Here is my list of the ten greatest Egg Bowls of my lifetime and not surprisingly, they are all Bulldog wins.
I attended my first Egg Bowl game as a child back in 1969. The game was played in Starkville and as I recall, Ole Miss won rather handily. While the game itself was one sided against my beloved Bulldogs, it was the verbal abuse I took as a nine year old kid from an intoxicated Rebel fan that solidified my dislike of Ole Miss.
The game wasn’t called the Egg Bowl back then. It was known as the “Battle for the Golden Egg”. The name “Egg Bowl” was coined some years later by the Clarion-Ledger sports department to address the fact that neither team had played in a bowl game in some time. The C-L created the “Egg Bowl” as a way to create some hype for the Mississippi State vs. Ole Miss game. The name stuck.
While I haven’t been to EVERY Egg Bowl game since 1969, I have been to quite a few. Here’s my list of my ten favorite Egg Bowls.
Keep in mind that these lists were created from my range of my experiences. These are games that occurred during my lifetime that I either attended in person or watched on TV. (Games marked with * are one I personally attended.) These are not necessarily the greatest games of all time, but they are the ones that stick out in my mind, for better or worse.
Honorable mention:
* 2009 – MSU 41, Ole Miss 27 (Starkville). In Dan Mullen’s first Egg Bowl, the Bulldogs avenged the 45-0 embarrassment of the previous year with a decisive win over the Cotton Bowl bound Rebels. This was the first of three consecutive Bulldog wins in the series, the first time that had happened since the 1940’s.