OurTupelo

The richest man in the poorest state in America is contemplating a run for Mississippi governor.

Advisers to Thomas Duff, 67, who along with his brother Jim has been perennially listed as the richest in the state, said he’s very seriously considering a run for the open governor’s seat in 2027. They said he will make a decision “sooner rather than later.” Business and political leaders have been encouraging the billionaire to run, and he has reportedly considered such a run in the past but demurred. Duff himself declined comment.

Duff, of Hattiesburg, has been involved in state politics, but only peripherally or behind the scenes. He recently finished an eight-year stint on the state Institutions of Higher Learning Board, first appointed by former Gov. Phil Bryant. Duff has been a major contributor to many Republican campaigns in Mississippi, including most of the current GOP congressional and statewide officeholders. He and his brother are major supporters of higher education and have donated millions to Mississippi universities.

As Duff contemplates a gubernatorial run, so reportedly are numerous more traditional Republican candidates, including Attorney General Lynn Fitch, Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson, former state House Speaker Philip Gunn, former U.S. Rep. Gregg Harper, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, Secretary of State Michael Watson and state Auditor Shad White.

Some political observers figure Duff entering the race could at least partially “clear the field” in a Republican primary. Some potential candidates might balk at facing someone who could easily write his own campaign an eight-figure check, and whom they had hoped might help fund theirs.

“If he decides to run for governor, he’s absolutely among the top runners if not the top runner,” said Austin Barbour, a state and national GOP strategist and lobbyist.

Some, it appears, might recalculate their next political move because they would support Duff as governor.

“For me it’s really exciting when you see somebody who has been a great American success story built on hard work and good vision — someone like that running for governor is exciting,” said Watson, who also has been widely mentioned as a candidate for lieutenant governor. “… For me, I want to make sure we have a great candidate for governor, someone who could really excite all of Mississippi, and somebody like Tommy Duff fits that bill for me, and really frees me up to know that a lieutenant governor with a good relationship with someone like (Duff) would be great for this state, working together with a vision for the same destination.”

For the voting masses, Duff would start any campaign as an unknown entity. While he has had the ears of the state’s most powerful politicians, he’s stayed out of the political fray and other than with IHL and philanthropic work, stayed out of the spotlight. His views on most major policy issues are at this point publicly unknown.

“I don’t know him well, but I see him as someone who has been involved in state government, in policy matters in his own way as a member of the IHL board for eight years, obviously involved in a lot of things locally as well,” Barbour said. “From all accounts, he is a conservative who has an interest in seeing Mississippi continue to become a better place.”

Could a billionaire gubernatorial candidate connect with the rank-and-file in poor Mississippi?

“There’s certainly a lot of history with independently wealthy people running for office and winning,” Barbour said. “Look at West Virginia — Jim Justice ran as the richest man in West Virginia, got elected there, won reelection and now is about to win a Senate seat … It’s always a balancing act for a self-funding candidate. You’ve got to come across that you can connect with the average voter. I’m sure Tommy Duff could do that … This man didn’t wake up as a billionaire. He obviously has achieved this success and probably had to overcome a lot of failure like a lot of us have.”

Duff and his brother turned a small, struggling company into Southern Tire Mart, the nation’s largest truck tire dealer and retread manufacturer. They created Duff Capitol Investors, the largest privately held business in Mississippi, with ownership in more than 20 companies, including KLLM Transport, TL Wallace Construction and Southern Insurance Group.

The Duff’s father, Ernest, started a tire business in 1973 to supply tires for his trucking business and as teens, the Duff brothers started working there. When the two brothers took over the tire business in the early 1980s, it was struggling and Thomas reportedly had to work without a paycheck for a while. But the brothers figured out how to speed up the retread process, and by the mid-1990s the company was flourishing. The family sold it in 1997 to an Iowa-based tire business, with the brothers joining the company.

But the two were unhappy with the new management, and in 2003, bought back the business for $15 million. They have since grown the company to nearly 300 stores, which did about $3.5 billion in business last year. The brothers are now reportedly worth a combined $7 billion.

Talk of Duff running for governor in recent years has typically brought analogy to the late former Gov. Kirk Fordice, owner of a large industrial and bridge construction company who ran as a businessman and political outsider and who in 1992 became the first Republican governor in Mississippi since Reconstruction.

