Monday’s news that Mississippi College – soon to be Mississippi Christian University – will no longer field a football team seemed to come out of nowhere. “Shocking” is the word many have used to describe the news.

“I feel like I just lost a family member,” said Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer Fred “Fast Freddie” McAfee, one of the two most famous football players in Mississippi College history. “I remember playing my last regular season game against Delta State before an overflow crowd. I remember winning a national championship. I just can’t believe it has come to this.”

Many readers might wonder who the other most famous Mississippi College player was. That would have been the remarkable Edwin “Goat” Hale, a College Football Hall of Famer who in 1916 led the Choctaws to a 74-6 victory over Ole Miss. You read that correctly. Mississippi College 74, Ole Miss 6. MC also defeated Mississippi State, Southern Miss, Tulane and many other southern football powers early in the 20th century.

Mississippi College competed in football for 117 years. There’s a lot of history there, both good and bad, including that 1989 NCAA Division II National Championship, later vacated for scholarship violations. McAfee, a star player on that team, says he never was on more than a half scholarship in his four years at MC.

And McAfee, who later made All-Pro in the NFL, surely didn’t receive any NIL (name, image and likeness) money, which is one stated reason why Mississippi College made its decision to drop the sport. We will get to that.

First, this: There are many losers with this decision: the coaches, who no longer have a job; long-time Mississippi College football fans who no longer have a favorite team; and even Delta State, which loses its arch-rival. Delta State football coach Todd Cooley, whose Statesman defeated MC 20-14 on Nov. 16 in what apparently is the last football game MC will ever play, called the MC decision “very disappointing” and added, “I just hate it for the players and the coaches.”

But make no mistake: The biggest losers are the MC football players, who really do play for the love of the game. They must decide if they love it enough to play it somewhere else and, if so, then find a school that will take them.

Dr. Blake Thompson, the Mississippi College president in his seventh year at the helm, says he hurts for those players but at the same time strongly believes that the decision to drop football – along with the name change – are in the best, long-term interest of the school. One primary reason is economics.

“I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me, but we’re looking at close to $2 million that we can save to put into our other sports programs, upgrade our facilities, and also put into other areas, including, of course, academics,” Thompson said. “We have a long standing tradition of academic excellence. We have among the highest incoming ACT scores of any school in the state. We’re proud of that.”

Thompson continued, “We also have bold aspirations for the future. I like the model of schools like Belmont University (Nashville), which doesn’t play football but has become quite competitive at the Division I level in baseball and basketball and other sports. Dallas Baptist, like us a faith-based school, has become a Division I baseball power.”

Thompson, who formerly worked at Ohio State, is in the middle of a seven-year term on the powerful NCAA Division II Presidents Council, and, consequently, is familiar with all aspects of of college athletics. “We’ve tried to look at the overall landscape of college athletics and determine where we stand and where we want to stand in that landscape,” he said. “We want to excel in everything we do. Sometimes, that requires tough decisions.”

One firm decision, Thompson says, “We are not in a place where we are going to be paying players. We are not going to play in that space.”

Over its last 10 full seasons, MC has won just 28 games, lost 74. Since the 1989 “championship” season MC has won 144, lost 200 and tied four. Those numbers will never be confused with Thompson’s goal of “excellence” in all MC does. None of that changes the fact, Thompson says, that this has been a gut-wrenching, quite emotional decision.

“My commitment since I got here seven years ago has been to care for these students,” he said. “All scholarship arrangements will be the same through the end of this school year. For those players who want to remain in school here, we will work with them, find scholarship money where we can from other sources. For those who want to continue playing football, we will help them every way we can with the transfer portal.”

The rest of the Gulf South Conference, including Delta State, faces a different and difficult situation. MC’s decision now leaves the league with only four football playing members: Delta State, No. 1 ranked Valdosta State, West Alabama and West Florida. The GSC was once known as the SEC of Division II football conferences. And, indeed, the four remaining football members all play the sport at a high level and all have won at least one national championship. But can four teams really be called a conference?

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