This is the third entry in our recurring series making the case for why we should care about each of Tech’s new Sun Belt conference mates. This week, we have to invoke the Interstate Commerce Act, because we’re crossing state lines.
With Louisiana Tech’s entrance into the Sun Belt, the Bulldogs aren’t just reunited with the “UL Twins.” Familiar foe Southern Miss is back on the schedule too.
ULM and ULL were reunions with a fairly large gap. The hadn’t shared a conference with either school since the 1990s, back before the Sun Belt even sponsored football. Those series went dark for a generation.
But not Southern Miss. The Bulldogs and Golden Eagles spent 2013 through 2021 together in Conference USA, playing every year in every sport.
Still though, it’s always a good to remember why Louisiana Tech fans should hate Southern Miss.
Reason 1: The Rivalry in Dixie
Grievance Rating: 8/10
Yeah… let’s go ahead and get this out of the way.
In football, the series dates back to a 27-0 Bulldog victory in 1935, between Louisiana Polytechnic Institute and Mississippi State Teachers College. But once the teams started playing every year from 1946 to 1972, Southern Miss built a tremendous series lead with Tech only winning seven times across those 28 years. So although the Bulldogs took last year’s matchup in Ruston, the Golden Eagles still lead the series 36-18.
In baseball, Southern Miss leads the all-time series 38-21, with three of those wins coming this past season in a weekend sweep of Tech in Ruston.
And for men’s basketball, there is finally some good news, although barely. Louisiana Tech has defeated Southern Miss 45 times and lost to the Golden Eagles 44 times. A one game series lead that only stands because the Bulldogs won the last six meetings between the schools before Southern Miss left CUSA.
Reason 2: The Eagles Flew the Coop
Grievance Rating: 3/10
And speaking of Southern Miss leaving CUSA, they weren’t the only ones out the door. Conference USA lost nine schools in that stretch. Six went to the American (Charlotte, FAU, North Texas, Rice, UAB, UTSA) and honestly, I’m not upset with them. The American is an obvious upgrade. If Tech were given the option, I’d want us to accept an American invite in a heartbeat.
But the other three left for the Sun Belt: Southern Miss, Marshall, and Old Dominion. That one stung, because the Sun Belt wasn’t as sure of a step up.
Without the Sun Belt defectors, CUSA would have stood at eight teams. And since that’s the minimum required by the NCAA for an FBS conference, the league would have been much less desperate to add new members. Liberty and New Mexico State might still join, but many of the FCS call-ups (Jacksonville State, Sam Houston, Kennesaw State, Delaware, and Missouri State) don’t happen.
But in fairness, Tech ended up in the Sun Belt anyway. But if we had all been on the same page back in 2021 when Southern Miss, Marshall, and Old Dominion decided to leave, we could have saved ourselves some legal bills.
And maybe there wasn’t an additional spot for us in the Sun Belt in 2022, but I still partially blame Southern Miss for this whole rigamarole anyway.
Reason 3: Maxie Lambright
Grievance Rating: -2/10
Yes, negative points, stay with me here.
After a 23-22 Tech win over Southern Miss in 1976, Bulldogs head coach Maxie Lambright called it the finest rivalry in Dixie, and the name stuck. But it must have been a bit awkward for him, because Lambright played at Southern Miss from 1946 to 1948 and coached there as an assistant from 1959 to 1966. He was, by any reasonable definition, a Southern Miss man.
And then in 1967 he came to Ruston and gave Louisiana Tech the greatest era in the history of the program.
Three national championships. Seven conference titles. A 95-36-2 record. He followed the coach that the stadium is named after and yet built the program that everything else at Tech is measured against. And he did it after Southern Miss had him in the building and let him walk out the door.
He also went 5-4 against his alma mater once he got here.
So how could I be mad at a program that gave us one of the best coaches Tech has ever had?
Reason 4: The Long Con
Grievance Rating: 7/10
Well, to answer that last question, this is how. By also giving us a coach that can be (partially) blamed for the downfall of the most successful dynasty in Tech history.
You may have noticed that women’s basketball wasn’t mentioned at the top when discussing Tech’s records against Southern Miss. That’s because it’s a bit… embarrassing.
The Lady Techsters have three national championships, thirteen Final Fours, twenty-seven NCAA Tournament appearances, and only have a losing record to four opponents that they’ve played more than 20 times: Tennessee, LSU, Middle Tennessee, and Southern Miss.
During the hey-day of the dynasty, they only faced Southern Miss twice and won both meetings. But on December 8th 2007, the Golden Eagles took down the Techsters for the first time. And who was the Lady Techster coach at the helm? Southern Miss graduate Chris Long.
The same Chris Long that ended the 25-year NCAA Tournament streak the previous year.
But it’s not like Long did this intentionally. He was a Leon Barmore assistant who turned down other coaching jobs out of loyalty, stuck around in Ruston under another Barmore disciple Kurt Budke, and was a very obvious pick for the job.
