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Mississippi Today’s political team discusses an important week that will officially kick off the anticipated 2023 statewide and legislative election cycle. 

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Mississippi Today journalists won numerous honors in the 2022 Society of Professional Journalists’ Green Eyeshade Awards, created to recognize “the very best journalism in the southeastern United States.”

In total, nine Mississippi Today journalists won or placed in categories against the Southeast’s digital news outlets, featuring reporting published in the 2021 calendar year.

Six Mississippi Today journalists took home top honors, earning first place in several categories:

• Reporters Will Stribling, Julia James, Geoff Pender and Bobby Harrison collectively won first place in the “Deadline Reporting” category for their thorough coverage of Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban going before U.S. Supreme Court.
• Editor-in-chief Adam Ganucheau won first place in the “Political Reporting” category for a broad collection of political coverage in 2021.
• Sports columnist Rick Cleveland won first place in the “Sports Reporting” category for his series on the Greenville Christian football team’s 2021 success.

Other Mississippi Today journalists placed in several other Green Eyeshade Awards categories:

• Reporter Bobby Harrison placed third in the “Serious Commentary” category for a collection of political analyses published in 2021.
• Sports columnist Rick Cleveland placed second in the “Sports Commentary” category for his column about Rusty Thoms and the Mississippi State baseball winning trip to Omaha in 2021.
• Economy & jobs reporter Sara DiNatale and photojournalist Vickie King placed third in the “Business Reporting” category for their piece on how Mississippians were affected by the $300 unemployment check ending.

To see a full measure of the impact our journalists continue to have on Mississippi, read our 2022 Impact Report.

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Editor’s note: On July 30, the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame inducts its Class of 2022. What follows is Part IV of a series detailing the achievements of the eight inductees, today featuring coaching legend Bob Tyler.

Soon-to-be Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer Bob Tyler gained his most fame as the program-reviving head football coach at Mississippi State in the 1970s, but some older experts believe Tyler might have been the state’s greatest high school football coach.

Mac Barnes, who qualifies as an expert having won more 333 games himself as a high school coach, is one of those. Barnes played one season for Tyler at Meridian High School.

“In my opinion, Coach Tyler earned Hall of Fame status before he ever became a college coach,” Barnes said. “He turned Mississippi high school football upside down. He really did change the landscape. He showed everybody how it could be done.”

What Tyler did was win. He spent his last three years (1965-67) as a high school coach at Meridian. His Wildcats for those three seasons won 38 games, lost zero and tied one. Nobody’s perfect.

While 99% of Mississippi high school teams in that era ran the ball 90% of the time, Tyler’s Meridian teams threw it all over the field.

Said Barnes, “Nobody could stop us. Coach Tyler was light years ahead of everyone else in terms of offensive scheme and preparation. He was the smartest coach around.”

Barnes went on, “You know in high school, there’s no draft and you don’t recruit or you’re not supposed to. You have to play with the guys you have. Coach Tyler didn’t have just his system and make his players adjust to that. He adjusted his coaching style to the players he had.

“At Meridian, we had guys who could throw it and catch it, so that’s what we did.”

The only blemish on Meridian’s record over three seasons was a tie with Columbus in 1967. Said Barnes, “They left the field slapping each other on the back, celebrating. We left the field crying.”

Barnes says he used many lessons he learned from Tyler to become the head football coach at Meridian at the age of 26 and to continue coaching and winning in high school football for the next 40 years. “What I saw with Coach Tyler was the influence he had on a community, on his players and his coaches,” Barnes says. “I saw the love he had for his players and how he treated them. This was back at a time when most high school coaches wouldn’t let their players have water and had them taking salt tablets before every practice and game. He changed all that. In many ways, he changed the way high school football was coached in Mississippi.”

Tyler had a lasting influence on his players, even one he coached for only one game. That player’s name: Archie Manning. Tyler coached Manning in the 1967 Mississippi High School All-Star Game after Manning had coached tiny Drew High School to a 5-5 record his senior year.

Tyler’s Meridian High quarterback, Bob White, was also a quarterback for the North team in that game. Manning didn’t know how much he would even get to play, but said, “I was excited anyway because I knew we were going to throw the ball. Plus, even though Bob (Tyler) had his quarterback there, he treated me great.”

