They called him The Space Ghost. Jearld Baylis — Jearld, not Jerald or Gerald — was the best defensive football player I ever saw at Southern Miss, and I’ve seen them all since the early 1960s.

Baylis, who died recently at the age of 62, played nose tackle with the emphasis on “tackle.” He made about a jillion tackles, many behind the scrimmage line, in his four years (1980-83) as a starter at USM after three years as a starter and star at Jackson Callaway.

When Southern Miss ended Bear Bryant’s 59-game home winning streak at Alabama in 1982, Baylis led the defensive charge with 18 tackles. The remarkable Reggie Collier, the quarterback, got most of the headlines during those golden years of USM football, but Baylis was every bit as important to the Golden Eagles’ success.

The truth is, despite the lavish praise of opposing coaches such as Bryant at Alabama, Bobby Bowden at Florida State, Pat Dye at Auburn and Emory Bellard at Mississippi State, Baylis never got the credit he deserved.

There are so many stories. Here’s one from the late, great Kent Hull, the Mississippi State center who became one of the best NFL players at his position and helped the Buffalo Bills to four Super Bowls:

It was at one of those Super Bowls — the 1992 game in Minneapolis — when Hull and I talked about his three head-to-head battles with Baylis when they were both in college. Hull, you should know, was always brutally honest, which endeared him to sports writers and sportscasters everywhere.

Hull said Baylis was the best he ever went against. “Block him?” Hull said rhetorically at one point. “Hell, most times I couldn’t touch him. He was just so quick. You had to double-team him, and sometimes that didn’t work either.”

John Bond was the quarterback of those fantastic Mississippi State teams who won so many games but could never beat Southern Miss. He remembers Jearld Baylis the way most of us remember our worst nightmares.

“He was a stud,” Bond said upon learning of Baylis’s death. “He was their best dude on that side of the ball, a relentless badass.”

In many ways Baylis was a football unicorn. Most nose tackles are monsters, whose job it is to occupy the center and guards and keep them from blocking the linebackers. Not Baylis. He was undersized, 6-feet tall and 230 pounds tops, and he didn’t just clear the way for linebackers. He did it himself.

“Jearld was just so fast, so quick, so strong,” said Steve Carmody, USM’s center back then and a Jackson lawyer now. Carmody, son of then-USM head coach Jim Carmody, went against Baylis most days in practice and says he never faced a better player on game day.

“Jearld could run with the halfbacks and wide receivers. I don’t know what his 40-time was but he was really, really fast. His first step was as quick as anybody at any position,” Steve Carmody said.

No, Carmody said, he has no idea where Baylis got his nickname, The Space Ghost, but he said, “It could have been because trying to block him was like trying to block a ghost. Poof! He was gone, already past you.”

Reggie Collier, who now works as a banker in Hattiesburg, was a year ahead of Baylis at USM. 

“Jearld was the first of those really big name players that everybody wanted that came to Southern,” Collier said. “He wasn’t a project or a diamond in the rough like I was. He was the man. He was the best high school player in the state when we signed him. Everybody knew who he was when he got here, the No. 1 recruit in Mississippi.”

Collier remembers an early season practice when he was a sophomore and Baylis had just arrived on campus. “We’re scrimmaging, and I am running the option going to my right just turning up the field,” Collier said. “Then, somebody latches onto me from behind, and I am thinking who the hell is that. People didn’t usually get me from behind. Of course, it was Jearld. From day one, he was special.

“I tell people this all the time. We won a whole lot of games back then, beat a lot of really great teams that nobody but us thought we could beat. I always get a lot of credit for that, but Gearld deserves as much credit as anyone. He was as important as anyone. He was the anchor of that defense and, man, we played great defense.”

Because of his size, NFL teams passed on Baylis. He played first in the USFL, then went to Canada and became one of the great defensive players in the history of the Canadian Football League. He was All-Canadian Football League four times, the defensive player of the year on a championship team once.

For whatever reason, Baylis rarely returned to Mississippi, living in Canada, in Baltimore, in Washington state and Oregon in his later years. Details of his death are sketchy, but he had suffered from bouts with pneumonia preceding his death.

Said Don Horn, his teammate at both Callaway and Southern Miss, “Unfortunately, I had lost touch with Jearld, but I’ll never forget him. I promise you this, those of us who played with him — or against him — will never forget Jearld Baylis.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A Dallas-based data center developer will locate its next campus in Meridian, a $10 billion investment in the area, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said Thursday.

