Mississippi Today
Is Ole Miss this good? Are Mississippi State, Southern Miss this bad?
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.
Mississippi Today
Mississippi Today’s NewsMatch Campaign is Here: Support Journalism that Strengthens Mississippi
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.
Here at Mississippi Today we act as watchdogs, holding those in power accountable, and as storytellers, giving a platform to voices that have been ignored for too long. And we’re committed to keeping our stories free for everyone because information should be accessible when it’s needed most.
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This year’s NewsMatch campaign runs from November 1 through December 31, giving us a special opportunity to make each dollar you give go even further. Through matching funds provided by local foundations like the Maddox Foundation, and national funders like the MacArthur Foundation, the Rural Partner Fund and the Hewlett Foundation, your gift will be matched dollar for dollar up to $1,000. Plus, if 100 new donors join us, we’ll unlock an additional $2,000 in funding, bringing us even closer to our goal. Boiled down: your donation goes four times as far.
Every dollar raised strengthens our ability to serve you with fact-based journalism on issues that impact your everyday life—whether 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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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 “overly broad” 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 “federal intrusion into RDC’s budget” – 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.
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.
“But 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,” 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.
Mississippi Today
2 out of 5 child care teachers make so little they need public assistance tosupport their families
This story about child care wages was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit,
independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger’s early childhood newsletter.
Caring for children during their first few years is a complex and critical job: A child’s
brain develops more in the first five years than at any other point in life. Yet in America,
individuals engaged in this crucial role are paid less than animal caretakers and
dressing room attendants.
That’s a major finding of one of two new reports on the dismal treatment of child care
workers. Together, the reports offer a distressing picture of how child care staff are
faring economically, including the troubling changes low wages have caused to the
workforce.
Early childhood workers nationally earn a median wage of $13.07 per hour, resulting in
poverty-level earnings for 13 percent of such educators, according to the first report, the
Early Childhood Workforce Index 2024. Released earlier this month by the Center for
the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, the annual
report also found:
? 43 percent of families of early educators rely on public assistance like
food stamps and Medicaid.
? Pay inequity exists within these low wages: Black early childhood
educators earn about $8,000 less per year than their white peers. The
same pay gap exists between early educators who work with infants and
toddlers and those who work with preschoolers, who have more
opportunities to work in school districts that pay higher wages.
? Wages for early educators are rising more slowly than wages in other
industries, including fast food and retail.
In part due to these conditions, the industry is losing some of its highest-educated
workers, according to a second new report, by Chris M. Herbst, a professor at Arizona
State University’s School of Public Affairs. That study compares the pay of child care
workers with that of workers in other lower-income professions, including cooks and
retail workers; it finds child care workers are the tenth lowest-paid occupation out of
around 750 in the economy. The report also looks at the ‘relative quality’ of child care
staff, as defined by math and literacy scores and education level. Higher-educated
workers, Herbst suggests, are being siphoned off by higher-paying jobs.
That’s led to a “bit of a death spiral” in terms of how child care work is perceived, and
contributes to the persistent low wages, he said in an interview. Some additional
findings from Herbst’s study:
? Higher-educated women increasingly find employment in the child care
industry to be less attractive. The share of workers in the child care
industry with a bachelor’s degree barely budged over the past few
decades, increasing by only 0.3 percent. In contrast, the share of those in
the industry who have 12 years of schooling but no high school degree,
quadrupled.
? Median numeracy and literacy scores for female child care workers
(who are the majority of the industry staff) fall at the 35 th and 36 th
percentiles respectively, compared to all female workers. Improving these
scores is important, Herbst says, considering the importance of education
in the early years, when children experience rapid brain development.
This doesn’t mean child care staff with lower education levels can’t be good early
educators. Patience, communication skills and a commitment to working with young
children also matter greatly, Herbst writes. However, higher education levels may mean
staff have a stronger background not only in English and math but also in topics like
behavior modification and special education, which are sometimes left out of
certification programs for child care teachers.
You can read Herbst’s full report here, and the 2024 workforce index here.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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