College Football: Where Tradition, Rivalries like Alabama-Mississippi State Are Dying
Just 82.3 miles.
That's the official distance between the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and Mississippi State University in Starkville. Geographically, they are the two closest schools in the Southeastern Conference by roughly 10 miles, while the separation in terms of success is obviously much greater.
On Saturday, Alabama Crimson Tide football fans will make the short trip down Highway 82 for the 8 p.m. kickoff against the Bulldogs, but this year's matchup has extra significance to it.
Conference realignment has turned the college football world on its head, with Texas and Oklahoma joining the SEC, west coast schools joining the Big Ten, and the Pac-12 almost ceasing to exist after the 2023 season. With those changes comes vast schedule changes and the dissolving of divisions, including the SEC West. Consequently, no one knows when the Bulldogs and Crimson Tide will play again, they're no longer an annual matchup.
It's a drastic change, given that the two schools have met on the gridiron every single year since 1948, and have 106 times in total.
It goes without saying that Alabama's biggest football rivals are Auburn and Tennessee, and in recent years, it's been LSU that has surfaced as a third rivalry for the Crimson Tide. But back before both Alabama and LSU were nationally relevant at the same time, it was Mississippi State who was viewed more as one of the Crimson Tide's rivals.
“In the modern day, I just think rivalries are based on pure result. Where once upon a time, regionality had a lot more to do with it," said CBS Sports analyst Josh Pate in an interview with BamaCentral. "That’s why if you’re a bus ride away like Starkville is to Tuscaloosa, that’s a really big deal. And it meant a lot, because you lived amongst the people that you were going to play against. If you’ve ever been to upper west Alabama or east Mississippi you know that to be the case. And also, I just think because of that you get this subculture of a rivalry baked in."
"Later in life, LSU emerged, and it doesn’t really matter where you are because the country is so small with the advancement of technology, that rivalries are whatever people want to make of them today. It used to be that geography had a whole lot more to do with it.”
Proximity used to matter much more in the overall structure of college football. Many rivalries that the sport is anchored by are either in-state or border-state rivalries, and the closeness of Alabama and Mississippi State used to make for a unique experience, despite the lopsidedness of the matchup over the years.
"Mississippi State was always there, and part of what made them so tough was the physical nature of the game, you’re always beat up afterwards," said Chris Stewart, the play-by-play voice for the Crimson Tide Sports Network. "It always fell before Auburn, either the week before or two weeks before. It was a really tough, tough deal, and if you didn’t play well they could get you. Even though Alabama won it most years, it was one that took a lot out of you and was dangerous if you weren’t ready to play.”
The overall series between the Crimson Tide and the Bulldogs, quite frankly, couldn't be much more unbalanced. Alabama has won 85 of the 106 meetings, currently holds a win streak of 15 in a row, and has never lost more than three straight in the history of the matchup. Dan Mullen was MSU's head coach from 2009-17, and there's only one team he never beat. It was Alabama that knocked State from No. 1 in the polls in 2014.
Regardless, the regionality of the matchup provides it with extra flare and excitement that fans wouldn't get to experience otherwise.
"For Mississippi State, Ole Miss is the biggest rival, there’s no debate about that. But then, it’s kind of unclear who the number two is," said Stefan Krajisnik, Mississippi State beat writer for the Clarion-Ledger. "It would make a lot of sense for it to be Alabama. Geographically speaking, they’re the closest two schools in the SEC, it makes a lot of sense for there to be a rivalry there. Going back beyond the Saban era it was a little bit bigger of a rivalry, since Mississippi State was able to compete a bit more.”
"There may be a guy from Livingston, Alabama, whose wife went to Mississippi State, and their year revolves around this game and we see little pockets and examples of that all over college football, with the ‘house divided’ license plates and all that," Pate said.
With the direction college football it heading in, it's not just Alabama-Mississippi State that is falling by the wayside. Games like Bedlam between Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, the Civil War between Oregon and Oregon State and the Apple Cup between Washington and Washington State are all at risk of being shelved and left to the college football history books.
“Geography is everything to me in college football. It's territorial, it’s no different than if you grow up in Georgia and you know what Region 4 in 7A means. There’s a reason why once upon a time we drew lines on a map and divided things up. It’s because you want to be playing teams that are of the same part of the country as you because you want to be playing teams that have access to the same pool of athletes. It offers a purer result on the field. That’s to me what college football has always been about," Pate said.
Conferences used to be truly divided up based on what region of the country the school resided in. Many conferences were named for that as well: the Southeastern Conference, the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Pacific-12 Conference, even the since-dissolved Southwest Conference.
But the moves of late deny any sense of geography of regionality in the sport. Pacific coast schools in Cal and Stanford have agreed to join the Atlantic Coast Conference. Oregon and Washington followed USC and UCLA to the Big Ten, a conference primarily set in the Midwest. The Big 12, primarily based in the Southwest, features Central Florida and West Virginia.
