Waiting at the airport in Reno to fly back to the Sip from vacay/conference out west. Talked to numerous people while out here with various allegiances (several LSU), mainly trying to get an honest perception of OM from people who don’t know me well and are willing to share what they see from a different view. Here is what I found out in relation to the topic I posted:
1. The captain obvious answer…we should have been more accepting of integration. The damage done by those in charge, politically and administratively, during that time… is still a burden. We will never know for sure what impact our admin and even JHV might have made if we had been an advocate for accepting the inevitable change that needed to happen and was going to happen, whether it be the easy way, which was to accept and embrace, or the hard way, which we all know, is the route we unfortunately chose.
2. Building in Oxford instead of Jackson. I understand the idea of the time… capital city, following the model of Arkansas and Alabama of playing in the capital city… I also understand the infrastructure issues involved at the time with Oxford. Ole Miss graduates dominated the state legislature at that time… they could have been persuaded by our Admin (with JHV’s influence) to pursue road and other infrastructure improvements to and in Oxford ala Auburn to enable Ole Miss to keep up with the upper echelon of the conference. We were so far behind by the mid 1970s that we still feel the effects of the decision not to focus on building in Oxford. This point (size/aesthetic of stadium, hotel/restaurant availability etc) was brought up by several of the folks I talked to.
3. Failure to make the LSU game the focus rivalry. This, IMHO, is the biggest failure of JHV and the Ole Miss admin. It is shared by the LSU folks I talked to out here at the conference. They love our game. They view us and Alabama as their big games, with Texas A&M 3rd (the ones I talked to despise the idea of Arkansas being a rivalry game). They understand, for the most part, our unfortunate situation with regard to sharing our state with MSU. They have much the same feelings about MSU as we do. JHV went 19-2-4 vs MSU. He made them irrelevant in Mississippi. Yet, for whatever reason, we didn’t move them to the middle of the schedule and LSU to the end ala Michigan. This failure has been an albatross over our heads since.
Ok. Getting on my flight now. What have I missed? Please share your thoughts. That is all.
1. The captain obvious answer…we should have been more accepting of integration. The damage done by those in charge, politically and administratively, during that time… is still a burden. We will never know for sure what impact our admin and even JHV might have made if we had been an advocate for accepting the inevitable change that needed to happen and was going to happen, whether it be the easy way, which was to accept and embrace, or the hard way, which we all know, is the route we unfortunately chose.
2. Building in Oxford instead of Jackson. I understand the idea of the time… capital city, following the model of Arkansas and Alabama of playing in the capital city… I also understand the infrastructure issues involved at the time with Oxford. Ole Miss graduates dominated the state legislature at that time… they could have been persuaded by our Admin (with JHV’s influence) to pursue road and other infrastructure improvements to and in Oxford ala Auburn to enable Ole Miss to keep up with the upper echelon of the conference. We were so far behind by the mid 1970s that we still feel the effects of the decision not to focus on building in Oxford. This point (size/aesthetic of stadium, hotel/restaurant availability etc) was brought up by several of the folks I talked to.
3. Failure to make the LSU game the focus rivalry. This, IMHO, is the biggest failure of JHV and the Ole Miss admin. It is shared by the LSU folks I talked to out here at the conference. They love our game. They view us and Alabama as their big games, with Texas A&M 3rd (the ones I talked to despise the idea of Arkansas being a rivalry game). They understand, for the most part, our unfortunate situation with regard to sharing our state with MSU. They have much the same feelings about MSU as we do. JHV went 19-2-4 vs MSU. He made them irrelevant in Mississippi. Yet, for whatever reason, we didn’t move them to the middle of the schedule and LSU to the end ala Michigan. This failure has been an albatross over our heads since.
Ok. Getting on my flight now. What have I missed? Please share your thoughts. That is all.
