JSU and Alcorn State’s Soul Bowl Meeting Is One for the History Books

Statewide bragging rights and more are on the line as one of the biggest HBCU rivalries is set to resume on The Reservation for the first time in four seasons.

Rich Storry/USA TODAY Sports

A dynasty was brewing on The Reservation. The cold air, filled with Southern seasonings of smoke from grills and old-fashioned fryers from tents at nearby tailgates lingered throughout Jack Spinks–Marino Casem Stadium. As the final seconds raced off the jumbotron, culminating in a 24–3 dominating second-half performance in the 2018 Soul Bowl, Alcorn’s party and celebration was in motion.

But even before the game’s final whistle and an uproarious edition of the Braves’ iconic fight song “Cherokee” echoed throughout the stadium, several devoted Alcorn State fans waved signs in the crowd of more than 21,300 that read “Back to Back to Back to Back to Back” with elation and repeated the phrase in unison like Drake’s summer 2015 hit single. What was once a jam-packed affair in the stands turned into a throng of Braves players draped in their purple-and-gold uniforms at midfield, hoisting the program’s fifth consecutive SWAC East trophy and the third division crown under coach Fred McNair.

Alcorn had become the mack of the SWAC, going on to secure its third league title—with Grambling State capturing two in between—in five seasons. Any team aspiring to slay the de facto giant in the East was forced to come through Lorman, Miss., a little town set off the beaten path in the woods along the Natchez Trace. The closest cities—Fayette and Port Gibson—for gas or food to the place where the likes of Bills defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier and Packers Hall of Famer Donald Driver left their indebted mark on the program is a 20-minute car ride with spotty phone service. When heavy traffic is involved, it the drive time doubles or even triples.

That season, following the JSU win, McNair led the Braves to the first of his two SWAC titles under a regime that included a stockpile of All-SWAC talent. McNair, the lauded and original “Air” to his late younger brother as well as Alcorn and NFL legend Steve “Air II” McNair, also captured the first of his two SWAC Coach of the Year honors. Lorman was at an epic high.

However, when JSU and Alcorn (5–5, 4–3 SWAC) reunite on the gridiron, things will look exceedingly different. Up until the league’s 2020 campaign, one that was played in an unprecedented spring 2021 season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Braves opted out of playing that spring only months after being crowned the ’19 SWAC champs. That, coupled with the emergence of conference realignment in the arrival of former MEAC bluebloods Florida A&M and Bethune Cookman to the SWAC East ahead of the ‘21 season, the Braves shifted to the West.

Jackson State (10–0, 7–0 SWAC) enters Saturday’s game in Lorman after winning its second consecutive SWAC East crown in a sloppy 27–13 victory against Alabama A&M last week and earning the honor of hosting the league’s conference championship game Dec. 3 at Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium. But before JSU commences its postseason business, the Tigers face Alcorn in their final regular-season assignment. If JSU handles the task in the core philosophy of coach Deion Sanders—smart, tough, fast, discipline and with character—the Tigers will charter a new installment in the record books, becoming the first team to go undefeated in a single season in program history. Sitting in his chair with cameras focused on him, donning his red JSU hoodie and blue joggers tucked away in his red, blue and white tube socks, that was the vision for the Pro Football Hall of Famer since his journey as JSU’s head coach began. “We’ve been screaming and preaching dominant all season,” Sanders said in his weekly news conference on Tuesday. “That’s been the goal since Day 1.”

To some, the third Saturday in November each year is solely the swan song of the regular season in college football. But for JSU and Alcorn fans, the game coined as the Soul Bowl, an all-out battle between two of Mississippi’s proudest HBCUs clawing back and forth on the field for 60 minutes, is a war with bragging rights on the line. Despite the severed division ties, several things remain unbroken in the true euphoria of the longstanding rivalry: the unmatched banter, the irresistible food selections at tailgates and the outrageous lines of bumper-to-bumper traffic filled with fans—young and old—hoping to enter the campus of the first Black land grant college in the country, even after leaving to make it to the game on time for kickoff. “It takes you all day to get there and all night to get out,” says JSU legend and NFL Hall of Famer Robert Brazile.

