During his legendary 22-year tenure as Georgia Tech coach, Bobby Dodd took his team across the Southeast, to Dallas to play SMU, to South Bend, Ind., for Notre Dame and across the country to play USC.
But, though Tech was an SEC member for most of Dodd’s career, he never deigned to play Mississippi State, the Yellow Jackets’ opponent in the Dec. 31 Orange Bowl. Tech played Ole Miss but twice, once in a bowl game and once in a regular-season game scheduled by Dodd’s predecessor, William Alexander.
“Whatever is there to go to Mississippi for?” Dodd was quoted as saying. “We like to take our fans to exciting places and Mississippi isn’t one.”
As No. 12 Tech prepares to play the No. 7 Bulldogs (the maroon kind), the Jackets are in the midst of a Magnolia State bender that might have bewildered the late Dodd. Tech played Ole Miss in the Music City Bowl last year. The Jackets played Mississippi State in a home-and-home in 2008-09. Earlier this fall, Tech moved a previously scheduled home-and-home with Ole Miss to 2022-23. For good measure, the Jackets will open the 2015 season with Alcorn State, located in Lorman, Miss.
Asked for the feedback he received about the Ole Miss series, Tech senior associate athletic director Ryan Bamford said that it’s still years off, “But I think for the most part, those are the types of series that our fans want to play.”
Between 2008 and 2023, barring future bowl-game matchups, Tech will play both Mississippi schools a total of six times, twice on Mississippi soil. That will exceed by one the number of times the teams had met in Tech’s first 115 seasons of football, including 48 years when the three schools were in the same conference on a virtually uninterrupted basis.
It was a time when member schools, not the conference, were responsible for scheduling league games. During Tech’s 31 seasons in the SEC (1933-1963), the Jackets usually played six or seven league games.
It was a confusing matter to Mississippi State administrators, according to former Mississippi State athletic director Larry Templeton. He served as AD 1987-2008, but grew up near campus in Starkville, Miss., began working in the sports information department in high school, graduated from the school in 1969 and worked almost all of his career at the university.
“It seemed like a natural home-and-home,” Templeton said. “(We) just didn’t understand why there were still those feelings, but accepted it and moved on.”
In the book “Dodd’s Luck” written by Dodd with former Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer Jack Wilkinson, Dodd addressed the matter in discussing his team’s decision to play Ole Miss in the 1953 Sugar Bowl.
“The Mississippis (Mississippi and Mississippi State) just hated my guts, particularly Ole Miss,” Dodd said. “They wanted their hands on me so bad, ‘cause I wouldn’t play ‘em.”
Tech was not the only SEC team to take a pass on one or both of the Mississippi schools, though none to the same degree. Georgia has only played Mississippi State 23 times and didn’t play at all between 1915 and 1949. Vanderbilt and Mississippi State didn’t play each other between 1943 and 1969. Florida and Ole Miss have played each other 23 times, facing each other just eight times between 1936 and 1971.
Dodd’s stance ultimately had repercussions. After Tech left the SEC, there were at least two informal efforts to bring the school back into the conference. Former Tech coach Bill Curry, a captain of Dodd’s 1964 team, served as a messenger in 1975 from Alabama great Bear Bryant to Dodd that Bryant was ready to end the feud between the two men and, moreover, sponsor Tech’s re-entry into the conference.
“Coach Dodd said, ‘Well, that’s very nice, but we would never be allowed (back in),’” Curry said. “’The Mississippi schools would never allow it. They hate us too much.’”
Georgia coaching legend Vince Dooley said his school likewise made a back-channels campaign to bring back Tech some time prior to the school joining the ACC in 1978. Dooley said his school and others believed Tech’s location in Atlanta to be important to the conference.
However, Dooley said, “The Western brothers and sisters were not so supportive, without naming names.”
Tech’s time for readmission into the SEC is almost certainly past, but the rift appears history, too. Templeton gave his support for an occasional home-and-home series between Tech and Mississippi State, something he said he and then-Tech athletic director Radakovich talked about before Templeton’s retirement.
“But I don’t know where the two AD’s are now (on that matter),” Templeton said. “But they’ll be together on the beach having fun. A conversation might take place.”
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