Mississippi State University, specifically MSU football and the Egg Bowl, has always had a significant importance to me.  
My father instilled in me a love for MSU from an early age. He went to school here and loved this school until the day he died when I was six. However, he was not the normal MSU fan who hated Ole Miss with every fiber of his being. He went to law school at Ole Miss and worked in Oxford, where I grew up.
This is not to say he did not enjoy the rivalry, the last thing played at his funeral was MSU’s fight song: a final jab at his friend who supported the red and blue school up north. Despite this, he left the rivalry to the game and did not let it affect his personal life.
Nov. 30 will mark 14 years without him, and with tensions higher than they have ever been between the two schools, I wanted to use his approach to the rivalry as a teaching moment about this game.
Do not let this game and this rivalry create another divide between people. As a loud, proud and obnoxious MSU fan who did not know when to shut up, I grew up in the midst of this rivalry in Oxford.
I heard every insult an MSU fan could hear. I have as much of a reason to hate the school and the people who support it as anyone, but I do not. Even though they are our rival and they have a different culture than we do, we are all still Mississippians.
I see people on both sides take this rivalry way too far, both over the internet and in person. People say completely unnecessary and hateful things because the two schools have historically feuded.
I know people on both sides who do everything within their power to not associate themselves with anyone from the other side.
The recent NCAA investigation and finger-pointing have done nothing to help the situation.
The reality is, people will read this and think one of two things. The guy writing this is a bleeding-heart millennial who needs to quit ruining “the fun in things,” or just think it is the other side who does all these things to make the rivalry so hate-filled.
Because you have become so instilled in the hatred of the other school, you cannot fathom the possibility of all this hate and finger-pointing being a bad thing for everyone.
The amazing thing is the way things have turned around so quickly. Remember 2014? When both schools were on top of the college football world together. This was probably the happiest the state has been in a very long time, not because one school was doing well, but because they were doing well together.
When the two are unified, everyone is a lot better off than when everyone is at each other’s throats. An example of this is the Special Olympics Mississippi 2016 Unified Egg Bowl, which raised over $20,000 last year. The Egg Bowl run, where the two schools ROTC programs meet halfway between the two schools in Calhoun City to show unity. They collect food people in need.
As a whole, when the two schools work together, things generally go a lot better than when the fan bases are divided and hate each other.
The division which football has caused is not good for anyone. There are so many bigger issues to worry about in this state: the quality of the education, obesity, poverty, the ineffectiveness of the state government, racism and so many other issues. Instead, we worry about the outcome of a game played between college students.
It is just a game; remember this as you walk into Davis Wade on Thanksgiving Day.
Yes, you want your team to win and the other team to lose every game. Yes, you should enjoy the game and forget about the problems of the world. But once the game is over, leave the negative emotions in the stadium. Do not carry them over to your personal life, like so many do.
Everything is fun in moderation, including rivalries; but unfortunately, this one has gone to an extreme, and no one wins when this happens.