Barbour said Duff’s wealth compared to Fordice’s “is not apples to apples with the wealth disparity — Kirk Fordice was successful in business, but Tommy Duff is the richest person in Mississippi.” Fordice’s famous gruffness and irascibility — he was known to threaten to whip the occasional reporter or Democratic attorney general — would also appear to be in contrast to Duff’s calm and friendly demeanor.

But successful businessmen who turn politician often grapple with politics and governance.

“Government doesn’t move at the fast pace that business does,” Barbour said. “Government is sometimes more like an aircraft carrier than a ski boat — it’s hard to turn it on a dime. But I’m sure he’s surrounded by smart people, and has had enough interaction with governors and government … He would know what he’s getting involved in.”

And the media and political spotlight can be harsh for someone who has been mostly behind the scenes.

“Everybody’s got their own level of — you used the term — baggage,” Barbour said. “but I’ve never heard anything negative about Tommy Duff. He’s built a business empire rivaled by none in Mississippi, and has done it without dirtying his reputation — he has a very good reputation in Mississippi.”

Duff’s was in the state and national media spotlight in Mississippi years ago, when authorities in 2016 thwarted a plot by three men to kidnap and extort money from him. A man the would-be kidnappers tried to include in the plot called and warned Duff, who contacted police. The three were convicted and sentenced to prison for the plot.

A 2018 Forbes article about the Duff brothers stated: “Despite their successes, Jim and Tom have maintained a veil of privacy over their affairs, giving only a handful of interviews. What is known about them gives them a salt-of-the-Earth persona: proud Mormons, donors to Tom’s alma mater, the University of Southern Mississippi — the exact sum fittingly never disclosed, though confirmed to be over to be over $5 million …”

The post Will a Mississippi billionaire run for governor in the poorest state? appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi Today took an extraordinary step this afternoon in asking the state Supreme Court to overturn a lower court order that threatens the constitutional rights and privacy of journalists and every Mississippi citizen.

Given this matter of grave constitutional concern and the critical decision our state’s highest court must soon make, I want to be transparent with you, our reader, about what’s going on and what’s at stake.

In July 2023, former Gov. Phil Bryant sued our newsroom and our CEO Mary Margaret White, arguing that we defamed him in three separate characterizations of our 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Backchannel” investigation. We continue to confidently defend ourselves against a lawsuit we believe has no legal basis.

Bryant’s lawsuit does not challenge a single word of our original “Backchannel” investigation, which revealed for the first time the extent of the role the former governor and others played in the Mississippi welfare scandal. We have not let this lawsuit intimidate us, and we continue to closely cover the ongoing investigations into the misspending — including accusations made by key defendants that Bryant was directly involved. In May of this year, Bryant added me and Mississippi Today investigative reporter Anna Wolfe as defendants, along with five of Anna’s more recent news articles, to his baseless lawsuit.

Bryant has attempted to use this lawsuit as a vehicle to go back in time and obtain unconditional access to all of our internal documents, including notes and interviews with sources regarding “The Backchannel” — despite never raising questions about the original investigation and long missing deadlines to challenge it in court.

Given this glaring overstep and our steadfast effort to protect our journalists and our sources, we declined to turn over that information, citing a First Amendment protection called “reporter’s privilege.” Reporter’s privilege, which is recognized by 40 states based on numerous legal interpretations of the United States Constitution, serves as a basis of protection and privacy for journalists and the sources who share important information with the press.

But last month, the court issued an order that because Mississippi’s appellate courts have never recognized reporter’s privilege, our citation of the privilege did not necessarily stand as valid reason to withhold our information from the plaintiff. The order issued on May 20 gave us a deadline of today, June 6, to turn over any information in our possession related to potential confidential sources.

We believe this court order is unconstitutional, so we have no choice but to appeal it to the Mississippi Supreme Court. We have also asked both the circuit judge and the Supreme Court to stay the troubling order while the high court considers taking up our appeal.

LINK: Mississippi Today’s petition for interlocutory appeal with Supreme Court

With our appeal, the stakes are incredibly high: The Supreme Court could guarantee these critical rights for the first time in our state’s history, or it could establish a dangerous precedent for Mississippi journalists and the public at large by tossing aside an essential First Amendment protection.

We at Mississippi Today take seriously our job as journalists to unveil government corruption and wrongdoing, and we’ve done it well in a state that has too little investigative reporting. We are proud to carry on the long legacy of journalists who have so often served as the only hope for true justice among Mississippians who are cheated, overlooked or ignored.

