Between 1964 and 1990, Mississippi State played Southern Miss in football every year except twice. During that stretch, we won 12 times, lost 12 times and tied once (the NCAA later forced us to forfeit two of those wins).
Back then, Southern Miss was an independent team that filled its schedule with teams like Memphis, Arkansas State, Southwestern Louisiana, Southeastern Louisiana, Richmond and Chattanooga, in addition to its instate “rivals” Mississippi State and Ole Miss.
Meanwhile, we played a tough SEC schedule, and among those brutal games, Southern Miss would often pop up on the schedule.
We would be beat up and bruised coming into that game, while Southern Miss would be barely singed thanks to its cupcake schedule.Even worse, USM would have its game with us circled as one of their biggest games of the year, while we would see them as just another game in a long difficult grind.
Because of this, Southern Miss tended to play up for this game, even beating us seven years in a row from 1977 through 1983.
Our 1980 team, one of the best in our history, the team that went down to Miami and beat one of Howard Schnellenberger’s best, the team that pulled off the 6-3 win over No. 1 Alabama, lost to an inferior Southern Miss team 42-14. Had we not played them, we would have been a touchdown away from going into the bowls undefeated.
Back then, we would regularly lose some of the recruits we wanted to Southern Miss because, by playing them, we were artificially putting them at our same level.
We finally wised up to all this by 1990 and dropped Southern Miss from our schedule.
Since then, Southern Miss has joined Conference USA and has been below us. We’ve lost very few recruits to them that we actually wanted, other than a few like DeAndre Brown who didn’t qualify academically for an SEC school (and wasn’t going to come to MSU anyway).
And now, here we go again. Southern Miss still fills its schedule up with cupcakes, now teams like SMU, UAB, Tulane and Marshall. We still play a brutal SEC schedule, along with tough nonconference games.
Southern Miss, who has no natural rival anyway, is going to have its game with us circled as its big rivalry game, while we might have it sixth or seventh on our list of importance.
All of a sudden we have another tough rivalry game on our schedule, and we just don’t need that.
Is Southern Miss going to beat us? It’s possible, but they probably won’t.
And it’s not really the end of the world if they do. Even if beating us helps them get a couple of recruits we want, most recruits still know that the way to get on TV and play for national titles is in the SEC. And losing to Southern Miss won’t be any worse than losing to Troy, Maine, UAB, Tulane or Louisiana Tech.
It’s not that we should be afraid to play them, it’s just that there’s no benefit. By playing them, we get a tougher game than we bargained for against a team that will measure its season by whether or not they beat us.
If we win, so what? It’s a Conference USA team, so of course we did.
If we lose, it’s a big deal, and we’ll have to put up with Southern Miss fans (one of the country’s most annoying fanbases for sure) for a whole year.
Of course, now that the die is cast, my whole argument is moot. I’ll certainly be at the games in both Starkville and Hattiesburg, rooting on the Bulldogs. At this point, all we can do is win those games.
Harry Nelson is the opinion editor of The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected].