LSU is playing football at Ole Miss Saturday. This once was a rivalry that squeezed into the status of “one of the great rivalries in college football.”
Understand, the series may be too lopsided in LSU’s favor (64-41-4) to be a premier rivalry, but there have been some pillars of greatness. Back-to-back top-10 matchups in 1958 and ’59 start the list. In LSU’s first national championship season, 1958, both teams were 6-0 entering the contest. LSU was ranked first in the AP poll and Ole Miss ranked sixth and the game was the first sellout in the history of Tiger Stadium, which then had 67,500 seats.
It almost seems charmingly quaint now, but these two fan bases use to yell “Go to Hell” to each other with regularity in the 1950s when that was pushing the envelope of vulgarity. For a while, it wasn’t uncommon to have “Go to Hell, LSU” leaflets bombed on campus, motivating 3,000 students to march to practice and cheer on the Tigers.
One of the heroes in LSU’s 14-0 shutout in ’58 was Max Fugler of Ferriday. He made key tackles on to two plays of a legendary goalline stand that saw the Rebels get as close as 12 inches from the end zone. Fugler was praised afterwards by coach Paul Dietzel for once making two tackles on the same play.
All these years later, the 1959 Halloween night match between No. 1 LSU and No. 3 Ole Miss at Tiger Stadium might be the top game of the entire rivalry. Somewhere this week, someone is listening to a tape of J.C. Politz’s radio call of Cannon’s epic 89-yard punt return and then the defensive stand he led in the closing seconds of LSU’s 7-3 victory. That Herculean effort cemented Cannon’s winning that year’s Heisman Trophy.
Another Halloween night matchup of note took place in 1964, and LaSalle High School product Billy Masters of Olla played a key role. He scored the touchdown -– on a 19-yard pass from backup quarterback Billy “Captain Easy” Ezell – that set up Ezell’s two-point conversion pass and fingertip, edge-of-the-end zone catch by Doug Moreau that gave LSU an 11-10 victory.
Mention of Ole Miss-LSU football cannot go without the mention of the name Manning. Archie Manning earned the nickname “SuperManning” as a sophomore at Ole Miss for directing the Rebels to a 27-24 victory over LSU at Tiger Stadium. The following year, he put the Rebels on his back in Jackson, Mississippi, and led them to a comeback 26-23 victory over LSU. Notably, Manning’s heroics cost LSU a major bowl invitation, the conference championship and at least, a perfect season. That LSU team gave up less than 40 yards rushing per game.
LSU finally turned the tables on Ole Miss in 1970 with a 61-17 trouncing in a night game at Tiger Stadium on ABC that included three scoring punt returns, two by Tommy Casanova. Manning struggled, wearing a seven-pound cast on his broken left arm, as he was intercepted twice and rushed for minus-25 yards. The victory gave the Tigers the SEC championship and a trip to the Orange Bowl.
A generation later, Manning’s youngest son, Eli, led Ole Miss to a victory over Nick Saban and LSU as a sophomore, passing for 249 yards and three touchdowns in a 35-24 victory, but he lost the next two seasons. That included a 17-14 setback at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium to third-ranked LSU as a senior in 2003. That kept the 15th-ranked Rebels from the SEC Championship game in a year when LSU won its second national championship.
Probably the craziest LSU victory in the rivalry was in 1972 at Tiger Stadium. Bert Jones to Brad Davis. That’s all that needs to be said. Final play. One second left. Much controversy that there was one second left. Davis temporarily lost the 10-yard pass from Jones in the lights, juggled it and caught it in the southeast corner of the end zone to tie it 16-16. Rusty Jackson ensured the moment would become legend by kicking the extra point for a 17-16 victory.
There have been other memorable games in the series, but I am out of space and out of time. Not even one controversial second left.