Every single Mississippi citizen benefits from these vital constitutional protections. In a state with little government accountability, Mississippians routinely learn about the actions of their public officials only because of journalism like ours. Eroding these protections could have a detrimental impact on how effectively journalists here can uncover potential wrongdoing. Worse, it would have a chilling effect on whistleblowers and other brave sources who often come forward to journalists because they have no other way to hold power to account.

If the lower court’s order is upheld, every Mississippian would stand to lose a fuller understanding of how some government leaders truly operate when their doors are closed and they think no one is watching.

It’s important to note that journalists, even in the 40 states that recognize the reporter’s privilege, do not have unlimited, blanket protection from having to turn over sensitive materials. But in those states — and we hope in Mississippi very soon — there is an appropriately high threshold that a plaintiff in a defamation suit must first reach before journalists are compelled to turn over their documents and notes.

Under the reporter’s privilege, a plaintiff in a defamation suit should first prove that what a journalist reported was false, defamatory and based upon unreliable sources before documents are turned over to anyone. Those standards have not been met in the 13 months since Bryant first threatened this lawsuit against Mississippi Today.

There has been no evidence presented to demonstrate our reporting was false because it wasn’t. There has been no evidence presented that our reporting was defamatory because it wasn’t. There has been no evidence presented that we relied on an unreliable source because we didn’t. For those reasons, we should not be compelled to turn over privileged information.

We stand by every word of our reporting, and we are confident we will prevail in our defense. Toward that end, we are obligated to appeal this order not only to protect ourselves and a free press, but also to uphold the rights guaranteed to all Mississippians by the United States Constitution.

In the meantime, please know that Mississippi Today will never stop investigating government corruption and working to provide accountability. We will never be afraid to reveal how powerful leaders truly serve their constituents. And we will always stand up for Mississippi journalists and sources who come forward to us with information the public needs to know.

If you have anything you’d like to share, my email inbox is open. If you’d prefer to communicate via encrypted channels, you can find our contact information by clicking this link. As ever, we appreciate your support, and we are honored to serve you with the quality journalism you’ve come to expect from Mississippi Today.

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Weeks after the family of a Jackson man who died after a police interaction rejected a settlement and alleged the city violated a confidentiality agreement, a Hinds County judge sided with the city to enforce the settlement. 

On April 23, the Jackson City Council approved $17,786 to settle a 2019 lawsuit brought by the family members of 62-year-old George Robinson, his sister Bettersten Wade and mother Vernice Robinson. 

The next day, Dennis Sweet III, an attorney representing Wade, released a letter alleging the city violated a confidentiality agreement in the settlement when it publicly disclosed the settlement amount. Sweet said Wade would move forward with the lawsuit against the city and three officers. 

Last week, Circuit Court Judge Faye Peterson rejected Sweet’s arguments, and wrote the parties entered a legally binding settlement and cited a 2021 Ethics Commission decision that found that the city of Jackson can’t legally choose to keep settlements confidential. 

“Their agreement was absent any fraud, mistake or overreaching and must now be enforced,” Peterson wrote in a May 31 order.

In January 2019, Robinson was pulled out of his car by officers who were looking for a murder suspect. The family’s lawsuit alleged the officers beat Robinson and that they wrongfully stopped him without a warrant. 

Robinson suffered a stroke days before his encounter with police and was taking medication, according to court records. He had a seizure hours after the beating and died from a brain bleed.

The officers, Anthony Fox, Desmond Barney and Lincoln Lampley, lost their jobs and faced criminal charges but only Fox was convicted for culpable manslaughter in 2022. 

This year, the Mississippi Court of Appeals reversed Fox’s conviction, which Attorney General Lynn Fitch requested and the Hinds County district attorney opposed. The evidence in the case, specifically whether Robinson’s medical condition was a contributor to his death, played a role in the reversal. 

Fox returned to work for the Clinton Police Department, where he was employed after leaving the Jackson police force and up until his conviction. 
Wade is the mother of 37-year-old Dexter Wade, a Jackson man who died after being hit by a car driven by an off-duty Jackson police officer on I-55. He was buried as an unidentified person in the Hinds County pauper’s grave, despite having identification on him and his family calling the coroner’s office and police.

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Thank you.

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A group of north Mississippians have filed a negligence lawsuit in federal court claiming that pollution their former employer released into the air, groundwater and soil near the Water Valley facility where they worked inflicted them with long-term symptoms such as cancer and Parkinson’s disease.