The company, Compass Datacenters, will build eight data centers in the Meridian area over eight years, Reeves said. The governor said the data centers would support local businesses and jobs in a fast-growing industry that Mississippi has tried to attract.

“Through our pro-business policies and favorable business environment, we continue to establish our state as an ideal location for high-tech developments by providing the resources needed for innovation and growth,” Reeves said.

The Mississippi Development Authority will certify the company as a data center operator, allowing the company to benefit from several tax exemptions. Compass Datacenters will receive a 10-year state income and franchise tax exemption and a sales and use tax exemption on construction materials and other equipment.

In 2024, Amazon Web Services’ committed to spend $10 billion to construct two data centers in Madison County. Lawmakers agreed to put up $44 million in taxpayer dollars for the project, make a loan of $215 million, and provide numerous tax breaks.

READ MORE: Amazon coming to Mississippi with plans to create jobs … and electricity

Mississippi Power will supply approximately 500 megawatts of power to the Meridian facility, Reeves said. Data centers house computer servers that power numerous digital services, including online shopping, entertainment streaming and file storage.

Republican Sen. Jeff Tate, who represents Lauderdale County, said the investment was a long time coming for the east Mississippi city of Meridian.

“For far too long, Meridian has been the bride’s maid when it came to economic development,” Tate said. “I’m proud that our political, business, and community leaders were able to work together to help welcome this incredible investment.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi women died of pregnancy complications at nearly twice the national rate during the COVID-19 pandemic, new data shows. The vast majority of those deaths were preventable, according to the latest Mississippi Maternal Mortality Report. 

Between 2017 and 2021, 202 women who were either pregnant or up to one-year postpartum died. Seventy-seven of those deaths were directly related to pregnancy. 

Black women were five times more likely to die from a condition or circumstance related to pregnancy, the report found. 

“Unfortunately, COVID unmasked and exacerbated an already prevalent problem here in Mississippi,” said Lauren Jones, co-founder of Mom.ME and a member of the  Maternal Mortality Review Committee members who contributed to the report. 

The federally mandated committee, made up of physicians, advocates, social workers and others, is tasked with reviewing all pregnancy and postpartum-related deaths to determine the circumstances that caused them and whether they were preventable. The committee makes recommendations based on what members learn from reviewing the data. 

The committee’s first recommendation to reduce these deaths is for the state to expand Medicaid as 40 other states have done.

“The report sheds light on exactly how fragile and unequipped we are to handle what is considered routine maternal care without adding a national health crisis to an already fractured system,” Jones said.

Study authors found that had COVID-19 not happened, it’s “highly likely” that the five-year pregnancy-related mortality rate would have gone down. Instead, it averaged 42.4 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, peaking at 62.6 in 2021 – compared to a U.S. average of 33.2 the same year at the height of the pandemic. COVID-19 was a leading cause of these deaths, second to cardiovascular conditions. 

Nearly half of the women who died because of a pregnancy complication or cause in this time period never received a high school diploma. And nearly three-quarters of them were on Medicaid. 

The pregnancy-related mortality rate was highest in the Delta.

A vast majority – 83% – of pregnancy-related deaths were deemed preventable. Committee members made several recommendations, including expanding Medicaid, training all health care providers on blood pressure monitoring, cultural sensitivity and screening for mental health issues. 

“I want to acknowledge the Mississippi women who lost their lives in 2017-2021 while pregnant or within a year of pregnancy,” State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney said in a statement published in the report. “I extend my heartfelt condolences to their surviving loved ones, and am optimistic that once we know better, we will do better.”

This report comes at the heels of the 2022 Infant Mortality Report, which showed that Mississippi continues to lead the nation in the number of infants who die before their first birthday. However, the number of infant deaths attributed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS, decreased by 64% between 2021 and 2022. 

Edney also commended the Maternal Mortality Review Committee members who he said “tirelessly leave no question unasked and no stone unturned in exploring what happened and how these deaths might have been prevented.”

In 2024, the committee met six times to review 54 maternal deaths from 2021. 

“No one wants to serve on a committee that is only established to review death. It’s mentally and emotionally hard, but as members we do it not only to lend our personal expertise in determinations but to be a voice for those lost in hopes of sparking necessary change for better outcomes,” Jones said. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.