Outside of the Vaught years, NO fake National Championships, NO SEC championships, and about the same number of winning seasons as The Mississippi State University.<div>
</div><div>Johnny Vaught caught lightning in a bottle. He came along at the right time, installed a wide-open passing offense, hired a recruiting coordinator, and Ole Miss was able to market their Rebel Confederate image into becoming the top school in the State.</div><div>
</div><div>The whole Rebel flag/South Shall Rise Again stuff didn't begin when Ole Miss started playing football in 1893...didn't even start when the Rebels became the official Mascot (over the Ole Massas) in 1936. It began when Harry Truman desegregated the Military, terrifying Southern whites at the oncoming progress. Ole Miss (along with other schools like Georgia and LSU) started waving rebel flags at football games in a show of defiance. </div><div>
</div><div>Another thing was that Vaught realized that he could never win with the normal crop of bow-tied sissyboys that attended Ole Miss. So he began going out and getting tough, hard-nosed, hard-working country boys who weren't afraid of hitting and getting hit-Vaught claimed his first recruit was Harper Davis, MSU great, when Vaught was coach of an Army Base football team during World War II, and he knew that he had to get players like Davis if he wanted to win.In other words, to win at Ole Miss he had to recruit Mississippi State-type Men...and if you look at the Ole Miss greats, do you really think any of them would've been given the time of day on campus if they weren't such good football players?</div><div>
</div><div>Add to all that, Vaught getting UT-Chattannooga to count as a conference win, and you have your so-called "glory years"...and why I call it an abberation.</div>
