Some Ole Miss Football History

Ole Miss started its football program in 1893, going 4-1. The only opponent on that schedule still recognizable today is Tulane, which Ole Miss defeated 12-4. Hotty Toddy! That 12-4 score looks kind of weird, doesn’t it? That’s because football, as it was played in 1893, doesn’t resemble the game played today, really at all. I find it hard to wrap my mind around what it must have looked like. The forward pass isn’t possible, and even the snap, if I’m not mistaken, is pushed back with the foot instead of snapped through the legs with the hands, and apparently they just ran what are called mass plays over and over, and as I understand mass plays, they are plays in which the entire team rushes and attacks a particular player, over and over again, and that explains why you had deaths on the football field. When I imagine this game, it seems pretty boring to me. Big plays would have been few and far between.

The rules changes in 1905 lead to the creation of the forward pass, and I understand that the idea behind it was to open up the field of play, to dis-incentivize the mass plays, but the rules had to rejiggered several more times over the next several years until in 1912 you get what is more-or-less recognizable as contemporary gridiron football. It is only then that a score like 12-4 becomes weird-looking. The 1912 Rebels turned in a record of 5-3, dropping a 10-9 heartbreaker to Alabama at game played on their quad, which is so cool, and handing LSU a 10-7 defeat at State Field in Baton Rouge. From the very beginning, Ole Miss has taken a special interest in defeating LSU at LSU.

Those early seasons don’t give us very much to talk about. It is hard to find rosters with simple google searches, so you’d really need to get into a library to compile an in-depth history of those early years. The coaches aren’t paid professionals, so they change almost every season. Ole Miss finishes low or in the middle of the conference standings year in and year out until 1947, which is Johnny Vaught’s first season. The Rebels won the SEC that year for the first time. Before Vaught, though, Ed Walker coached the 1930-1937 Rebels squads, and his 1935 Rebels finished 9-3 and third in the SEC, losing to Catholic University in the Orange bowl by the score of 20-19. That was the Rebels first bowl game, but the Rebels would not go bowling again until that 1947 season and Coach Vaught’s 25-year tenure.

When you look over Ole Miss all-time records, it is scary to think about what it would have been like without Johnny Vaught. He was excellent. His 25 season boost the Ole Miss all time-win total by almost 200. The Rebels went bowling year-in and year-out during this time, and they were always competitive at the top-tier of the SEC along with Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and so forth. Those were the Ole Miss football golden years, for sure.

After Vaught retired in 1971 the wheels came off the wagon of Ole Miss football, almost immediately. Without even looking very deeply into it, to me it looks like internal politics played a role as there is some obvious nepotism going on with the Kinards. The athletic director hired his brother as Vaught’s replacement instead of doing any kind of search. Also too, football itself has a sea change with the recruitment of black players, and Ole Miss was the very last university in the SEC to embrace black players. You can’t really overstate how much black players have changed the game, so when Bear Bryant over at Alabama has enough power by then to not give a shit about his administration and he can just recruit black players freely, over at Ole Miss the Kinards are such a disaster that Coach Vaught has to come out of retirement to stabilize the 1973 team, fill in as athletic director, and hire a suitable replacement, and he picked Ken Cooper out of Georgia, whose football pedigree was excellent, but Cooper doesn’t have any power and so he can’t get anywhere with Ole Miss’ adminsitration on matters like recruiting, but also on matters like playing home games at home instead of at shitty Memorial Stadium in Jackson. Suffice it to say, by the time Cooper is head coach, Ole Miss football is just a mess, and it is in this transitional phase between the old and the new, and Ole Miss has it particuarly difficult because all of its iconography is based on the romanticized version of the Civil War. I actually like all that old stuff and find it endearing. Your mileage may vary, but Ole Miss needed to update.

That period is a wilderness for Ole Miss football. Victories get harder and harder to come by, and bowl games completely evaporate. Billy Brewer comes on as coach in 1983, and he’s my Ole Miss coach, the first coach I remember, and he coached the Rebels until 1993, when he was fired unceremoniously for recruiting violations, and I’m pretty such he took that pretty hard. Brewer was one of those true blue Rebels who played for those great Vaught teams. Brewer’s tenure is a mixed bag. He turned in two 9-3 seasons but also five losing seasons. Still, I remember many of those Rebels, like Randy Baldwin, Dou Innocent, Cassius Ware, Wesley Walls, Tom Luke and Russ Shows and Mark Young and John Darnell, Corey Philpot, Everett Lindsay, Bill Smith, Brian Lee.

