Egg Bowl Preview

No question about it: I enjoy Thankgiving more than any other holiday, and a lot of that enjoyment comes from the the annual football game between Ole Miss and Mississippi State, the Battle of the Golden Egg, or just The Egg Bowl. If you’re a Mississippian worth a damn, this is the football game, but I will argue with anyone that it is one of the best rivalry games in all of college sports, bar none. It has the animus, the history, and it is one of those football games in which you can just throw out the win-loss records of either team. Doesn’t matter if one team if winnless and the other is undefeated. It is going to be a hard-fought football game.

For people who don’t know: Why is it called the Egg Bowl? Well, because the trophy, pictured above, looks like an egg, and that’s because the football they played with back in the 1920s looked like that. The trophy was created because in 1926, on Thanksgiving Day, Ole Miss snapped a 13-game losing skid to the Aggies of Mississippi A&M, State’s old appellation, and stormed the field in Starkville and tried to rip down the goal posts. Melee ensued. To try to civilize the event, a trophy was created, and it was first awarded to Ole Miss after its victory the following season. The Battle of the Golden Egg was born. That’s what it was called until 1977 when a sportswriter in Jackson called it the Egg Bowl, and the name stuck.

Some of my Egg Bowl memories:

Egg Bowl 1986, Ole Miss 24 MSU 3. Tatooed in my brain his this Egg Bowl, played in Jackson in the rain and the mud. Ole Miss wore its red jerseys to start the game, and MSU wore white. At halftime, State comes out in its muddy white jerseys, but Ole Miss had changed clothes and was now wearing its navy blue jerseys. I’ve never seen anything like that before or since. To ten-year-old me, it was like a fresh new team emerged. It made quite an impression on me. If I didn’t know at the time if I was Ole Miss or Mississippi State in my affiliation, this was the game that clinched it for me.

The second one was the 1997 Egg Bowl, which I witnessed first hand. At Starkville, Ole Miss went for two instead of overtime to win outright 15-14. Stewart Patridge completed the conversion pass to Corey Peterson. Because of the victory over the Bulldogs, despite that both teams finished 7-4, Ole Miss got the bowl game invitation that year while MSU stayed home. LOL. The Rebs went to Detroit to take on the Marshall Thundering Herd and Randy Moss in the Motor City Bowl, a game I also witnessed first hand. The Rebs won 34-31.

After that game, I asked out a Rebelette I had my eye on, and she said yes, and she gave me her phone number, and stupid me, I never called her and followed through. Why? I had a girlfriend and I didn’t want to fuck that up. It was victory enough that she said yes. I ended up marrying the girlfriend, and I got my precious daughters out of that. That’s all I got out of it, though. Probably for the best, I guess, but that Rebelette. Damn. She was built-for-speed. I can see her in my mind’s eye clear as a bell. I digress.

There’s lots of these, but last year’s MSU win, Coach Leach’s last football game, was a good one, if for no other reason than I’m glad Leach went out with a victory in the Egg Bowl, his only one. This is the only Egg Bowl I’m glad State won.

2023 Prediction

State is a really bad team this year. Really bad. It doens’t have a head coach as it fired its coach a couple of weeks ago, and it has struggled to move the football all season long. That could mean, though, that in this game it finds its offense. This is how one ought to interpret the Egg Bowl. If State is going to score points, it will find a way to score them against Ole Miss.

The Ole Miss offensive line is banged up, gave up at least 4 sacks to a vastly inferior ULM team last week. The Reb were phoning it in pretty much all game during that one. That’s a Lane Kiffin thing, that his teams are hollywood teams that lack heart.

State has 56 players born in the State of Mississippi versus only 28 players on the Ole Miss squad. What? Yeah, you read that right. Kiffin isn’t recruiting Mississippi worth a shit and just uses the transfer portal.

I really dislike Lane Kiffin. I don’t know what I want from a head coach because Kiffin has that Hollywood quality and gets Ole Miss lots of attention in the media, and that is probably good, but his teams lack heart. They just do.

State is going to play to win. They get bowl eligibility if they take down Ole Miss as that will be its sixth victory.

Ole Miss is playing for its tenth victory of the season, which will be only the second time it’s ever done that. With a tenth victory they’ll get a pretty good bowl game and a chance to go for 11. Do I think these players give a shit about that? No, I do not. Kiffin’s teams lack heart, and Georgia beat the holy shit out of them two weeks ago, and I don’t think they’ve recovered from it.

I’m going to make a bold prediction here: At Starkville, MSU finds a way to win 28-25, sending the Rebels crying all the way home.

Or, does Ole Miss take out its frustration on the Bulldogs at MSU after getting manhandled by the Bulldogs at Georgia? I could see that, too. Rebs 45-0.

I can’t lose either way. I just love watching this particular football game.

Hotty Toddy! And Happy Thanksgiving!