Plaintiffs Odester Andrews, Excell Vance, Josephine Martin, Eddie Foster, Billy Harris, Joan Berryhill, Patricia Camp, and Clayfers Walton all used to work at the carburetor manufacturer, now owned by North Carolina company EnPro Industries, Inc.

“It’s well known that this is a dangerous chemical, and yet we were exposed to
dangerous levels, and they polluted the land and drinking water with it,” Vance, 69, said. “The harm that they caused to my life, my family, and this community is unspeakable.”

The lawsuit filed Tuesday says the business, at the time owned by Coltec Industries, used a “vapor degreaser” it bought from another company, Detrex Corp., to clean debris and oil from car parts. The degreaser contained a toxic chemical called trichloroethylene, or TCE, the complaint says, a substance the Environmental Protection Agency is now working to ban.

TCE has been around for decades, and is mostly used in degreasers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but is also an ingredient in “adhesives, paint removers, typewriter correction fluids, and spot removers.” TCE is a known carcinogen, the CDC says, and the National Cancer Institute specifically links prolonged exposure to TCE with kidney cancer.

The complaint lists EnPro, Detrex, and Italmatch Chemicals — an Italian company that bought Detrex in 2017 — as defendants. Mississippi Today reached out to EnPro for comment but did not hear back.

Coltec used the degreaser containing TCE from 1972 to 1986, according to state enforcement records. All except one of the eight plaintiffs worked at the facility during that time. The other plaintiff, Andrews, was exposed to TCE either through drinking water or from breathing vapors at the facility, the lawsuit claims. Seven of the plaintiffs have some form of cancer, and other diagnoses among the group include Parkinson’s disease and kidney disease.

Coltec, the lawsuit claims, did not have a plan for disposing its TCE waste. The complaint details an incident where Coltec told an employee to dump TCE waste in a ditch behind the facility and, the next day, an employee told their supervisor that they saw about 20 dead turtles in the same ditch. The lawsuit also claims the company told employees to spray TCE in the parking lot to kill weeds.

In 1988, Coltec and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality sampled two water wells, one the company used and the other a “domestic” well near the facility, MDEQ records show. The samples revealed TCE levels above 5 parts per billion, or ppb, the limit set by the Environmental Protection Agency. Two years later, MDEQ ordered the company to investigate the extent of and then remediate its pollution of TCE into the nearby groundwater.

But for years the harmful chemical remained present in the nearby air and groundwater. Testing from 2017 at monitoring wells near the facility shows TCE levels as high as 13,200 ppb in the groundwater, shattering the EPA limit. Around the same time, TCE levels in the air inside the facility also surpassed the EPA action level, the Clarion Ledger reported.

Also in 2017, then-Attorney General Jim Hood filed a lawsuit against the company seeking repayment of cleanup costs incurred by the state. The two sides reached a settlement in 2020.

Last October, the EPA proposed banning the use of TCE in manufacturing. The agency said it’s suggesting an exemption to the ban for “battery separators” because they’re critical to the economy and don’t yet have a substitute for TCE.

Data from National Cancer Institute, which was cited in the lawsuit, show that Yalobusha County, where Water Valley is, has seen the biggest rise in cancer diagnoses over the last five years of any county in the state.

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NCAA Super Regionals are this weekend, but Mississippi will not be represented for the first time in a while. Both Mississippi State and Southern Miss lost out in the finals of their prospective regionals. The Clevelands discuss all that, plus venerable Coastal Carolina coach Gary Gilmore’s parting words to college baseball.

Stream all episodes here.

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An attempt to reform Mississippi’s lax, antiquated and jacked-up campaign finance laws went over like a lead balloon with lawmakers in this year’s legislative session, with Republicans and Democrats alike gutting and deriding the reform bill before killing it.

So, that leaves the Magnolia State where it was, right? Weak laws. Little transparency for voters or enforcement for wrongdoers. Our government susceptible to the corrosive influence of secretive big-money special interests.

No. It’s worse.

In her eleventh-hour hop onto the reform bandwagon, Attorney General Lynn Fitch, the state’s top law officer, publicly opined, in writing, that she can’t legally enforce the laws we do have. Oh, and that a $1,000 a year limit on out-of-state corporate donations to our politicians that everyone believed was law for at least the last 30 years is null and void under her new interpretation. She put that part of her press release in italics, for emphasis.

Fitch’s last-minute joinder of calling for reform was seen as deflection of the flak she was receiving for not enforcing what many, including Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, believed were flagrant violations of laws already on the books during last year’s statewide elections. Millions of dollars in dark money poured into Mississippi campaigns and some candidates appeared to thumb their noses at what rules we do have.

