What is the egg bowl? Ole Miss-Mississippi State rivalry, explained

On November 30, 2024By Littum

There are very few guarantees in this world.

But Miss Ole vs. Mississippi State getting weird is about as sure a thing as anyone will find outside of death and treasure.

The two teams play in the Egg Bowl every year for the eponymous Golden Egg, a trophy that was literally created to prevent the two schools from tearing down each other’s goalposts and hitting each other with chairs. This is the kind of stuff college football rivalries are made of and has endured over the years.

Although the egg bowl is not always played close, it is almost always chippy. It will fall on Black Friday in 2024 instead of Thanksgiving, but that will undoubtedly have no impact on the intensity on the pitch.

Mississippi State is looking to salvage what has been a miserable season by playing spoiler over its archrival, who looked DOA in playoff conversations after a Week 13 loss to Florida — its third of the year. A win over Georgia catapulted the Rebels back into playoff contention, and they now hope to beat the Bulldogs and stay in that conversation.

Here’s what you need to know about the Egg Bowl, including its namesake.

What is the golden egg?

The golden egg is the trophy that Miss Ole and the Mississippi State play. When Ole Miss wins the game, it will be in Oxford. If Mississippi State wins, it lives in Starkville.

The egg was commissioned to essentially give players from both schools something to play for instead of taking all of their post-game emotions out on each other.

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

Here’s a breakdown of the incident from The Mississippian, taken from Ole Miss website archives:

“After the final gun, the Ole Miss boys rushed to the field, warmly congratulated their warrior and proceeded to tear down the target. The Aggies swarmed the field but were slow to save the goals. A fisticuff ensued, but the melee was brought to an end by the more sober minded before the Aggies’ ‘chair brigade’ got 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 quell further incidents, and the Golden Egg name came about because footballs – especially the smaller 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 actually came from something besides the trophy. In fact, Patterson dubbed the name because of the sheer mundaneness of the game’s play that year. Both teams entered the game 3-7, and as Rick Cleveland (now with Mississippi Today) recalls, Patterson decided to give the teams something to play for.

“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 also 3-7. That’s why the late Tom Patterson, The Clarion-Ledger sports editor at the time, called it The Egg Bowl. If none of our team would 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 every quarter of the game. As the new guy, I was assigned the first quarter. It was aimlessly of course.”

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

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