But what if this was Southern Miss’s plan for subterfuge from the beginning!? Surely it couldn’t have just been one Long con? Unless…
Reason 5: Brett & Circuses
Grievance Rating: 6/10
Every program at this level seems to have their famous football alumni. Delaware has Joe Flacco, Louisiana Tech has Terry Bradshaw, and Southern Miss has Brett Favre.
The NFL leader in career interceptions now has his name attached to an even bigger disaster.
Mississippi ran the largest public embezzlement scandal in state history: roughly $77 million in federal welfare money, meant for the poorest residents of the poorest state in the country, was diverted to other purposes.
The single largest known chunk of that money, $5 million, went to the University of Southern Mississippi Athletic Foundation.
To build a volleyball stadium.
I guess, to be fair, it is a nice looking volleyball stadium.
According to investigative reports, Favre heavily lobbied the governor and other state officials to divert these funds to build the arena for a team his daughter played on.
Favre denies knowing where the money came from, and has yet to be federally charged, but the leaked text messages strongly indicate that he did.
Terry Bradshaw sometimes has a Fox Sports segment where he gives away $100,000. As long as we don’t one day find out that “Terry’s Money” was actually taken from the coffers of an orphanage, I’m much happier with our guy.
Reason 6: Not Just Lying, Cheating Too!
Grievance Rating: 6/10
Last week we touched on Louisiana-Lafayette’s eligibility cheating in men’s basketball, but they weren’t the only ones.
Donnie Tyndall coached Southern Miss basketball from 2012 to 2014. During that time, his staff completed more than a hundred online course assignments for recruits, to get them eligible. Graduate assistants traveled to where players lived to do their coursework for them.
One recruit, described by his own junior college coach as about as far from graduating as any kid he’d ever had, posted a 3.75 GPA.
The NCAA gave Southern Miss three years of probation and a two-year postseason ban. Tyndall got a ten-year show-cause, which is the NCAA’s polite way of saying he couldn’t work in this sport until 2026.
And just when those ten years were up, another scandal hit USM. In January, former Southern Miss guard Mo Arnold was among twenty people charged in a federal point-shaving investigation. The specific fixed game named in the indictment was a 77-61 Southern Miss loss in 2024.
To Louisiana-Lafayette.
C’mon. If you’re going to point shave (and I generally recommend you don’t) don’t give the Cajuns, of all teams, an easy win in the process.
Reason 7: General Nat
Grievance Rating: 9/10
In 1940, the student body of what is now the University of Southern Mississippi held a vote to pick a nickname for its athletic teams. They chose the Confederates, revised the next year to become the Southerners.
So, at the time, they were the Mississippi Southern College Southerners.
When a mascot was added in the 50s, the school decided to lean further in and bring in a costumed horse rider named General Nat, as in Nathan Bedford Forrest: the Confederate cavalry general, slave trader, commander at the Fort Pillow massacre, and the first Grand Wizard of the KKK.
This ran for nearly twenty years.
The Klan was not a historical abstraction then, either. In 1966, while General Nat was still the mascot, Klansmen firebombed the Hattiesburg home of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer and killed him, because he had been helping Black residents pay the poll tax so they could vote.
But the sad thing is that the school could have drawn from a different local history from the same time period.
In the piney woods of southern Mississippi was one of the most anti-Confederate places in the entire South: Jones County, one county over from Hattiesburg.
Newton Knight deserted the Confederate army, took up arms against it, spied for the Union, and (as the legend goes) raised the United States flag over the Ellisville courthouse and declared the Free State of Jones. The Southern Mississippi Knights would have been such a cool name!
So while some of the region rebelled against the Old South, the school built practically next door spent thirty years a century later dressing up as the Old South anyway.
Reason 8: A Hat on a Hat-tiesburg
Grievance Rating: 3/10
Hattiesburg calls itself the Hub City.
So does Lubbock, Texas. And Hagerstown, Maryland. And Spartanburg, South Carolina. And, like we discussed last week, Lafayette, Louisiana. “Hub City” is what a town calls itself when it can’t come up with anything else, the civic equivalent of naming your dog “Dog.”
For Hattiesburg, it was a 1912 newspaper contest that decided on the genericism. Which means the townspeople sat down, thought about it, made suggestions, cast their votes, and the best they could come up with was the same nickname three other American cities were already using.
Ruston is the Peach City. That’s not winning any creativity awards, but at least it’s distinct.
Which brings us to the other thing about south Mississippi.
In the 1960s, the United States government detonated two nuclear devices underground in salt domes near Lumberton, Mississippi, less than 30 miles from the USM campus. These are the only nuclear explosions ever set off east of the Mississippi River.
Which means the federal government looked at southern Mississippi the same way we do and decided it needed to be nuked.
The Reunion
Southern Miss left Conference USA in 2022 for the Sun Belt, and now Tech has followed four years later. As far as breakups go, this was more of a trial separation.
It starts on November 14th in Ruston, when the Golden Eagles make yet another trip to Joe Aillet Stadium. Hopefully, the Bulldogs can chip away at USM’s series lead, even if it would take at least two decades of Tech dominance to get even.
Welcome back to the schedule Southern Miss, your seat’s still warm