What is the eggshell? Ole Miss-Mississippi State rivalry explained

November 29, 2024

There are very few guarantees in this world.

But Ole Miss vs. Mississippi State getting weird is almost as certain as anyone outside of death and taxes is going to find.

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The two teams play in the Egg Bowl every year for the eponymous Golden Egg, a trophy literally created to prevent the two schools from tearing down each other’s goal posts and hitting each other with chairs. That’s the stuff college football rivalries are made of, and it’s endured over the years.

Even though the egg bowl isn’t always played close, it’s almost always chippy. In 2024, it will fall on Black Friday instead of Thanksgiving, but that will undoubtedly have no impact on the intensity on the field.

Mississippi State is trying to salvage a miserable season by betraying its archrival, which was considered DOA in the playoff talks after a loss to Florida in Week 13 – the third of the year. A win over Georgia catapulted the Rebels back into the playoff conversation, and they now hope to beat the Bulldogs and stay in the conversation.

Here’s what you should know about the Egg Bowl, including its namesake trophy.

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What is the Golden Egg?

The Golden Egg is the trophy that Ole Miss and Mississippi State are playing for. If Ole Miss wins the game, it stays in Oxford. If Mississippi State wins, it will be in Starkville.

The mission for the egg was essentially to give players from both schools something to play with instead of taking out all their emotions on each other after the game.

In fact, in 1926, when Ole Miss snapped a 13-game winning streak over Mississippi State (then Mississippi A&M), Ole Miss fans stormed the field and tried to tear down the goal posts. …In Starkville. Mississippi A&M students fought back with chairs, leading to the introduction of the Golden Egg the following year.

Here is a detailed description of the incident from The Mississippian, taken from the archives of Ole Miss’ website:

“After the final shot, the Ole Miss boys rushed onto the field, warmly congratulated their warrior and set about tearing down the goal. The Aggies stormed down the field but arrived too late to save the score. A scuffle ensued, but the melee was stopped by more sober heads before the Aggie “chair brigade” came into serious action.“

The “Chair Brigade” is exactly what it sounds like: a group of A&M students who tried to defend the goalposts with chairs.

The trophy was then commissioned in 1927 to appease further incidents, and the name “Golden Egg” came about because footballs – particularly the less elongated ones used in the 1920s – resemble eggs. Very easy.

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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 = eggshell—Patterson’s inspiration was actually derived from something other than the trophy. In fact, Patterson named the name because of the sheer ordinariness of the game’s play that year. Both teams entered the game 3-7, and as Rick Cleveland (now at Mississippi Today) recalls, Patterson decided to give the teams something to play for.

“The Bulldogs entered the game 3-7,” Cleveland wrote for Mississippi Today in 2017. “Ole Miss wasn’t much, if anything, better. Steve Sloan’s team was also 3-7. That’s why the late Tom Patterson,” then-Clarion-Ledger sports editor, called it The Egg Bowl. If none of our teams were going to be good enough to play in 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 before has so much been written about so little. Instead of a game story, we had stories for each quarter of the game. As a new man, I was assigned the first quarter.” Of course it was goalless.

Ole Miss would win that game 14-9 and the name would live on.

It continues to be unintentionally perfect: a ridiculous name for a game that so often becomes ridiculous.

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