Many chalked up Fitch’s inaction on the complaints to not wanting to ruffle political feathers or sour relationships with potential donors for her own future political ambitions.

Despite Fitch lamenting, “We’re allowing out-of-state influencers to determine and to pick who the candidates should be in our state … (and) We’ve got to have enforcement …,” a Mississippi Today analysis of her own campaign finance reports showed a majority of her campaign money came from out-of-state businesses: about $727,000 of $1.27 million.

Also, Fitch appears to receive lots of money from out-of-state interests to whom she awards AG office contracts. Records show she signed at least nine AG contracts last year with out-of-state law firms that had donated more than $300,000 to her campaign.

There has never been traction in the Mississippi Legislature for “pay-to-play” campaign donation prohibitions like other states have enacted.

Fitch, the only official with clear legal authority to investigate and enforce campaign finance violations, in her Feb. 6 press release appeared to throw in the towel on her office enforcing current laws: “Last year, we were asked to investigate several instances of clearly unethical and immoral campaign behavior. But we discovered they were not criminal under our current laws.”

So, what now?

Secretary of State Michael Watson helped lead the push for reform along with Hosemann and Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England, R-Vancleave. The three have vowed to continue that push next legislative session.

In the meantime, Watson said he will continue to forward suspected violations to the AG’s office, as the law prescribes. And, he said, he will continue to tell candidates there is (note the italics) a $1,000 a year limit on donations from both in-state and out-of-state corporations. He said this limit will remain in the written campaign finance guide the secretary of state’s office has provided candidates for decades.

It’s noteworthy that despite her Feb. 6 interpretation that no such limit applies to out-of-state corporations, Fitch appeared to think it did in August of 2023. After months of inaction on major campaign finance complaints, she announced then that she would investigate whether a PAC run by unsuccessful lieutenant governor candidate Chris McDaniel’s campaign treasurer tried “exceeding corporate contribution limits” by shuffling out-of-state money through PACs.

“We are going to continue along the lines we have practiced for years and years,” Watson said. “… And, we are not going to stop, we are going to keep pushing for campaign finance reform.

“I don’t have prosecutorial authority,” Watson said. “I can’t prosecute so I have to have a willing and able attorney general working with me.”

Watson could hand off suspected campaign finance violations to local district attorneys. But Watson’s office said that DAs typically would refer such misdemeanors down to county prosecutors, who don’t have the resources to investigate or prosecute such violations. Plus, such complaints are often about districtwide or statewide candidates, often running in areas that extend beyond the jurisdiction of a county prosecutor or DA.

Watson said he believes current statute and definitions and decades of practice uphold the $1,000 limit and that other campaign finance laws — while in need of an overhaul — could still be enforced by the AG. But he did question her comments early this year.

“That was an interesting statement on her behalf, perhaps to dodge a little,” Watson said. “… If folks rely on her position, I do think it opens the door for outside dollars to flow in.”

Lawmakers have not only been loath to strengthen campaign finance laws and increase penalties, they’ve not wanted to provide offices such as the secretary of state or the Ethics Commission clear duties on collecting finance and other reports and enforcing deadlines. Such laws have been piecemealed and tweaked over many years in the name of reform, but now they often conflict, with one part of statute giving Ethics a responsibility, another saying the same responsibility belongs to the secretary of state’s office.

Watson has said he’s not not seeking more power for his office, but last year said, “… when people do not do their jobs, I will stand in the gap for Mississippians,” which appeared to be a dig at Fitch and a call for someone to be responsible for campaign finance enforcement.

Also, lawmakers have shown they not only don’t want stronger campaign finance rules and enforcement, they don’t want the citizenry to even be able to clearly see who donates to candidates and how much.

Most other states, including all those surrounding Mississippi, have searchable campaign finance databases. One can, for instance, type in the name of a donor and see all the campaigns to which the person donated and how much.

Setting up such data would not require Mississippi candidates learn any real computer skills — they could simply type in donation information into fields in a form on the secretary of state’s website.

But lawmakers have shot down any effort to require such electronic campaign finance reports, including this year when Watson pitched it as part of his proposed reforms. Instead, Mississippi politicians can still file paper reports and hand-write them, which many still do with varying degrees of legibility. While Watson’s office puts reports online, they are PDFs — pictures of pages that a citizen would have to go through page by page to tally donations. Cross referencing donors across all campaigns or even inspection to make sure the reports were filled out properly would be a daunting task.

