Mississippi State football's best Thanksgiving wins in the Egg Bowl

Nothing goes together quite better than Thanksgiving and football. America's most beloved sport has been a fixture on the holidy for well over a century. In fact, football has been played on Thanksgiving practically since the sport's inception in the late 1800s.

And though the NFL has long been the "main event" nationally on Turkey Day, it was in the college ranks that the tradition of Thanksgiving football began. Many programs made playing on the holiday an annual affair, and in many cases, Thanksgiving games were reserved for fierce rivalries.

Mississippi State football fans know this well. Their heated rivalry with the Ole Miss Rebels, the Egg Bowl, has grown synonymous with Thanksgiving. Mississippi's SEC institutions have played each other on Thanksgiving upwards of 30 times (the exact number is unknown), and in recent years, the Egg Bowl has been the designated college football game played in primetime on Thanksgiving night.

That's not the case this season though. The 2024 edition of the Battle for the Golden Egg will instead take place on Black Friday. How fans from either side feel about the move depends entirely on who you ask. It's certainly a polarizing topic, though there's no questioning how college football fans nationally feel about it.

But since we have to wait an extra day to see the Bulldogs and Rebels go at each other's throats, I thought we could look back on some of Mississippi State's best moments in the Egg Bowl on Thanksgiving. And there have been some fun ones over the years.

I've ranked the Bulldogs' Top 5 Thanksgiving Egg Bowl moments, but we'll start with an honorable mention.

Honorable Mention - Mississippi State wins the 2018 Egg Bowl 35-3

The 2018 season was a bit frustrating for Mississippi State fans, as they Bulldogs didn't quite live up to preseason expectations. But they got to take out a lot of those frustrations on Thanksgiving night with a 35-5 whipping of Ole Miss. The Bulldogs ran for 309 yards on the Rebels while holding the opposition to just 189 total yards. MSU QB Nick Fitzgerald had total 228 yards and three scores himself. Three points was the fewest Ole Miss scored in a home Egg Bowl since 1996.

This game comes in as an honorable mention because, despite the fun of the beat down, it wasn't the most exciting game to be played. Honestly the biggest highlight of the game came at the end of the third quarter when an all-out brawl broke out that led to every single player on both teams earning unsportsmanlike conduct penalties.

And the best part? The brawl only broke out because of a play that the officials then determined didn't actually count. If that doesn't perfectly describe the Egg Bowl, then I don't know what does.