No. 3: Wade Walker (1956-61)
Next on our list is Wade Walker, the man who preceded Davis and the man who hired him. That's right, when Walker was fired as head football coach after the 1961 season, he was allowed to remain as athletic director and he would hire Davis to replace him in what had to be an incredibly awkward situation.
It's hard to say if Walker was a worse administrator or coach. A college tackle at Oklahoma, he would be an assistant at N.C. State and Texas Tech before coming to Mississippi State where he was an assistant from 1954-55 before being handed the reins as head coach and A.D. in 1956.
Just like Davis after him, he would manage only one winning season in Starkville. And like Davis, that was in his second year in charge when he would go 6-2-1.
Meanwhile, in the rest of his seasons, he would go just 16-30 overall and 4-28 in S.E.C. play. What's more, in both 1959 and 1960 his program would not win a single conference game. In 1961, he led the way to only one.
Walker was fired after going 5-5 in 1962. His overall record at MSU would wind up being 22-32-2, a winning percentage of just 0.411.
What makes Walker even more of a failure, though, was that he hired Davis as his replacement. In a classic move of the good ole boys networking doing a solid for one of their friends, he gave his job to one of his friends on his coaching staff and that move proved to be a bad one for the university.
That's because two of the worst coaches in program history were in charge at MSU for a total of eleven years. Walker is the bigger villain of the two, though, because he not only didn't win on the field, but he also made a poor hire as AD to be his replacement. What a double-dip of failure that proved to be.