"I don’t know if geography matters anywhere for any reason anymore," Stewart said. "I get it, you’ve got to find a way to pay for everything. You’ve got to pay the bills and those bills are not getting any smaller and I understand that, but you’re losing who you are and you’re losing what you are when you lose a lot of these things that are traditional rivalries and traditional matchups. There are some games that aren’t just geographic rivals and you’re having to lose some of those because of what’s required of you everywhere else.”
It's still unclear what structure the SEC will choose for scheduling in the future. The conference has yet to decide whether it will stay at eight league games per year or move to nine, and with that comes the decision of which rivalries to protect and which rivalries to surrender to the yearly rotation of new opponents.
One thing is clear, the fact that Alabama and Mississippi State aren't scheduled to play in the 2024 season signals that it will not be a protected rivalry in the future, regardless of the scheduling format.
And in the case of the Bulldogs it's not just the annual Alabama matchup that they're losing, but also typical SEC West foes in LSU and Auburn as well.
"I think the word that keeps coming to mind is bittersweet, because it is unfortunate that you lose Alabama, LSU, Auburn some of the games that have made some traditions that make Mississippi State special," Krajisnik said. "But at the same time there is some excitement because of the fact that LSU and Alabama have had success against Mississippi State but you have a chance now to go to new SEC environments, you know over a four year stretch you’re going to get to see all the different stadiums. The history is so deep and so rich, but the prospect of something new is really exciting.”
As it is with all decisions, there's some good and some bad with whenever major changes are made in college football, and while realignment has taken away some rivalries it's also revived a few. For example, the Lone Star Showdown between Texas and Texas A&M is about to become a regular SEC matchup, and the Holy War between Utah and BYU will take place in the revamped Big 12.
"There’s never a 100 percent positive move. It may be 75 percent, but there’s always that 25 percent, and part of it is, you evaporate some rivalries that people know. [...] Even if you hate the direction college football is going, the inverse true too, there’s never 100 percent negative. Games like Alabama-Auburn, games like Alabama-Tennessee, like Ohio State-Michigan, those are the most precious pieces of television inventory they have. Even if the television executive is your sworn enemy right now, you two do have commonality in that you want to preserve some of the same things.”
All of the changes adopted over the past few years all boil down to one thing, that the people that hold the power in the sport care more about the big game (and money) than the regionality of the product:
• Sacrificing a rivalry like Alabama-Mississippi State in order to have a super-conference featuring the likes of Georgia and Texas together.
• Numerous traditional matchups being relegated to second-tier status and will only be occasionally played.
• The dissolving of numerous in-state showdowns, that can only now happen as bowl and postseason possibilities.
Are these good or bad for the sport? Only time will tell.
The other major unknown is the extent that realignment goes before it slows down or stops. Network executives didn't sit down and plan out each team's move to each conference, rather each move was a reactionary response to the previous move.
"Everyone thinks we’re headed towards two super-conferences. Maybe we are. Maybe it’s five years away, maybe it’s 50 years away," Pate said. "I just don’t think that has even been so much as sketched out in final form on a pizza box, much less, existing in some secret Google file somewhere.”
It's not just diehard fans and college football analysts that feel negatively about the change, either. Last week, Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin alluded to the fact that Alabama and Ole Miss is another matchup that won't be played annually anymore after 2023.
"I love going against him and seeing him before the game," Kiffin said. "We’re excited for this opportunity today and you never know how many more you've got. Maybe this is our last time.”
Even Nick Saban, who has long been an expresser of his own opinion about the health of college football, conveyed his own concerns before the season began about the direction of the sport, and how he thinks the focus should be on the players first.
"There's a lot of traditions that we've had for a long time in college football. I think we're in a time of evolution for whatever reasons," Saban said in August. "Some of those traditions are going to get, sort of, pushed by the wayside, I think. It's sad. Whether it's good, bad or indifferent for college football — I guess you have to define what is good and bad for college football. I think one thing I would just hope that we would keep in mind in all the choices and decisions we make relative to what we do in college athletics is the student-athlete."
But regardless of how Saban felt in the preseason, now that game week against the Bulldogs has arrived, he has one sole focus: the game at hand.
"My focus is on this game. I don't look back at other games," Saban said on Monday. "I think there's a time and place to commiserate or celebrate or whatever you want to do relative to rivalries and the changing environment and landscape of college football. But to me, everything is about this game, our team, trying to get our team better, and get our team to play winning football against a good team. I don't have a lot of thoughts or spend a lot of time, at this time, thinking about those kinds of things."
When Alabama and Mississippi State take the field for their final annual matchup on Saturday night, many will stop to think what could have been between the two closest schools in the conference.
“Everything was in place for it to be such a big rivalry especially when you look back at how long they’ve been playing each other, it’s really just the competitiveness that’s taken a bit away from it," Krajisnik said.