Brian Lee is a fascinating figure in Ole Miss lore. He was the kicker at Ole Miss during that 1990 9-3 season in which Ole Miss was easily defeated by Michigan 34-3 in the Gator Bowl, which was Brewers best bowl invitation. Brian Lee scored the field goal in that game, but he’d gone through this horrible slump and could not hit anything. He’d missed something like twelve in a row. You can watch some of those games on television and it is sort of hilarious, because Brewer will sometimes go for it on 4th down because he knows Brian Lee is just going to miss the field goal if he sends him out there, and I’m not joking. The announcers talk about it, and then later in the game Lee goes out there to kick one and he misses it spectacularly, or it gets blocked. It goes on an on over the course of a season. I mean, it is completely fascinating. He couldn’t hit anything, yet Brewer stuck with him, and eventually he takes over the record for Ole Miss’ all-time scoring at the time.

There’s so many of those stories. The lore at Ole Miss is second to none, I think. We do have that. Those same early 1990s Ole Miss teams have one of Ole Miss’ all-time greats on the offensive line, Everett Lindsay, who went on to a ten-year career in the NFL. Lindsay weighed around 280, and that is up from linemen weighing 150-175 during the 1920s, with 200 being huge. When you watch Lindsay play at Ole Miss, he’s a dominant force on the line, and a huge factor in Ole Miss’ success. Today, the average offensive lineman weight averages about 305. That’s the result of every football program across the country having a strength and conditioning program, and I don’t think you can get men much larger than that without limiting mobility, and I would say that across the board, football as playing coming up in 2024 is cresting. It can’t really get much better. The passing game is a fine-tuned weapon. Receivers are fleet and wiley, and quarterbacks are precision-passing machines. Loads of big plays. Loads of scoring. It is football played at it’s very highest levels, I think, a historical high point, and just in time because I’m convinced another big system-changing turn is coming for college football, but unlike the last time, Ole Miss really does seem poised to capitalize with a visionary coach in Lane Kiffin.

None of it would be possible without Tommy Tuberville, who had a most outsized impact on the Ole Miss program, especially considering the brevity of his tenure. He only coached there for the 1995-1998 seasons, which just so happens to coincide with the entirety of my time as a student at Ole Miss. People still have hard feelings about him. Tubs shafted Ole Miss for division rival Auburn, and boy, Ole Miss fans were pretty steamed up about it at the time. I know I was. I loved Coach Tuberville. He was the coach who ended the confederate flag-waving at Ole Miss games. Those flags before Tuberville were still lingering as the de facto expression of Ole Miss pride at games, a sea of them waving. During Billy Brewer’s tenure, though, they were already anachronistic, at least in my view. It was Tuberville who got rid of them for good, with administration backing. They got around the free-speech issue by banning sticks as a safety hazard. That alone gives Tuberville high marks for improving the situation at Ole Miss, at least in my book, but Tuberville also just had exciting teams. He recruited and coached Deuce McAllister, the best Ole Miss running back of all time. Those were some fun teams, and that 1997 victory at LSU is one of my fondest Ole Miss memories.

If Ole Miss seems sort of fresh and modern and even cool today, and I think it does, you can give Tommy Tuberville a lot of credit for that. He made Ole Miss football competitive again, and he set the stage for David Cutcliffe, who was not exactly the most high-energy or inspiring football coach in the world, but without Cutcliffe there’s no Eli Manning, the greatest Ole Miss quarterback of all time (but who can be supplanted this season if Jaxson Dart has the kind of season I think he is capable of having), so it all sort of unfolds from there. So, historical coaches have to be Vaught, the greatest, then Tuberville, the pragmatic football coach, and then Kiffin, the visionary. Again, if you look at the history, I think it shows that Ole Miss really needs to hang onto Kiffin for a longer-tenure type of coach, if it can. It needs that stability as it lauches into this new era.