For his part, Tyler had not heard of Manning before he helped select the roster for the team, but he got a call from Ole Miss coach John Vaught asking him to please consider choosing Manning. Said Tyler, “When Coach Vaught asked you to do something back then, you just did it.”

Long story short: White, a high school All-American, who had also signed with Ole Miss, started the game but suffered a career-altering knee injury in the first quarter. Manning came off the bench and threw for four touchdowns and ran for another in the North’s 57-33 victory.

Manning and Tyler have been friends ever since. In 2017, 50 years after the memorable all-star game, the North team held a reunion at Millsaps where they had stayed and practiced the week of the game. Says Manning, “We had a blast. I think Bob had more fun than anyone.”

Vaught created a position of wide receiver coach at Ole Miss for the 1968 team. He hired Tyler to fill it. Said Manning, “I thought Bob really improved us at that position. We had great ones, you know: Floyd Franks, Vernon Studdard and Buddy Jones.”

Tyler moved to Alabama to coach for Bear Bryant in 1971. That Bama team won 11 games and the SEC Championship. Then, Tyler spent the 1972 season as offensive coordinator at Mississippi State before becoming the head coach. His 1974 Bulldogs are fondly remembered by State fans. State finished 9-3, trounced Ole Miss in the Egg Bowl and then beat North Carolina in the Sun Bowl.

Later on, Tyler also coached at North Texas and at Millsaps, where his 2000 Millsaps Majors defeated Mississippi College 20-19 in the first-ever Mississippi Backyard Brawl.

Tyler, who turned 90 on July 4, has long since retired and is living in Water Valley where he was born and where he was hired for his first high school coaching job in 1957 – the beginning of career that saw him when 95 games while losing only 28 as a game-changing high school coach.

•••

The 2022 Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame Induction Class includes Tyler, golfer/golf commentator Jim Gallagher, football great Eric Moulds, world swimming champion Maggie Bowen-Hanna, basketball coach Kermit Davis, Sr., baseball standouts Barry Lyons and David Dellucci, and football coach Willis Wright.

Part I: Maggie Bowen-Hanna.

Part II: Eric Moulds.

Part III: Jim Gallagher.

For MSHOF Induction Weekend event and ticket information, click here. 

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Late in the 2021 session, legislative leaders set a revenue estimate of $5.93 billion. That estimate represented the amount of revenue the state was expected to collect in the upcoming fiscal year and the amount anticipated to be available to fund the budget.

That fiscal year ended on June 30, and the state in reality — based on early numbers —collected $7.38 billion or about $1.46 billion more than the estimate set way back at the end of the legislative session in April 2021. In other words, lawmakers budgeted based on expected revenue of $5.94 billion, but the state collected $7.38 billion instead, resulting in the surplus.

According to data compiled by the staff of the Legislative Budget Committee, revenue collections for the fiscal year that began on July 1, 2021, and ended on June 30 increased 9.5% year over year. That spike in revenue collections comes on top of an increase of a record-breaking 15.9% for the prior fiscal year. It is important to note that in most fiscal years growth in revenue collections is 3% or less.

In terms of state revenue collections, these are truly historic times. The only time in recent memory when the state experienced similar growth was in the 1990s with the start of casino gambling and all the construction related to the new industry and in the 2000s in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the construction that ensued after the Gulf Coast was pummeled. The above average growth for the 1990s lasted for much of the decade while the growth after Katrina was more short-lived, lasting only a couple of years.

Time will tell how long the current revenue growth spurt lasts, but the past two-year period is unprecedented even when compared to what occurred during the casino boon and what happened after Katrina.

During the past fiscal year, sales tax revenue grew 13.8% or $309.3 million while income tax revenue inceased $273.4 million or 12.3%.

In other categories for the just completed fiscal year:

• Oil and gas severance taxes grew $15.5 million or 85%.
• Use tax collections increased $20.2 million or 5%.
• Casino tax revenue grew $15.4 million or 10%.
• Corporate tax collections increased $9.4 million or 1.1%.
• Revenue from the tax on cigarettes, beer and liquor decreased $10.9 million or 3.8%

The staff of the Legislative Budget Committee, which tracks state revenue, has long said that the final surplus tally is not known annually until sometime in August when the books are closed on the prior fiscal year. But based on the early numbers, the surplus — somewhere around $1.4 billion — will be the largest recorded at the end of a fiscal year.

