Mississippi Today
Ole Miss 28, Georgia 10: This was more a statement than victory
Years from now, we will remember many of the vivid images from a rainy night in Oxford and Ole Miss’ thoroughly convincing 28-10 victory over mighty Georgia:
- Of worthy Ole Miss Heisman Trophy candidate Jaxson Dart limping to the locker room early, the game seemingly over almost before it started. But, no, redshirt freshman Austin Simmons rallied the Rebels, directing a 10-play, 75-yard touchdown drive to tie the game at 7. Defeating a team that has won 53 of its last 56 and two of the last three national championships requires so many huge contributions. None were bigger than what Simmons, just turned 19, did. The lanky kid from Miami stands 6 feet, 4 inches tall, but he played much taller than that Saturday night.
- Of Dart limping back onto the field, his left ankle heavily taped, and providing clutch play after clutch play in a remarkable display of grit and and character. Dart made so many plays, both with his arm and his legs, but the one I’ll remember is when he escaped the Georgia pass rush, somehow getting free while running to his left, turned the corner and rambled 28 yards, clearly favoring the left ankle, before blowing up a Georgia safety who finally – and painfully – made the tackle. It was the biggest play of a third quarter drive that extended the Rebels’ lead to 25-10.
- Of a smothering, ball-hawking Ole Miss defense that came at Georgia quarterback Carson Beck from so many angles he never seemed to get settled. Last year, on a similarly rainy day, Georgia smoked Ole Miss 52-17, gaining 611 yards of total offense, 300 of it on the ground. The Rebels clearly were out-manned, so they went out and got some new men, spending heavily on defense in the transfer portal. Georgia could not block them all. The Rebels signed the aptly named Princely Umanmielen from Florida, Walter Nolen from Texas A&M and Chris Paul from Arkansas, Trey Amos from Alabama and others. And before you call it “the best team money can buy,” remember this: You have to buy the right ones and then you have to coach them. Those new guys have meshed well with returners such as J.J. Pegues and Suntarine Perkins in coordinator Pete Golding’s defense that often looks as if it is playing with 13 guys instead of 11.
- Of a squirrel, who stole the spotlight and stopped the game for nearly a minute in the second quarter, scampering onto the field and darting this way and that. It eventually headed toward the Georgia sidelines, scattering Bulldogs players including the quarterback Beck, who had better luck evading the squirrel than he did the Rebels’ pass rush.
- Of Ole Miss receivers running so free in the Georgia secondary you’d almost swear they must have smelled just awful. We haven’t seen this many receivers consistently get so open since Steve Spurrier was drawing up ball plays at The Swamp in Gainesville. Keep in mind, Ole Miss was doing this without its best receiver Tre Harris – “the best receiver in the country,” Lane Kiffin says – who missed his third consecutive game. For that matter, the Rebs were also playing without starting running back Henry Parrish Jr.
- Of Kiffin, the mastermind of it all, choking up briefly during his postgame interview with ESPN’s Molly McGrath when talking about Dart. We don’t often see that side of Kiffin but you could tell this one meant the world to him. This was the so-called signature victory his otherwise highly successful tenure at Ole Miss has lacked.
- Of Caden Davis’ kicking and Fraser Masin’s punting. As previously typed, you don’t win games like this without multiple, huge contributions, and those must include the kicking game. Davis, who has one of the strongest legs in football, was a perfect 5-for-5 on field goals, including a 53-yarder. Masin, from Brisbane, Australia, punted only twice but one was a Ray Guy-like 65-yard boomer that flipped the field late in the second quarter.
- Of Ole Miss fans rushing onto the field, not once but twice in a wild, raucous celebration that rivaled the one after a similar conquest of Alabama 10 years earlier. The postgame flood of humanity likely will cost the Rebels $250,000, which Ole Miss must pay to Georgia. Maybe, the Bulldogs can use it to help buy an offensive tackle who can block Umanamielen and Perkins on the edge. But then, these days, that probably will cost more than 250 grand.
