The next chapter of the Egg Bowl series will be written this Saturday night in Oxford, Mississippi. There is a lot on the line for both teams. For Mississippi State, this is our chance to finish up the regular season with an 8-4 record. Considering how challenging the past decade has been for the Bulldogs, an 8-4 record would be nothing less than gratifying to anyone wearing maroon and white.
TSUN is playing for pride this year. After having a couple of spectacular seasons capped off with a couple of Cotton Bowl wins, the Black Bears find themselves 4-7. Bowl eligibility is not in the cards for them this year, however an Egg Bowl win would certainly ease the pain.
This will be the 107th time these two rivals will clash. All of those years produced a ton of good football games and some interesting stories to boot. Obviously, this is a Mississippi State website so we're going to explore some of the high moments we've experienced over the years.
The very first Egg Bowl was played on October 28, 1901. That inagural game was played exactly where it should've been played, Starkville. Not surprisingly, TSUN threatened to leave before the game even started because they believed MSU (or Mississippi A&M as it was then called) had players that were not students of their institution. When they finally did play, Mississippi State made them pay and won the very first game 17-0.
The creation of the Golden Egg Trophy is something that all MSU fans owe to TSUN. From the year 1911 until the year 1925, Mississippi State won every game for seventeen years straight. When TSUN finally did put the beatdown on MSU (a whopping score of 7-6), Rebel fans took the victory as a moment to show the cow college exactly how classy and sophisticated they all were. Since the win took place in Starkville, the TSUN fans proceeded to swarm the field in an attempt to tear the goal posts down. MSU fans met their rivals on the field and, wielding wooden chairs among other things, they taught the unruly invaders a valuable lesson on the importance of having good sportsmanship. The MSU goal posts never fell.
Thus, the following year the Golden Egg Trophy was created so fans of the winning team would have something to take home and brag about for the entire year.
TSUN destroyed MSU 45-0 inthe 2008 version of the Egg Bowl with their new coach Houston Nutt. As painful as that loss was for Bulldog fans, it was not the largest margin of victory in Egg Bowl history. You have to go pretty far back in the record books, but that stat goes in MSU's favor. Can you imagine how the Rebel fans felt after an embarrassing 65-0 loss to MSU in 1915?
An Egg Bowl 6-0 win in 1941 sealed an SEC Championship for the Bulldogs.
In 1998 the Bulldogs won the Egg Bowl 28-6 and clinched their first SEC West division title in the process. The Bulldogs went on to the SEC championship that year and after leading much of the game, they lost to Tennessee late. Tennessee went on to win the national championship.
The 1999 Egg Bowl, known as "The Pick And Kick" saw a losing Mississippi State team (20-13) rally late in the fourth quarter to tie the game. With only 20 seconds left of the clock, instead of kneeling and taking the game into overtime, TSUN decided to throw a deep pass that bounced off the hands and foot of MSU cornerback Robert Bean. Eugene Clinton finally intercepted the ball and returned it deep into Rebel territory. With 8 seconds left on the clock, MSU kicked a field goal to win the game.
In 2007 Mississippi State was losing late in the fourth quarter 14-0. The tenacious Bulldogs rallied and put 17 points on the board in the final 7 minutes and 51 seconds. The win gave TSUN a winless season in SEC conference play for the first time in 25 years.
Unfortunately, it must be noted that TSUN leads the overall series 60-40. There were 6 tie games between the schools over the years. Hopefully, under the leadership of head coach Dan Mullen, the Bulldogs can begin to close the gap on the Black Bears. Last year was a great start. The Bulldogs hung 41 points on TSUN, the most points they've scored in the Egg Bowl since 1917. Those were the days the Bulldogs were dominant. Maybe last year's win was a sign of things to come.