Preparing to Make History

Walter Reed, a diehard Jacksonian, a former two-sport athlete and JSU athletic director, takes a few seconds to shut the door at his house and presses the button on his phone to cut up the volume. Reed, a paragon of JSU, has watched or had his fingerprint on JSU football and athletics for more than seven decades.

He also served as an offensive assistant under three-time SWAC champion coach Robert “Bob” Hill and as the Tigers’ athletic director during the golden years of College Football Hall of Famer W.C. Gorden, the winningest coach in JSU football history. “I’m a JSU tiger from the end of my toenails to the last string of hair on my head,” he says.

If you think the sharp-minded 89-year-old is cooped up in the house on Saturdays during college football season, think again. Reed, who played fullback under “Big” John Merritt in the 1950s, gets up early and leaves his house by 9 a.m. sharp for JSU football games these days, especially considering the stadium’s massive crowds. “Parking lots fill up early. … People are parking all the way out to I-55 anywhere and any way,” he says.

For years, Reed had the perfect seat inside the packed 60,000-plus, horseshoe-style venue. But even now, he sits comfortably on the second floor of JSU’s press box, often finding himself looking into the “curve,” or the horseshoe portion filled with an ensemble of young and old Tiger fans, a wave of blue and white pom-poms and signs that read “Shedeur Sanders for Heisman” or “It’s Miller Time,” referencing hard-hitting linebacker Aubrey Miller. “I see the enthusiasm at games coming back to where it was in the ’70s and ’80s,” he adds.

But on Saturday, the longtime Jacksonian will not be sitting in the friendly confines of JSU’s press box. In thinking about the upcoming clash of SWAC titans, Reed recalled the 1974 Braves-Tigers matchup at Henderson Field in Lorman on Nov. 23, five days before Thanksgiving. The late Walter Payton and Brazile, then seniors in the Tigers’ program and now two of JSU’s four NFL Hall of Famers, were playing their last game in a blue-and-white uniform.

However, before Payton and Brazile were able to showcase their adroitness on the gridiron, the bus carrying the football team broke down in Port Gibson, forcing the Mississippi Highway Patrol to aid the team in getting to the game in the same chaotic traffic that is sure to dwell along Highway 61 and the Natchez Trace on Saturday. “Traffic was so bad, we had to go down the left side of the highway,” Reed says. “There were people that never got in the game, even with the game delayed in starting because we were late getting there.”

Instead of dealing with interstate mayhem, Reed plans to watch Sanders seal the deal on an unblemished season and a moment that he considers a “lifetime achievement.” “I’m praying that I can see it this year,” he says. “When I go meet my maker, I can tell him that I was around when JSU went undefeated the entire season.”

Sanders’s JSU Has a New Look

Since JSU defeated its final two October adversaries—in what JSU President Thomas Hudson deems the university’s “double homecoming”—with a win against the Big South’s Campbell and the national exposure from ESPN’s CollegeGameDay before JSU’s shutout of Southern in the BoomBox Classic, many felt the Tigers would run the table and win their final three games that includes Saturday’s matchup against the Braves.

Even if JSU were to lose on Saturday, it would not prevent the Tigers from playing in the league’s title game. However, JSU’s two November victories have not been the most appealing in style, which includes an influx of penalties (a combined 25 for 223 yards) and the defense allowing more rushing yards (a combined 335 yards) than it typically surrenders in defensive coordinator Dennis Thurman’s scheme.

The off-putting performance in those two areas is what Sanders attributes to his players becoming “lackadaisical” and “complacent” during the most critical part of the season. “We got to make sure we place kids in that’s not going to self-inflict us,” Sanders said.

Alcorn enters the game riding a two-game winning streak and remains in contention for the SWAC West crown, although the Braves would need a win against JSU and a load of help that includes losses from both Prairie View A&M—the SWAC West’s current leader—and Southern.

Statistically, Alcorn’s offensive unit ranks below the top five in scoring, total and pass offense, in the league but sits third in rush offense powered by the SWAC’s leading rusher Jarveon Howard, a Mississippi native and Syracuse transfer into the program. Defensively, McNair’s squad ranks in the top five in total, scoring and rush defense in the conference. Despite the challenges the Braves present and JSU’s sloppiness in its latest wins, the Tigers’ dominion of the SWAC has not wavered, and the daily sermon of dominance has remained at the front line of the program.

