After 13 hours of watching college football Saturday – and enduring seemingly 21,989 TV timeouts – this bleary-eyed correspondent is left with more questions than answers.

For instance, is Ole Miss, the nation’s fifth-ranked team, really this good? (Honestly, I think the Rebels are.)

Are Mississippi State and Southern Miss this bad? (The season is still a puppy, but, boy, those are two teams that really need for something good to happen. Soon.)

Through three games, Lane Kiffin’s offense averages nearly 700 yards per game, nearly nine yards per play and exactly 56 points per game. Granted, the Rebels have not played a really good football team yet, but these eyes see no weaknesses, glaring or otherwise. Apparently, Wake Forest doesn’t either because the Demon Deacons are paying Ole Miss $750,000 to not play the return game in Oxford next year.

As for Mississippi State, there was nothing holy about Toledo. The Rockets earned a $1.2 million paycheck and dominated the Bulldogs in every phase of the game in a 41-17 victory that was ever bit as one-sided as it sounds. The pertinent question seems not so much how can a 10.5-point underdog win by 24 points on the road, but why was Toledo ever a double-digit underdog in the first place?

Toledo plays in the Mid-American Conference, where the league’s best teams are nearly always competitive with Power 5 conference teams. We saw it a week ago when Northern Illinois won at Notre Dame. That was a week after Notre Dame won on the road at Texas A&M and a week before the Irish crushed Purdue 66-7. That same Saturday, Bowling Green led for much of the game before losing at Penn State. Last year, Toledo lost to Illinois by three points in its opener before winning 11 regular season games and the MAC regular season title. 

My point: Toledo is a well-coached, veteran team, used to success, and no doubt came to Starkville expecting to win. What the Rockets couldn’t have expected was to dominate. But Toledo led 14-0 early, 28-3 at halftime and 35-3 in the third quarter. It could have been worse than the final 41-17.

For State, the worst part is that the Bulldogs were dominated at the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball. There was nothing fluke-y about it. Twenty of Toledo’s 73 offensive plays gained 10 for more yards. On the flip side, Toledo defenders combined for five sacks, six tackles for losses. State ran the ball 27 times for a paltry 66 yards.

That’s particularly sobering when you realize that the Bulldogs’ remaining schedule includes five of the nation’s top seven ranked teams. After Florida, in Starkville, this Saturday, State’s next two games are against the nation’s top two teams, Texas and Georgia, both on the road.

Meanwhile, Ole Miss continued its early season demolition of inferior competition. After clubbing Furman and Middle Tennessee State by a combined 128-3, the Rebels faced their first Power 5 competition and first road game of the season. The Rebels made it look easy. The first possession of the game pretty much set the tone: 75 yards and five plays in 87 seconds, touchdown Ole Miss. It was almost like a dummy drill. Before the first quarter was over, Ole Miss would score three touchdowns, and it easily could have been four.

Jaxson Dart has now completed 73 of 88 passes for 1,172 yards. That’s 83 percent. He throws lasers.

Ole Miss now plays a good Sun Belt team Georgia Southern, at home, before beginning conference play the following week against Kentucky. Road games at South Carolina and LSU follow that. The Rebels will be favored in all.

At Hattiesburg, Southern Miss started fast, taking a 14-0 lead over a talented South Florida team that had played Alabama on even terms for three and a half quarters the previous week. After USM’s quick start, reality set in. South Florida scored the next 28 points en route to a dominant, 49-24 victory. Most disheartening of all for USM: The Golden Eagles’ defensive front was supposed to be the strength of the team, but South Florida gashed USM for 369 yards rushing. Southern Miss now goes on the road to face Rich Rodriguez’s Jacksonville State team, which won nine games and the New Orleans Bowl last year.

Elsewhere:

• Previously No. 1 Georgia, for once, looked human in a 13-12 win at Kentucky.
• Previously No. 2 Texas lost Quinn Ewers but used Arch Manning’s five-touchdown performance to trounce UTSA 56-7 and move up to No. 1 ahead of Georgia. To this observer of three generations of quarterbacks named Manning, the athletic, 19-year-old Arch, whose performance included a 67-yard touchdown run, looked far more like his grandfather Archie than either of his famous quarterbacking uncles Peyton and Eli.
• No. 4 Alabama went on the road to blast Wisconsin 42-10.
• No. 16 LSU outlasted South Carolina 36-33 in a game marred by officiating that was sketchy at best.
• Vanderbilt fell from the unbeaten ranks, dropping a 36-32 decision to Georgia State of the Sun Belt Conference.
• Jackson State trounced Southern University 33-15 for its fifth straight victory over the Jaguars before a crowd of just over 32,000 at Veterans Memorial Stadium.
• Colorado bounced back with a 28-9 victory over Colorado State. Former Jackson State coach Deion Sanders had his son, Shadeur, throwing the ball and padding his stats with a 19-point lead with under two minutes to play. CBS announcers, understandably, were both incredulous and critical. Alas, sportsmanship will never be Deion’s long suit.