One thing is certain: Ole Miss should move ahead of Georgia in the playoff rankings. Anyone who witnessed Saturday night’s dismantling of the Bulldogs (397 yards to 245) can testify to that. This wasn’t just a victory, it was a statement.
So what’s next? Ole Miss entered the game ranked No. 16 in the new 12-team playoff rankings. Georgia was No. 3. The Rebels should easily move up into the top 12 and should make the playoffs if they can defeat Florida and Mississippi State to end the regular season. No. 3 Georgia, No. 4 Miami and No. 15 LSU all lost Saturday. Ole Miss’ two defeats have come by three points each to Kentucky and LSU. The Rebels really are two plays away from 10-0.
Kiffin said beforehand that to win it all, a team eventually will have to beat Georgia. After watching what happened in Oxford, we can all agree that someone is going to have to beat Ole Miss. Currently, that’s a chore.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Mississippians ask U.S. Supreme court to strike state’s Jim Crow-era felony voting ban
A group of Mississippians who were stripped of their voting rights is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike a provision of the state Constitution that allows denial of suffrage to people convicted of some felonies.
The Mississippi residents, through attorneys with the Southern Poverty Law Center and private law firm Simpson Thacher and Bartlett, filed an appeal Friday with the nation’s highest court. They argue that the provision of the state Constitution that strips voting rights for life violates the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
Jonathan Youngwood, global co-chair of Simpson Thacher’s litigation department, told Mississippi Today in a statement that after filing the petition with the Court, he remains confident in the case, and the firm’s clients remain committed to ensuring their right to vote is restored.
“The right to vote is an important cornerstone of democracy and denying broad groups of citizens, such as those who have completed their sentences for criminal convictions, deserve the full right of participating in our representative government,” Youngwood said.
Under the Mississippi Constitution, people convicted of a list of 10 felonies lose their voting rights for life. Opinions from the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office have since expanded the list of disenfranchising felonies to 24.
The practice of stripping voting rights away from people for life is a holdover from the Jim Crow-era. The framers of the 1890 Constitution believed Black people were most likely to commit those crimes.
About 55,000 names are on the Secretary of State’s voter disenfranchisement list as of March 19. The list, provided to Mississippi Today and the Marshall Project-Jackson through a public records request, goes back to 1992 for felony convictions in state court.
The only way for someone to have their suffrage restored is to convince lawmakers to restore it, but the process is arduous. It necessitates a two-thirds majority vote in both legislative chambers, the highest vote threshold in the state Capitol.
Governors can restore suffrage through issuing pardons, but no governor has issued one since the waning days of Gov. Haley Barbour’s administration in 2012.
In August, a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, agreed with the plaintiffs and found that the lifetime voting ban violates the U.S. Constitution. But the full court, known for its conservative rulings, overturned the decision of the three-judge panel.
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office is defending the state in the appeal, and it has not yet responded to the plaintiff’s petition with the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s unclear when the Court will issue a ruling on the petition.
While the litigation is pending, state lawmakers have attempted to reform the state’s felony suffrage process.
The GOP-controlled house last year passed a bipartisan proposal to automatically restore suffrage to people convicted of nonviolent disenfranchising felonies after they’ve completed the terms of their sentence.
The legislation, however, died in the 52-member Senate because Senate Constitution Chairwoman Angela Burks Hill, R-Picayune, declined to bring the bill up for a vote before a deadline. House leadership is expected to address the issue again during its 2025 session.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
JXN Water to send notices about lead line inventory
JXN Water said Wednesday it’s confirmed no lead in about 43% of the city’s service lines, and that it will continue to investigate the remaining lines as it complies with recently updated guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency.
A representative for Jacobs, a contractor that manages the city’s drinking water plants for JXN Water, told Mississippi Today their goal is to fully determine whether there’s lead in any of the city’s nearly 75,000 service lines by 2027.
