Egg Bowl
The Egg Bowl (traditionally named “Battle for the Golden Egg”) is the name given to the Mississippi State–Ole Miss football rivalry. It is an American college football rivalry game played annually between Southeastern Conference members Mississippi State University and Ole Miss (The University of Mississippi). The teams first played each other in 1901. Since 1927 the winning squad has been awarded possession of the "Golden Egg Trophy"; after ties, the previous winner retains possession. The game has been played every year since 1944, making it the tenth longest uninterrupted series in the United States. Ole Miss leads  the series 64–45–6 through the 2021 season. The game is a typical example of the intrastate sports rivalries between public universities. These games are usually between one bearing the state's name alone, and the land-grant university, often styled as "State University." Like most such rivalries, it is contested at the end of the regular season, in this case during the Thanksgiving weekend. The Egg Bowl has been played on Thanksgiving 23 times, including from 1998 to 2003, in 2013, and from 2017 to 2021. Series history. The first game in the series was played on October 28, 1901 , at Mississippi State. Mississippi State, then known as the Mississippi A&M College and nicknamed the Aggies, defeated Ole Miss, nicknamed the Red and Blue at that time, by a final score of 17–0. The two squads met on the gridiron every year from 1901 until 1911 and then, after a three-year hiatus, resumed the series in 1915; since that 1915 meeting the two teams have met on the field every season with the exception of the 1943 season, when neither school fielded teams due to World War II. From 1973 through 1990, the game was played at Mississippi Veterans  Memorial Stadium in Jackson, which seats about 62,000. The stadium was centrally located in the state and the state's only venue capable of seating the anticipated crowd; for many years Vaught–Hemingway Stadium in Oxford seated only about 32,000 and Scott Field in Starkville seated only about 31,000. Both campus venues have been considerably expanded and are now capable of accommodating the expected crowds, and both have been continually upgraded to the point where they are superior in amenities to Veterans Memorial Stadium. At one point the level of intensity was such that a victory by one of the  schools in this game could salvage what had otherwise been a poor season. This dynamic has proven not to be applicable every year, however; in 2004 Ole Miss won the game but fired its coach, David Cutcliffe, the next year following a disappointing season. Mississippi State dominated the first part of the series with a 17–5–1 record against Ole Miss. However, Ole Miss now leads the series, due largely to its performance in the rivalry under Johnny Vaught. Vaught went 19–2–4 against the Mississippi State during his two separate tenures at Ole Miss. The series has favored Mississippi State most  recently; as of the 2019 season, when removing the wins that Ole Miss vacated from 2012 and 2014 due to NCAA violations, the past ten games have included only two victories for Ole Miss and six for Mississippi State. The birth of the Golden Egg. The Aggies (Bulldogs) dominated the early days of the series including a 13-game A&M winning streak from 1911 to 1925 during which time the Aggies outscored the Red and Blue by a combined 327–33. Through 1925 Ole Miss had won only five times out of 23 total contests. In 1926 when the Red and  Blue ended their 13-game losing streak by defeating A&M 7–6 in Starkville, the Ole Miss fans rushed the field with some trying to tear the goalposts down. A&M fans did not take well to the Ole Miss fans destroying their property and fights broke out. Some A&M fans defended the goal posts with wooden chairs, and several injuries were reported. According to one account: To prevent such events in the future, students of the two schools created the "Golden Egg," a large trophy which has been awarded to the winning team each year since 1927. The trophy is a  large football-shaped brass piece mounted to a wooden base and traditionally symbolizes supremacy in college football in the state of Mississippi for the year. The footballs used in American football in the 1920s were considerably more ovoid and blunter than those in use today and similar to the balls still used in rugby; the trophy thus, to modern eyes, more resembles an egg than a football. The awarding of the "Golden Egg" was instituted in 1927 by joint agreement between the two schools' student bodies. In the event of a tie (before overtime was instituted in Division I college  football in 1996) the school that won the game the previous year kept the trophy for the first half of the new year and then the trophy was sent to the other school for the second half of the new year. The game was given the nickname "Egg Bowl" by "The Clarion-Ledger" sportswriter Tom Patterson in 1979.