Mississippi Today
Former Greenville St. Joe standout running backs are killing it at Washington, Florida State
College football running backs Trey Benson of Florida State and Dillon Johnson of Washington have much in common, including that they are the leading rushers for undefeated teams very much in the national championship race.
Benson has run for 641 yards and eight touchdowns. Johnson has run for 686 yards and 10 touchdowns. Both average over six yards per carry. Both are big, strong backs with plenty of speed. Both have transferred once during their college careers.
But you haven’t read anything yet. Four years ago, both ran in the same Mississippi high school backfield. That’s right: Benson and Johnson, both redshirt juniors and two of the best college running backs in the land, shared the football for Greenville St. Joseph High School back in 2019. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Greenville St. Joe finished 13-0 and won the MAIS 3A state championship that season.
โWe were blessed, that’s for sure,โ says St. Joseph coach John Baker said this week. โBoth are great football players. Both are great students and people. Education comes first at this school and both were A students. Both were great with the little kids who follow our program. What they are doing right now is no surprise at all for those who saw them here.โ
Consider this: The Greenville St. Joe Class of 2020 included 27 seniors. Two of those might be star players in the College Football Playoff.
โThat’s what we’re hoping and praying for here in Greenville,โ Baker said. โWouldn’t it be something if two kids from such a small school who have been friends since peewee ball ended up playing against each other in the national championship?โ
It would be. And it could happen.
Both play difficult games Saturday. Florida State, 9-0 and ranked No. 4 in the CFP rankings, plays Miami Saturday. Washington, ranked No. 5 in the CFP rankings, plays Utah Saturday. Both games start at 2:30 p.m. Mississippi time, which means there’s going to be a lot of channel flipping in Greenville.
Johnson, who began his college career at Mississippi State, has played his best football lately. Last week, against Southern Cal, he ran 256 yards, nearly a first down per carry and scored four touchdowns in a 52-42 Huskies victory.
Benson, who began his college career at Oregon, last week ran for 97 yards and a touchdown against Pitt. Earlier this season, he ran for 200 yards and two touchdowns against Virginia Tech. Back in September, he carried the ball just nine times against Southern Miss but scored three touchdowns.
Benson was the more lightly recruited of the two. In fact, he wasn’t recruited at all until after he attended a Nike football camp in New Orleans the summer before his senior season of high school.
Said Baker, โTrey went down there and ran several sub-4.4 40s at 215 pounds. The next week, coaches from all over the country were lined up to talk to him.โ
Johnson’s recruitment was heavier and much earlier. Then-Mississippi State coach Joe Moorhead recruited him much harder than all the others, Baker said, and Johnson chose State where Moorhead promised him he would have plenty chances to run the ball.
When Mike Leach took over, the running game took a backseat at State. Johnson played three seasons for the Bulldogs but never reached the 500-yard mark rushing despite averaging more than five yards per carry. He made the decision to leave last December, before Leach died.
“Dillon said the NIL and the location didn’t matter to him,” Baker said. “He just wanted to run the football.”
Both Johnson and Benson are expected to declare for the NFL Draft after the current season. Indeed, NFL scouts already have been at Greenville St. Joseph doing background checks, Baker said. How’s that for due diligence?
Those scouts got nothing but glowing reports from coaches and faculty at the Catholic school where Johnson and Benson played in the same backfield their senior season.
โWe moved Dillon to quarterback that season and ran a lot of read option,โ Baker said. โThey didn’t know who they were gonna have to tackle.โ
Often, the opponents didn’t tackle either one of them. They combined for 54 touchdowns on a team that scored 48 points per game.
Said Baker: โI could coach for a hundred years and not have two like that at the same time.โ
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1875
Nov. 2, 1875
The first Mississippi Plan, which included violence against Black Americans to keep them from voting, resulted in huge victories for white Democrats across the state.
A year earlier, the Republican Party had carried a majority of the votes, and many Black Mississippians had been elected to office. In the wake of those victories, white leagues arose to challenge Republican rule and began to use widespread violence and fraud to recapture control of the state.
Over several days in September 1875, about 50 Black Mississippians were killed along with white supporters, including a school teacher who worked with the Black community in Clinton.