While lawmakers shot down England’s reform bill, with many voicing dismay at the inclusion of an online campaign finance filing requirement, the Legislature did approve $3.9 million for an overhaul of the secretary of state’s computer system. Watson said he believes he can still move forward on developing such a filing system, although he said he would still require legislative approval to make electronic filing mandatory.

“The (request for proposals) for that system is going out in June, and it will have a platform for online campaign finance reporting,” Watson said. “… I think we will get there eventually. I think we can educate (lawmakers) on how simple it will be to use.”

Watson said he knows campaign finance reform and strengthening laws and penalties is a tough sell in the Legislature, but he believes change will come eventually. He noted that despite England’s bill being shot down, “There were a large number of legislators who commented it was the right thing to do.”

He said eventually, campaign finance authority should be centralized, even if it’s not under his office.

“I have no problem with that whatsoever,” Watson said recently. “That’s what we told the Legislature — just centralize campaign finance under one roof. Mississippians deserve it. I don’t want more authority, but I want the law to be followed.”

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Few observers, if any, would argue that of all the so-called major college sports, baseball has remained the least affected by money and greed. It has remained closest to the college ideal, meaning the least professional in nature. College baseball has had the most level playing field.

Baseball is the one sport in which small market teams such as Mississippi State and Ole Miss could win back-to-back national championships. It is the one sport in which a so-called mid-major school like Coastal Carolina could recruit and develop a team that could win a national championship as it did in 2016 — or in which another Sun Belt team, Southern Miss, could host back-to-back NCAA Super Regionals as it did in 2022-23.

But we are watching the nature of college baseball change before our eyes.

This is not a good thing.

You don’t have to take it from me. Gary Gilmore, the retiring coach who led Coastal Carolina to that national championship, sounded an alarm over the weekend after his team lost to Clemson in the finals of an NCAA Regional. Gilmore should be considered an expert on the matter. He coached his teams to 1,369 victories, which computes to an average of more than 40 wins a season for 34 seasons.

Gilmore was asked about the state of college baseball, and he didn’t mince words.

“I’ll use this analogy, and this is what’s wrong,” Gilmore said. “If Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NFL had a system where everyone was a free agent every year, do you realize what chaos there would be? It would go away. You wouldn’t have those three sports. If you did, in baseball it would be the Yankees, the Red Sox, the Dodgers, Texas, and the rest of the teams couldn’t compete because they would spend whatever amount of money they needed to do it. And that’s what’s going on right now. I mean, there’s not a level playing field. It’s just ridiculous to me.”

“There has to be a better way,” Gilmore continued. “It’s not just who can raise the most money and give it away. There has to be a better way because, like I said, professional sports would go in the toilet in a hurry if we used this system. I mean, me as a college coach, this is what I have to deal with. You can sign your returning players to a scholarship, which binds you to them, but they can come out in July and go, ‘I’m gonna go in the portal. I’m up at the Cape (League), and someone’s gonna give me a big NIL deal. You were held accountable, coach. You had to honor that scholarship you gave me, but now I’m going to go in the portal and leave you hanging.’ That’s a messed-up system. I hope somebody fixes it. I’m gonna be honest with you, that part I’m going to enjoy not having to mess with.”

We’ve seen this play out — almost precisely as Gilmore states — here in Mississippi. The prime example: In July of 2022, Hurston Waldrep transferred from Southern Miss to Florida during the last week of the transfer portal period. Scott Berry, then the USM head coach, was left high and dry with no time to replace Waldrep by with another pitcher in the portal. Berry thought he had his pitching rotation in place. He thought wrong.

So what happened? Well, Waldrep helped pitch Florida into the College World Series championship series. Southern Miss, on the other hand, came up one victory short of making it to Omaha. You could make a case that Florida would not have gotten to Omaha without Waldrep, and that he would have been the difference maker that put Southern Miss in the College World Series for only the second time in school history.

In his first season as USM head coach in a proverbial rebuilding year, Christian Ostrander replaced six everyday starters, an All American starting pitcher and an All American closer, and still won 43 games and a conference tournament championship and made it to a regional final. There’s no time to celebrate said accomplishments because Ostrander must now stave off poachers who would love nothing better than to steal some of the talent with offers of high-dollar NIL packages.

Every college athlete is now a free agent every year. Gilmore is right. It would not work in professional sports. It won’t work in college athletics. It is a system that is not sustainable.  

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