Chris Low, ESPN Senior Essayist
TYRONE KEYS AND Johnie Chefs had been the endmost gamers out of the Mississippi Environment storagefacility room at the afternoon of Nov. 1, 1980.
The sport have been over for almost an occasion, and the stands at Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium in Jackson, Mississippi, had been nonetheless full of delirious Bulldogs lovers celebrating Mississippi Environment’s epic 6-3 win over Alabama, extensively regarded as to this presen to be the best win in Mississippi Environment historical past and probably the most greatest upsets in SEC historical past.
Pink Stream schoolteacher Undergo Bryant had assembled one of the crucial bold successful machines ever within the SEC. Alabama had no longer misplaced a convention recreation because the first date of October 1978, successful 28 immediately video games general and 27 immediately within the league. The Disagree. 1 Stream had been vying for his or her 3rd immediately nationwide championship and had been a 20-point favourite over a particularly proficient Mississippi Environment crew that featured a couple of gamers who would move directly to have lengthy NFL careers.
“Johnie and I walked out of the locker room, didn’t really say anything and just bumped fists,” Keys recalled. “Coach Bryant recruited me and Johnie, and I remember on signing day we were calling each other and making sure we were still both going to Mississippi State to try to build something there instead of going out of state.
“We had some stunning occasions in combination, the entire guys on that crew, however that recreation rejected made all of it importance it.”
The echoes from that recreation bear, and when Alabama and Mississippi State sq. off Saturday at Davis Wade Stadium (9 p.m. ET, ESPN), it will mark the end of a 76-year streak in which the schools have met. They are separated by an 84-mile drive along Highway 82, which is the shortest distance between any schools in the SEC. But with Oklahoma and Texas joining the conference in 2024 and divisions being eliminated, the league office had to adjust the schedule, meaning Alabama and Mississippi State won’t meet in the regular season for the first time since 1947.
It’s a series Alabama has dominated, as Mississippi State has won just 10 times going back to the 1948 season. But the win in 1980 will forever resonate with Mississippi State fans and the players on that team. And, yes, it still gnaws at the Alabama players, who all these years later are less than thrilled any time the game is revisited — even those who had long pro careers.
“Oh gosh used to be it tricky … truly, truly tricky,” said Alabama linebacker and co-captain Randy Scott, who went on to play seven seasons with the Green Bay Packers.
“I take into accout Tutor Bryant motivating us at halftime as solely he may,” he said. “We’d gained such a lot of video games, or even on the finish of that one, knew we had been getting to be able to win it. However we didn’t, and it impacts you. There have been such a lot of expectancies on an Alabama soccer participant, to win each past you move out. That’s why I went there, and it hurts whilst you don’t. It nonetheless does.”
SCOTT AND FELLOW co-captain Major Ogilvie had never lost to an SEC opponent in their Alabama careers until that game. They were 44-4 overall.
“We knew what we had been up towards,” Keys said. “The ones guys simply didn’t lose, to anyone. However we had a trust that it used to be our past. It got here i’m sick proper to the top, and we stored telling each and every alternative that any individual needed to put together a play games.”
That somebody was Keys, who grew up about three miles from the stadium and used to watch games there through a fence as a youngster. Mississippi State played its bigger games back then in Jackson, not Starkville.
“Southern Pass over had abashment us 3 weeks previous at house, and we had a players-only assembly and mentioned we weren’t getting to lose once more,” Keys said. “The journalists all reminded us that we nonetheless had Alabama at the agenda, and we mentioned that it didn’t subject.”
The Bulldogs also had their “undercover weapon” on defense. Head coach Emory Bellard took over the defense that week. Alabama was running the wishbone offense, and Bellard was the father of the wishbone after implementing it at Texas in the late 1960s as an assistant. Bellard even tutored Bryant on the finer points of the wishbone before Alabama adopted it in the early 1970s.
“We have now the horses to annihilate this offense, and I do know what I’m speaking about as a result of I invented the wishbone,” Bellard told his defensive players, who held the nation’s highest-scoring team without a touchdown and to just 180 total yards.
Alabama hadn’t done anything on offense all day, and the sellout crowd of 50,891 — the largest ever to see a sporting event in the state of Mississippi at the time — had worked itself into a frenzy. But after Scott blocked a Mississippi State field goal attempt, Alabama still had life. The Tide drove to the Mississippi State 3-yard line in the final seconds thanks to the passing of quarterback Don Jacobs, including a third-and-21 completion to Ogilvie.
