The Early Egg

STARKVILLE – For the last four years, football fans in Mississippi have spent Thanksgiving Day the same way: watching the Battle for the Golden Egg. Like so much else in 2020, that plan has changed this year.

Instead, Mississippi State and Ole Miss will play their annual rivalry on Saturday, but that's not the strangest change to the tradition this week. No, the talk of this matchup since the day the schedule was released has centered around the fact that it will not be the last regular-season matchup on the calendar.

It has been 19 years since an opponent other than the Rebels has sat at the conclusion of State's schedule. And then, like today, it wasn't planned to be that way. In 2001, MSU hosted then-No. 10 BYU on Dec. 1 after the game was moved from its original date following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.

The rivalry is the ninth-longest uninterrupted series in college football. With the exception of that 2001 contest, it has been the Bulldogs' final game every year since 1947. So yes, 2020 will be a change, but as with all traditions, it wasn't always this way. In fact, the game has only been played on Thanksgiving Day 26 times out of 116 meetings.

When MSU's game with Auburn was rescheduled, giving State two games after the Egg Bowl, the questions started popping up. Has this ever happened before? Sure, maybe there was a year or two when there was one game after the rivalry, but two?

It's been a long time, more than 80 years, but it has happened. Flip back in the record books to 1936. It was an important year in the program's history.

That season MSU defeated Ole Miss, 26-6, on Nov. 21 before going on to claim victories over Mercer (32-0) and Florida (7-0). The final three wins were enough to propel the Bulldogs into the Orange Bowl against No. 12 Duquesne, their first bowl trip in school history.

While we're back in the early 1900s, the Golden Egg trophy was created in 1927. That was about the same time that the rivalry took up residence in its year-end spot on the schedule. Prior to 1926, the game was often played earlier in the season, sometimes as early as the second game of the year.

In the 84 years from 1936 to present day, there have been seven more "early" Egg Bowls. In 1937, State had a rematch with Duquesne after the rivalry. In 1940, 1945 and 1946, the Bulldogs played another familiar foe in Alabama to close the year, and in 1941 and 1942, there was a home-and-home series with San Francisco.

The Egg Bowl may be different this year, but the changes aren't completely unheard of, and Bulldog fans can take hope in this: In those eight years that the game has not ended the season, State is 7-1 in the Battle for the Golden Egg.

Mississippi State University Athletics

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