Heading into its eventual 24–10 win against Alcorn in 2021, Sanders’s team ranked among the top five FCS teams in nine different statistical categories—total defense, team tackles for loss, sacks, pass efficiency defense and third-down conversion percentage on defense—while ranking in the top 10 in the FCS in four other categories. This season, prior to the matchup, JSU increased its FCS footprint, holding six No. 1 rankings that include the nation’s top total, passing and scoring defense, and drastic increases in total offense, pass offense, rush offense—powered by the Tigers’ elusive, stocky running back in Sy’veon Wilkerson—and time of possession.

It’s a testament to Sanders bringing in new offensive coordinator Brett Bartolone, who built a strong relationship with Sanders’s son, Shedeur. The sophomore quarterback and Walter Payton Award candidate leads the league with 2,682 passing yards, 31 touchdowns and five rushing touchdowns. He will likely break JSU’s single-season record for touchdown passes that was set by Robert “Superman” Kent.

The Tigers’ success is also the power of having an educator in Thurman, who brought 17 years of NFL experience to JSU in joining Sanders’s coaching staff, having coached some of the greatest players in NFL history that include the Tigers’ coach, Hall of Famers Troy Polamalu and Ed Reed, as well as future Hall of Famer Darrelle Revis. “[Sanders] has been able to accumulate a staff that is second to none,” Reed says. “I watched Gordon operate and he had a great staff. Assistant coaches play a great deal in the success of the head coach. …They are the ones who really get down in the trenches.”

“You got to put your whole heart and soul into this.”

When it comes to the desire to beat Alcorn, no one cared more and thrived off the energy of the heated contest than Brazile. After the state’s highway patrol signaled JSU’s team through its traffic escapade, traveling northbound on a southbound highway, the Tigers arrived to an overcrowded Henderson Stadium. For Brazile and Payton, it was the duo’s last hurrah against their SWAC rival and playing for JSU before preparing for the ’75 Senior Bowl and the East-West Shrine Bowl.

“We wanted to close out the show,” Brazile says. “We wanted to end on a high note.”

Everything was strictly business. Not only did JSU hand Marino Casem’s Braves a 19–13 loss—the first of two blemishes in Alcorn’s 1974 season that included a loss to UNLV in the NCAA Division II football playoffs as the program declined to play in the Pelican Bowl—Brazile set the tone for his future NFL career. With the game on the line, he made four consecutive stops on a last-minute goal line stand, shutting down Braves running back Augusta Lee, one of Alcorn’s top 50 players in program history. “I had to close the show for Jackson,” he adds.

Nearly 50 years later, Brazile shares that same message with the players in Sanders’s locker room. “You got to outwork everybody,” Brazile says. “You got to put your whole heart and soul into this.” After JSU’s win against the Bulldogs in Mobile—Brazile’s hometown—on Saturday, the seven-time Pro Bowler quickly reminded the team that it still had three more games to play. But aside from the team’s message, Brazile delivered a special note to Miller, informing him that he had been selected to the 2023 Reese’s Senior Bowl, also held in Mobile.

Brazile is providing Miller with guidance and preparation for life at the next level, like an uncle who keeps a nephew focused, aligned and locked in on the things he needs to do to get better. “I don’t bite my tongue with him,” Brazile says. “If he had a bad play, I tell him to stay focused and move on to the next. If [the other teams] don’t score, JSU wins. … You always got to close the show.”

Miller plans to do so: “[Brazile] is a great mentor … and always tells me what I need to do in a game,” he says. Like Brazile and Payton, Tigers wide receiver Dallas Daniels—JSU’s second-leading receiver and one of Shedeur’s top-notch wideouts—earned an invite to the East-West Shrine Bowl. It was one of several goals Daniels set before the season.

But before Miller, Daniels and others can embrace the next steps of their career and prior to this team gauging a feel for the SWAC title game in nearly two weeks, they must close out the show on The Reservation. When the Tigers make the final curtain call on their movie entitled dominance, a standing ovation will come from fans of the program now and those who laid the framework in the golden years of the past.

“I’m one of the oldest Jacksonians still alive, and I’m proud of where we are today,” Reed says. “Coach Prime has changed the trajectory of this program.”

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