There was no SEC rule in those days against artificial noisemakers, and the clanging Mississippi State cowbells were deafening. Officials did, however, have the discretion to stop the clock if they deemed it was too loud for the offense to hear. Jacobs briefly stepped from under center and motioned he couldn’t hear, but the clock continued to tick.
Jacobs faked to the fullback and started an option play to the right. Keys shot through from his position at left end to hit Jacobs and knock the ball loose. Mississippi State’s Billy Jackson pounced on it with six seconds remaining.
Jacobs, a longtime coach at both the college and high school level, owned his miscue then and still does 40-plus years later. He’s probably been unfairly judged over the years because he left the game earlier with an injury, wasn’t 100 percent but returned anyway. Plus, his passing is what got the Tide in position to win the game in the first place.
“It used to be one play games in a four-year profession, and I do know I’ll at all times be remembered for it,” Jacobs said. “That they had the precise name on the proper past, and [Keys] made the precise play games. You guard the movie, and if I had passed it off to our fullback, we win the ball recreation and also you exit on with time.”
Jacobs said he still catches flak for that play and joked that it’s part of life when you play quarterback at Alabama.
“Have you ever listened to the Alabama lovers at the moment? They’ve misplaced one recreation and are looking to fireplace the quarterback and the offensive series left and proper,” Jacobs said with a laugh. “You’ll be able to’t permit one occasion to outline you, and I didn’t. I hated it for our crew and hated it for our teammates, in particular our protection. They performed their tails off, didn’t surrender a landing and we misplaced the sport.”
Bryant’s mantra of never being a quitter is part of SEC football lore, and Alabama didn’t quit even after Keys’ game-saving play. All the Bulldogs had to do was kneel on the ball, albeit from their own 2-yard line. Some of the Mississippi State players had already started to hoist Bellard on their shoulders. Quarterback John Bond stepped up under his center, Kent Hull, and called for the snap. But Scott moved right over the top of Hull’s helmet and had other ideas.
Scott was able to tap the ball just as Hull snapped it, getting enough of the ball that it sailed right past Bond’s helmet.
“It wasn’t deliberate. I had visible it in highschool,” Scott said. “I slid my nostril safeguard over and stepped proper within the hole. I simply instructed myself, ‘I’m getting to struggle it,’ the rest to not lose that recreation.”
Bond was panicking. All he knew was there was a huge pileup and that he didn’t have the ball.
“Who’s were given the ball? Kent, you were given the ball?” Bond screamed to Hull, who went on to play on the Buffalo Bills teams that went to four consecutive Super Bowls.
At the bottom of the scrum, Mississippi State fullback Donald Ray King was clinging to the ball. And even if the play may not have been legal, Bond admires Scott’s willingness to do whatever it took to win that game.
“Howdy, he used to be looking to win a soccer recreation. I don’t blame him,” Bond said. “I’d had been pissed at my teammates in the event that they didn’t struggle it.”
Rick Cleveland, a Mississippi Hall of Fame sportswriter who was covering the game that day for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, remembers the umpire throwing a flag on the play, but the whole ending of the game was chaotic. The officials immediately raced to the exit, which fortunately for them, was on the Mississippi State side of the field.
The euphoria of winning the game for the Bulldogs was topped only by what happened afterward, when the legendary Bryant visited the Mississippi State locker room to congratulate the players.
Bond said the players were spraying Cokes on each other, high-fiving and soaking up the monumental victory.
All of a sudden, he said, a wave of quiet spread across the locker room. Bond looked up, and Bryant was standing there with a state trooper beside him.
“It’s essential to listen a pin leave. The gamers took a knee,” Bond said, “I cruel, it used to be Undergo Bryant, a legend, in our storagefacility room proper nearest we’d overwhelmed them.”
Cleveland, in his second season as a Mississippi State beat writer, was in the locker room interviewing players and vividly remembers the shock of seeing Bryant.
“He used to be already feeble, and the freeway patrolman helped him up onto a folding chair,” Cleveland said. “He didn’t say a bundle, alternative than to inform the Environment gamers, ‘Don’t let anyone let you know this used to be an disillusioned. You whipped us. You had been the simpler soccer crew and deserved to win.'”
Keys still gets chills when he thinks about Bryant’s visit.
