The Oxford Square

Are there any goat curses that involve Ole Miss football a la the Chicago Cubs? Did we once trade away Red Grange to Illinois for $100 and a sack of rice for the school cafeteria? I need to know, because barring a curse of the Galloping Ghost or some other unforeseen explanation, I’m tired of Ole Miss losing every big game that matters.

As a lifelong Ole Miss fan, I’ve personally witnessed countless wins in the big three sports. Great Egg Bowl wins over Mississippi State, a kick sailing wide from Tiger kicker David Browndyke’s foot that propelled Ole Miss over a top 5 ranked LSU, and the win against Alabama in 2001 that seemed to lift an unimaginable weight off of the collective shoulders of our fans; all these games and others fill my Ole Miss memory bank. But when the chips are down, too often in my experience as an Ole Miss fan, we fall just a little short. I was born and raised in the dog days of Ole Miss football. Despite proudly donning a John Fourcade jersey almost as soon as I could lace my own cleats up, the Rebels went to only two bowl games from the time I learned to walk until the time I learned to drive.

Then, a miracle happened. Whether it was the grit of Tommy Luke or the talent of Randy Baldwin, Ole Miss popped unexpectedly onto the national stage and made a New Year’s Day bowl in 1990 and teed it up against Michigan. They were beaten like a rented mule, and they had to give the Ole Miss MVP award to a kicker. Over the next fifteen years, Ole Miss has had innumerable chances to step up on the national stage and proclaim, albeit temporarily, some degree of football supremacy in the SEC. Yet it seems like all of my memories of the big games, the best games of the Tommy Tubberville era and beyond are gut-wrenching losses. No game better exemplifies this than the 2003 LSU game. Toughest ticket I’ve ever seen for a college football game, great weather, a Manning under center, national television audience, and we lose because our All-American quarterback tripped?

There are other games. The 1999 game against a loaded eventual SEC champion Alabama squad ended up in a coulda, woulda, shoulda loss. Likewise later that fall against the most revered defense in the SEC, Ole Miss pushed Mississippi State all over the field, only to see a collapse of gut wrenching proportions and the Golden Egg stayed South of Oxford for another long year. In 2001, in what at the time was the longest game in college football history, Eli Manning had his national coming out party, only to lose Arkansas in a 7-OT thriller. Even the last few years, it is the losses that stand out over the wins. And while that may have more to do with arithmetic than psychology during Cutcliffe’s last year and the Orgeron era, witness the abhorrent win loss record of the last three years, I’m still haunted by the image of that asinine kicker from Alabama running around waiving a dollar bill after he kicked the Tide to victory in 2005 and the little yellow hanky that signified a phantom holding call that undermined a blocked punt against Georgia last year.

Maybe the old Vaught-era people fucked up and displayed such football hubris that the gods decided to never give us joy again. Maybe the ghost of Byron De La Beckwith is in cahoots with Earl Long and they’ve become fast friends in Hell, pleading with Satan to cause the ball to bounce the exact opposite of our way. Witness the ball meeting the backside of Tremaine Turner’s helmet in 2002. But for the love of Christ, even in those Vaught years, long before my day, our most memorable games, the games that define our best players and our best teams, were losses. Billy Cannon and Jake Gibbs in Tiger Stadium on Halloween in 1959. Scott Hunter and Archie Manning flinging it all over Legion Field in 1969. Both games are considered among the greatest college football games ever played. And do you know what? Ole Miss lost both of them. So what have we done wrong to deserve such punishment?