Is it time for a radical solution for college football in Mississippi?
This idea is not new. People have talked about it for decades. But I think its time has come.
A few facts to keep in mind:
- College students take a lot of online classes these days.
- Football players in particular take a lot of online classes.
- The NCAA allows players from other campuses of the same college to play on the main campus's team. For example, someone who took classes at the MSU campus in Meridian could play on our teams.
- Mississippi is the poorest state in the country, and it's one of smallest in population to have a Power 4 school (and unlike Nebraska and West Virginia, we don't have just 1)
- Ole Miss is doing well in the NIL right now (top 20), but probably can't sustain it indefinitely. We are not doing as well, but combined we would be a top 10 NIL program.
- The state government has been talking for years about building a nice new football stadium in Jackson
- The rivalry between Ole Miss and Mississippi State is toxic (though arguably not as much as it was last decade). However, most all of us here have friends who like Ole Miss, and vice versa. It doesn't need to be toxic.
- Depending on the year, Mississippi is #1 or close to #1 in NFL players per capita. There's plenty of talent here.
So you can see where this going -- we should consider dropping down to 1 college athletic program in the state, and get everyone unified behind it.
- The state would have to reorganize the university administration. We have 8 separate institutions, not 8 branches of the same institution. This would not be unprecedented - for example in North Carolina, there is the UNC system, and the main campus (Chapel Hill), NC State, Charlotte, Appalachian State, Wilmington, etc., are part of it.
- The football team would all need to live in Jackson and take online classes at whichever university they want to. This wouldn't be a huge change from their student lives for most of them though.
- I think it's safe to say the majority of fans in Starkville or Oxford most Saturdays would have a shorter drive to go to Jackson than to either campus.
- You can't call the team the Rebels or Bulldogs - you'd need a new color scheme that doesn't match any of the current universities. You'd need a new nickname too. But you could keep Bully, the Shark, etc., as the costumed mascots. Why not have a bunch of them? And the team would have to be just known as "Mississippi"
- The stadium could seat 100,000 and be near the top of the FBS in attendance.
- Instead of sniping at each other for players, we would be a unified state taking on the world.
- With the streamlining of expenses, there would be leftover money to add more sports, like men's soccer, lacrosse, etc.
- You'd probably want to do the same with basketball and everything else. Maybe keep the baseball programs separate so that Starkville and Oxford don't lose out completely.
- A lot of people wouldn't be happy when this was announced, but after a couple of years, we'd all love it.
- The SEC would be happy to go down to 1 SEC school but still keep the whole state engaged.
These are the cons I can think of:
- Both universities have spent a lot of money on stadiums that would no longer host games. Maybe they could play 1 non-conference game a year away from Jackson, rotating between Oxford, Starkville, and Hattiesburg or something. And maybe you could play state championships or even NCAA soccer games there.
- The student sections may not be as lively since they'd mostly be coming in from 2+ hours way. The campuses could probably pay to bus students in though.
- There's no guarantee we'll be a great program if we do this. Arkansas, Minnesota, and West Virginia aren't great programs. Nebraska is a shadow of what it once was. On the other hand, all of those programs would almost certainly be in a worse situation if they had to share their states with another power conference school.
- A lot of people nationwide would probably still informally call the new team "Ole Miss" and see it as a continuation of that program rather than a merger of all programs. We would need to make it clear that that's not the case.
Should we do this? Yes. I said we should do this 20 years ago. I said we should 10 years ago when we were both top 10 teams. But given the modern unregulated NIL landscape, we need the entire state to unite around the same program.
This is NOT a surrender. This is just recognizing the realities of the world we live in. Companies merge all the time. Sports teams in other countries merge. Mississippi would have the chance to be a national power.