The governor asked President Ulysses Grant to intervene, but he decided against intervening, and the violence and fraud continued. Other Southern states soon copied the Mississippi plan.
John R. Lynch, the last Black congressman for Mississippi until the 1986 election of Mike Espy, wrote: โIt was a well-known fact that in 1875 nearly every Democratic club in the State was converted into an armed military company.โ
A federal grand jury concluded: โFraud, intimidation, and violence perpetrated at the last election is without a parallel in the annals of history.โ
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
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High-quality journalism like ours depends on reader support; without it, we simply couldn’t exist. That’s why we’re proud to join the NewsMatch movement, a national initiative aimed at raising $50 million for nonprofit newsrooms that serve communities like ours here in Mississippi, where access to reliable information has often been limited.
In a time when trusted journalists and media sources are disappearing, we believe the stakes couldn’t be higher. Without on-the-ground, trustworthy reporting, civic engagement suffers, accountability falters and corruption often goes unaddressed. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
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Every dollar raised strengthens our ability to serve you with fact-based journalism on issues that impact your everyday lifeโwhether it’s covering local election issues or reporting on decisions affecting schools, safety and economic growth in Mississippi. Your support makes it possible for us to stay rooted in the community, offering nuanced perspectives that help Mississippians understand and engage with what’s happening around them.
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We’ll examine what’s at stake if local newsrooms lose press freedoms and will discuss how you, as members of the public, can help protect it. This event is open to Mississippi Today and Verite News members as a special thank-you for supporting local journalism and standing with us in this mission. Donate today to RSVP!
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This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Hinds County loses fight over control of jail
The Hinds County sheriff and Board of Supervisors have lost an appeal to prevent control of its jail by a court-appointed receiver and an injunction that orders the county to address unconstitutional conditions in the facility.
Two members from a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with decisions by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves to appoint a receiver to oversee day-to-day jail operations and keep parts of a previous consent decree in place to fix constitutional violations, including a failure to protect detainees from harm.
However, the appeals court called the new injunction โoverly broadโ in one area and is asking Reeves to reevaluate the scope of the receivership.
The injunction retained provisions relating to sexual assault, but the appeals court found the provisions were tied to general risk of violence at the jail, rather than specific concerns about the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The court reversed those points of the injunction and remanded them to the district court so the provisions can be removed.
The court also found that the receiver should not have authority over budgeting and staff salaries for the Raymond Detention Center, which could be seen as โfederal intrusion into RDC’s budgetโ โ especially if the receivership has no end date.
Hinds County Board of Supervisors President Robert Graham was not immediately available for comment Friday. Sheriff Tyree Jones declined to comment because he has not yet read the entire court opinion.ย
In 2016, the Department of Justice sued Hinds County alleging a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conditions in four of its detention facilities. The county and DOJ entered a consent decree with stipulated changes to make for the jail system, which holds people facing trial.
โBut the decree did not resolve the dispute; to the contrary, a yearslong battle ensued in the district court as to whether and to what extent the County was complying with the consent decree,โ the appeals court wrote.
This prompted Reeves to hold the county in contempt of court twice in 2022.
The county argued it was doing its best to comply with the consent decree and spending millions to fix the jail. One of the solutions they offered was building a new jail, which is now under construction in Jackson.
The county had a chance to further prove itself during three weeks of hearings held in February 2022. Focuses included the death of seven detainees in 2021 from assaults and suicide and issues with staffing, contraband, old infrastructure and use of force.
Seeing partial compliance by the county, in April 2022 Reeves dismissed the consent decree and issued a new, shorter injunction focused on the jail and removed some provisions from the decree.
But Reeves didn’t see improvement from there. In July 2022, he ordered receivership and wrote that it was needed because of an ongoing risk of unconstitutional harm to jail detainees and staff.
The county pushed back against federal oversight and filed an appeal, arguing that there isn’t sufficient evidence to show that there are current and ongoing constitutional violations at the jail and that the county has acted with deliberate indifference.
Days before the appointed receiver was set to take control of the jail at the beginning of 2023, the 5th Circuit Court ordered a stay to halt that receiver’s work. The new injunction ordered by Reeves was also stayed, and a three-person jail monitoring team that had been in place for years also was ordered to stop work.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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