Saturday’s in the South Hotty Toddy - Saturdays in the South, #2

Before the championships, before the scandals, before the entertainers and the architects and the men who built it and the men who burned it down — there was the red clay.

Hotty Toddy: Faith, Football, and the Soul of Ole Miss is the complete history of one of college football's most complicated, most beloved, and most stubbornly unconquerable programs. From the first game played on a patch of north Mississippi ground in 1893 to the Sugar Bowl of 2026, this is the story of a state that has never been told it belongs at the top and has spent more than a century proving the world wrong anyway.

It is the story of Johnny Vaught and three national championships. Of Archie Manning on a September night in 1969, willing thirty points onto a scoreboard in a game he still lost. Of James Meredith and the weight that football carries when it becomes a courtroom. Of the wilderness years, the violations, the penance, the recovery. Of Lane Kiffin — brilliant, transparent, temporary — who built something real and left for a larger stage, as everyone who knew him always knew he would.

And it is the story of what remained when he left: the Grove, the oaks, the faithful, and a team that had one more thing to prove.

Saturday's in the South, Vol. II

Jm Alexander