Why is Ole Miss-Mississippi State called the Egg Bowl? What to know of contentious rivalry
There are very few guarantees in this world.
But Ole Miss vs. Mississippi State getting weird is almost as sure a thing as anyone will find outside of death and taxes.
The two teams play in the Egg Bowl every year for the eponymously named Golden Egg, a trophy that was quite literally created to stop the two schools from tearing down each other's goal posts and hitting each other with chairs. It's the kind of stuff college football rivalries are made of, and that has endured over the years.
While the Egg Bowl isn't always played close, it is nearly always chippy. It will fall on Black Friday in 2024 instead of on Thanksgiving, but that undoubtedly won't have any effect on the intensity on the field.
Mississippi State is looking to salvage what has been a wretched season by playing spoiler over its archrival, which looked DOA in playoff conversations after a loss to Florida in Week 13 — its third of the year. A win over Georgia catapulted the Rebels back into playoff talks, and they're now hoping to beat the Bulldogs and stay in that conversation.
Here's what to know about the Egg Bowl, including its namesake trophy.
What is the Golden Egg?
The Golden Egg is the trophy for which Ole Miss and Mississippi State play. When Ole Miss wins the game it stays in Oxford. If Mississippi State wins, it resides in Starkville.
The egg was commissioned to, essentially, give players from both schools something to play for instead of letting out all of their emotions after the game on each other.
Indeed, in 1926, when Ole Miss snapped a 13-game win streak for Mississippi State (then Mississippi A&M) Ole Miss fans rushed the field and attempted to tear down the goalposts. ... In Starkville. Mississippi A&M students fought back with chairs, leading to the inception of the Golden Egg the following year.
Here is a detailing of the incident from The Mississippian, taken from the Ole Miss website archives:
"After the final pistol, the Ole Miss boys rushed to the field, warmly congratulated their warrior, and proceeded to tear down the goal. The Aggies swarmed the field, but were late to save the goals. A fistic combat ensued, but the melee was put to a stop by the more sober minded before the Aggie 'chair brigade' got into serious action."
The "chair brigade" is exactly what it sounds like: A group of A&M students who attempted to defend the goal posts with chairs.
The trophy was then commissioned in 1927 to placate further incidents, and the Golden Egg name came because footballs — particularly the less oblong ones used in the 1920s — resemble eggs. Simple enough.
Why is Ole Miss vs Mississippi State called the Egg Bowl?
Tom Patterson of The Clarion-Ledger coined the term Egg Bowl over 50 years later, in 1979.
While the name may seem obvious — Golden Egg = Egg Bowl — Patterson's inspiration was actually derived from something besides the trophy. Indeed, Patterson dubbed the name due to the sheer mundanity of the game of the game that year. Both teams entered the game 3-7, and as Rick Cleveland (now with Mississippi Today) recalls it, Patterson decided to give the teams something for which to play.
"The Bulldogs were 3-7 heading into the game," Cleveland wrote for Mississippi Today in 2017. "Ole Miss wasn’t much, if any, better. Steve Sloan’s team was 3-7 as well. That’s why the late Tom Patterson, The Clarion-Ledger sports editor at the time, named it The Egg Bowl. If none of our teams were going to be good enough to go to a bowl game — and they weren’t — Patterson decided to create one and cover it with a special section.
"From a distance of 38 years I can assure you: Never has so much been written about so little. Instead of one game story, we had stories about each quarter of the game. As the new guy, I was assigned the first quarter. It was, of course, scoreless."
Ole Miss would win that game 14-9, and the name would live on.
It has continued to be inadvertently perfect: a ridiculous name for a game that so often turns ridiculous.