Watch: Fight Erupts in NCAA Football Rivalry Game, 4 Players Kicked Out
You know you’ve got a good college football brawl when the referee calls unsportsmanlike conduct on every player on both teams.
For Mississippi State, it wasn’t enough to beat the snot out of Ole Miss 35-3 Thursday in the annual Egg Bowl rivalry game in Oxford. They also got to mix it up with their rivals in a fracas in the end zone after Ole Miss appeared to score a touchdown that would’ve brought to score to 28-9 before it got called back on replay review.
If you like a good old-fashioned football donnybrook, this is an even better Thanksgiving leftover than the turkey-and-cranberry-sauce sandwich Black Friday lunch:
Mississippi State and Ole Miss are NOT in the holiday spirit.
“Unsportsmanlike conduct on all players for both teams…” pic.twitter.com/Cf6efueNSu
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) November 23, 2018
For their part in the festivities, Mississippi State players Wille Gay Jr., Jamal Peters, and Cameron Dantzler got themselves ejected, and they were joined by the Rebels’ C.J. Moore.
Gay was tossed not because he’d committed a particularly flagrant violation but because he had an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty earlier in the game and two such penalties in the same game bring an automatic ejection.
While the Rebels’ season is over, Mississippi State, still nationally ranked despite four losses, will lose those three players for the first half of its bowl game under NCAA rules.
If you think that put a damper on the enthusiasm of Bulldogs coach Joe Moorhead, he disabused anyone of such thoughts in the postgame press conference.
“I’m happy as a lark right now,” he said. “Certainly, you don’t want to see that stuff. I really can’t comment on everything that happened because I didn’t see it, and I was trying to keep guys on the sideline. We’ll look at the film and see what happened.
“But certainly, we want our play to be between the whistles, and we want our execution and our effort to be what’s talked about.”
Matt Lake, coaching a disappointing Ole Miss squad that was flat-out overmatched by its cross-state rival, echoed his counterpart’s sentiment about the fight.
“Hate for our seniors to go out this way because they have been through so much,” he said. “But I’m really, really grateful to them.”
If you were surprised that there was a fight at the Egg Bowl, Yahoo’s Pat Forde thinks you must be new here.
Egg Bowl brawl as predictable as the sunrise. Saw it coming.
— Pat Forde (@YahooForde) November 23, 2018
He also pointed out the Shakespearean idiocy — full of sound and fury, signifying nothing — of the fight.
Peak Egg Bowl: full-scale brawl, with ejections, after a TD was wiped out because the ball was snapped after the third quarter game clock ran out. So much hate, so little relevance.
— Pat Forde (@YahooForde) November 23, 2018
Then again, for the kinds of people who have no other rooting interest in a football game, sometimes a bit of controversy just makes for great television.
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