Yvonne Mazza-Lappi, water compliance manager for Jacobs, said JXN Water has so far identified nearly 14,000 galvanized iron service lines, or about 18% of the total amount. For each of those lines, she explained, JXN Water will have to find out if they were ever downstream of a lead service line, as lead particles can attach to the surface of those pipes according to the EPA. If so, JXN Water will have to replace the galvanized line.
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There are another roughly 29,000 service lines, she added, where the material is unknown.
“With this inventory, the EPA requires certain validation,” Mazza-Lappi said. “So we can’t just assume that someone’s service line is non-lead. We have to prove that. We use historical records. If we don’t have enough of those, we do build inspections.”
The EPA in October finalized a revision to its Lead and Copper rule, requiring public water systems around the country to find and replace lead service lines over the next decade.
JXN Water released a mapping tool where residents can look up their address and see the latest information for their service line, both on the customer side and the utility side. JXN Water spokesperson Aisha Carson said the utility will mail notices this week to residents that fall in the “unknown” or “galvanized” categories.
Mazza-Lappi said that so far, JXN Water has found just four lead service lines in the city, and that it replaced those lines earlier this year. She said they also offered those residents filters and will do follow-up sampling in January to make sure their water meets federal standards.
While there are still tens of thousands of lines to examine to make sure there’s no lead present, Mazza-Lappi said that their predictive modeling suggests there’s no widespread presence.
In the notices JXN Water is mailing to customers with galvanized lines or lines with unknown materials, the utility lists a number of ways to reduce the risk of lead contamination, such as letting the tap run before drinking, using a filter, or cleaning faucet screens and aerators.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
‘Groundhog Day has come to an end’: Appeals court orders dismissal of Jackson airport authority in lawsuit
A federal appeals court has ruled, again, that members of Jackson’s airport authority can’t sue over a state takeover of the city’s airport.
The court overruled a lower federal court decision, and ordered it to dismiss members of the airport authority in a lawsuit to block a state takeover of the Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport.
“For the fourth time, Mississippi state legislators appeal a district court order compelling discovery in an eight-year-old dispute over control of the Jackson-Medgar Evers International Airport,” Judge Edith Jones wrote in the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion issued Tuesday. “For numerous reasons that have percolated throughout this litigation, we conclude that the current plaintiffs, members of the Jackson Municipal Airport Authority, lack … standing to sue. Groundhog Day has come to an end. Accordingly, we vacate the order of the district court and remand with instructions to dismiss.”
Jackson’s mayor and city council remain as plaintiffs, and the authority members could appeal Tuesday’s order, but the federal appeals court has appeared to make clear it doesn’t believe the challenge should be in federal court.
“This suit is nothing more than a political dispute between state and local governments over control of an airport and the land around it,” the court wrote Tuesday. “One side has dragged that fight into federal court by tricking it out in equal protection colors. That won’t fly.”
The state Legislature in 2016 passed a measure that would abolish the Jackson Municipal Airport Authority and replace it with a regional authority with members from the cirt of Jackson and Madison and Rankin counties. Currently, the Jackson mayor and council appoint JMAA’s members.
Under the new regional authority, the governor would appoint five members including one each from lists supplied by the Jackson City Council, Madison supervisors and Rankin supervisors. The lieutenant governor would appoint one and the mayor of Jackson one. The adjutant general of the Mississippi National Guard and director of the Mississippi Development Authority would also serve on the nine-member authority.
City leaders and Jackson’s lawmakers have opposed the move, and the city and authority in its litigation claimed the move was racially motivated by a group of white lawmakers and violated Jackson citizens’ voting rights. They point out state leaders are treating Jackson differently — an argument city leaders have also made on the state’s takeover of policing and courts in the downtown Jackson area and efforts by lawmakers to take over the city’s troubled water system, which is now under federal control.
U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves has ruled in favor of the city and JMAA several times in the airport litigation, but then has been reversed by the Fifth Circuit.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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