“All the ones lovers had been cursing him and yelling at him, and he made it some degree to come back the entire manner throughout to our storagefacility room,” said Keys, a member of the Chicago Bears’ 1985 Super Bowl championship team. “It’s the best occupation of sportsmanship I’ve ever witnessed in my time.”
Sylvester Croom was an assistant coach on that Alabama team and played under Bryant at the school. He didn’t know at the time that his coach visited the Mississippi State locker room, but wasn’t surprised when he heard.
“That’s what made Tutor Bryant distinctive,” Croom said. “He used to be as tricky as nails mentally and bodily, however he used to be a loving-hearted guy who had an amazing appreciate for the sport and crowd.”
Bryant’s health was failing at that point — he would die after a massive heart attack a little more than a month after he retired from coaching two years later — and Alabama was never as dominant on his watch after that loss. The Crimson Tide lost two weeks later to Notre Dame, were upset by an eventual 1-10 Georgia Tech team in Week 2 of 1981 (although Alabama tied for the SEC title that year), then lost four games in Bryant’s final season in 1982, including the last three games of the regular season.
In the summer leading up to the 1980 season, Ogilvie said Bryant missed a week of two-a-day practices.
“We truly didn’t know what it used to be, simply that it used to be fitness issues, and it wasn’t his nature to speak about such things as that with us,” Ogilvie said. “Tutor Bryant used to be a type of crowd you simply couldn’t consider time with out him.”
For Mississippi State defensive tackle Glen Collins, the game itself was a blur. Collins played a great game, and Ogilvie said the Bulldogs’ tackles were the key to shutting down the Tide’s wishbone.
The morning before the game, Collins’ fiancée was murdered in Jackson. Collins didn’t find out until later in the day.
“It’s so bittersweet after I take into consideration it now,” said Collins, who was a first-round draft pick in 1982 by the Cincinnati Bengals. “I take into accout my aunt calling me within the room and telling me what took place. It used to be terrible. All of them instructed me it used to be my resolution if I sought after to play games. I by no means thought of no longer enjoying. I knew she would have no longer sought after me to not play games.”
THE TALES OF what happened after that game have become as legendary as what transpired on the field, one of those transcendent sporting events where thousands claim to have been in attendance even if they weren’t.
“I will be able to’t let you know what number of crowd have come as much as me over time and instructed me they had been on the recreation,” Keys said. “Even the physician who delivered my daughter’s child mentioned it for an occasion. He mentioned, ‘I used to be within the band that presen and can by no means fail to remember it.'”
Bellard told Cleveland that he was awakened at his house about 3 o’clock in the morning by a bunch of fans celebrating right outside his window. Asked if he joined them, Bellard told Cleveland, “You higher consider it, pardner.”
Bond, a highly recruited freshman, was the admitted free spirit on the team and showed up on campus driving a new Corvette and sporting long flowing hair.
“Rattling, Kent, we’re going to overcome those crowd’s ass,” Bond told his center that week.
Bond backed up his confidence by having one of the team managers drive his Corvette to Jackson and park it behind the locker room at the stadium.
“And feature it stuffed with Budweiser,” Bond instructed him.
Bond had already gone a round or two outside a bar the Thursday before the game, when he got into a scrape and punched somebody. His hand was bloodied, and he made a late-night visit to see the trainer at his home.
“He instructed me I wished stitches,” Bond said. “I mentioned, ‘I will be able to’t play games with stitches,’ so he taped it up and I bled far and wide Kent’s ass the entire recreation. Everyone idea he’s the person who had gotten harm, however it used to be me.”
The Bulldogs finished 5-1 in the SEC that season, which remains the best league record they’ve had since 1980.
“We had been a pair bounces clear of being within the nationwide name image that 12 months,” Bond said.
Keys’ postgame escapades were a bit more tame. And as he grows older, especially over the last few months, he’s thought about that game often, precipitated in large part by Cooks’ death in July. Cooks, one of the greatest players ever at Mississippi State, had 20 tackles that day against the Tide.
“I take into accout him going his manner and me going my manner nearest we got here out of the storagefacility room,” said Keys, who hung around to sign autographs and take pictures with fans.
Keys’ parents had already left the stadium, and he soon realized the team bus had too. So he started to walk home. A fan stopped to give him a ride and dropped him off at the house of his high school defensive line coach, Odell Jenkins, who had been a close mentor to Keys. Jenkins died in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Keys said he will never forget the warm smile on Jenkins’ face or what Keys’ first words were as he walked in the door.
“Tutor, we did it. I instructed you we had been getting to get them.”