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

Sept. 15, 1963

Members of the Ku Klux Klan planted a bomb inside the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young girls, Denise McNair, 11, and Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, all 14. Collins’ younger sister, Sarah, was blinded by the blast, which also injured 22 others. 

That same day, police shot and killed 16-year-old Johnny Robinson after a group of kids reportedly threw rocks. Virgil Ware, 13, was shot to death while riding on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle. (The teens who killed him got no jail time.) 

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram to President Lyndon B. Johnson, “Dear Mr. President, I shudder to think what our nation has become when Sunday school children … are killed in church by racist bombs.” 

Days later, he told a crowd of 8,000 at the girls’ funeral service, “The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as the redemptive force that will bring new light to the city.” 

The bombing became a turning point in generating broader sympathy for the civil rights movement. On the same day of the bombing, James Bevel and Diane Nash began the Alabama Project, which later grew into the Selma Voting Rights Movement.

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

One of Vice President Kamala Harris’ most devastating zingers in last week‘s debate with former President Donald Trump was when she looked at him and said he “was fired by 81 million people … Clearly he is having a difficult time processing that.”

Harris was correct about the 2020 election. That year more people voted against Trump than against any candidate in the history of the nation.

On the other hand, Trump is correct when he says he received more votes in that election than any incumbent president in the nation’s history. The only problem with that is that in that 2020 election, Joe Biden garnered more votes than any candidate had ever received.

Biden defeated Trump by about 7 million votes.

Turnout of the eligible voting-age population in 2020 was 66.7% — the highest since 1900, according to Fair Vote, a national nonprofit promoting various voting reforms.

In Mississippi, the turnout compared to past elections in the state was high, but well below the national average. According to Fair Vote, the turnout in Mississippi in the 2020 election was 60.2%. And by the way, in the 2020 election, Trump received more votes — 756,764 — than any presidential candidate in Mississippi’s history. In 2008, incumbent U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran garnered 766,111 in his reelection bid against Democrat Erik Fleming.

This perhaps is an appropriate time to mention one of our funniest age-old political jokes: that the outcome of a particularly close election will depend on turnout.

All elections, of course, do depend on turnout. A candidate’s most basic mission is to get his or her voters to the polls. The only problem is that generally speaking, when a candidate drives up his or her voter turnout it also spikes on the other side.

That, in part, is why elections often turn so negative. It is part of the effort to depress the opponent’s turnout.

The question this election cycle is will people turn out to vote at as high a rate as is in 2020?

Will Trump garner as many votes as he did in 2020 – more than 74 million – the second most in the nation’s history? Can Harris in 2024 match what Biden did in 2020 – more than 81 million votes?

In other words, will voter interest or enthusiasm be as high on each side as it was in 2020? A drop on either side most likely will portend the winner of the November election.

There you go — the old joke again.

In Mississippi, turnout was high in 2020 but much lower than the national average.

But there is a reason to believe that turnout might be higher in Mississippi this November. The two Democrats winning the most votes in federal elections in Mississippi history were Black candidates: Mike Espy in his unsuccessful U.S. Senate bid against Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in 2020 and President Barack Obama in 2012. Espy captured 578,619 votes in losing to Hyde-Smith by 10% in 2020. In his successful reelection in 2012, Obama received 562,949 in Mississippi, or about 11.5% less than Republican Mitt Romney.

Minnesota generally is the state with the highest turnout, hovering near 80% — almost 20% higher than the turnout in Mississippi.

If Mississippians come out to vote at the same level as Minnesotans in 2024, that would mean almost 260,000 more people would vote in 2024 than in 2020.

That could be enough votes to give the Democratic presidential nominee a victory in Mississippi for the first time since 1976.

Of course, that victory would only occur if Harris could ensure those extra votes were mostly her supporters.

After all, it’s all about the turnout.

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