, his unique personality and his innovative mind, and I can’t imagine college football without him. I’m grateful to be part of his final win, hug him and watch him walk off like the winner that he is. I know God is welcoming the Pirate home now.3
After a game like that, followed by those beautiful words from Coach Kiffin, you would think that the rivalry would simmer down, but this is football and it’s SEC football and it’s SEC football in Mississippi, and we are still looking forward to the next Egg Bowl full of nuts.
1 I first read this in a piece by Wyatt Emmerich, who publishes the Northside Sun in Jackson, Mississippi, and other local papers across the state.
2 We’d never call anyone full stupid or plumb stupid, because even a broken clock is right twice a day.
3 Dani Mohr, “Ole Miss’ Lane Kiffin on Death of Mike Leach: ‘Can’t Imagine College Football Without Him,’” Mississippi Clarion Ledger, December 13, 2022.