The Legislature will most likely decide what to do with those surplus funds during the upcoming legislative session beginning in January. The Legislature entered the 2022 session with about $1.1 billion in surplus funds and spent $956 million of those funds on projects and on specific needs for state agencies, leaving about $150 million in what is known as the capital expense fund.

The Legislature opted to spend the funds on literally hundreds of projects, such as building and renovation projects on various governmental properties and on tourism projects. In the past when such gargantuan surpluses did not exist, the Legislature paid for such projects by issuing long-term debt.

After an initial drop in state tax collections in 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, revenue soared and has continued to soar. Threats of a national recession have not slowed Mississippi’s revenue collections.

Mississippi is not unique. Federal stimulus funds provided to deal with the coronavirus have helped spur tax collections in nearly every state. In addition, increased wages have provided the states more revenue from the taxes levied on income. And inflation also has provided states more revenue — especially for states more reliant on the sales tax such as Mississippi.

After all, a 7% sales tax on groceries now generates more revenue for the state since groceries cost more thanks to inflation. The same can be said for car sales and for just about every other retail item impacted by inflation.

In the 2021 session, legislators did not consider the impact of inflation when budgeting. Most agencies received small increases in funding or no increase at all other than for specified purposes. But in reality, gas and various other items that schools and state agencies must purchase have increased in cost thanks to inflation. If the Legislature does not provide funds for those increased costs during the 2023 session, many schools and other state agencies could have difficulty making ends meet.

Legislators have no excuse not to fund those inflationary needs. No doubt, the Legislature will have the surplus funds needed to do so.

READ MORE: Many states used surpluses to give taxpayers a rebate. Not Mississippi.

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Mississippi Department of Human Services Director Bob Anderson said he took attorney Brad Pigott off the state’s ongoing civil lawsuit in the welfare scandal because Pigott didn’t consult with the agency before filing a recent subpoena that named the former governor.

But a July 1 email obtained by Mississippi Today shows Pigott sent a draft copy of the subpoena to both the Attorney General’s Office and the welfare agency’s general counsel — 10 days before he filed it.

On July 11, Pigott filed a subpoena on the University of Southern Mississippi Athletic Foundation for its communication with several key players in the case, including former Gov. Phil Bryant and retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre. He also subpoenaed Supertalk, a high-powered conservative talk radio network, for interviews with defendants in the suit.

The athletic department had received $5 million in welfare funds from the embattled nonprofit founder Nancy New to build a new volleyball stadium on behalf of Favre — the single largest known purchase in the scandal.

But the USM Athletic Foundation and Supertalk, both of which received welfare payments that auditors have questioned, were not named as defendants in the lawsuit.

“Please look over these DRAFT subpoenas to 2 non-parties, which you and I have talked about only generally,” Pigott wrote in the July 1 email to Assistant Attorney General Stephen Schelver, copying MDHS attorney Patrick Black. “Let me know if you have edits.”

On Friday, the week after Pigott filed the subpoenas and Mississippi Today first published them, MDHS abruptly removed him from the case.

READ MORE: State fires attorney probing former Gov. Phil Bryant in welfare scandal lawsuit

MDHS hired Pigott, a former U.S. attorney who filed civil litigation against 38 individuals or companies in early May, on a year-long contract that was set to expire July 30. The goal of the lawsuit is to recover misspent welfare funds — federal dollars that were intended to help Mississippi’s neediest residents. While Pigott’s client was MDHS, the attorney general’s office approved Pigott’s contract and is included as counsel on the lawsuit. 

Attorney General’s Office spokesperson Michelle Williams told Mississippi Today on Saturday that her office is not involved in decisions about who MDHS chooses to represent the agency.

However, the governor’s office, which directly oversees MDHS, was.

“While the Governor has not been closely involved, the Governor’s office has worked closely with DHS throughout our efforts to recover the fraudulent spending that occurred before the Reeves term began,” reads a statement Reeves’ office released Saturday. “That included discussions about the decision not to extend Brad Pigott’s contract. DHS has done a great job explaining the myriad reasons why a more professional, full-service law firm was required. Recovering the stolen TANF funds is a priority for DHS, and we always engage with our agencies on their priorities.”

Pigott said MDHS did not give him a reason he would not remain on the case but told him the decision was not indicative of the quality of his legal work. Pigott told Mississippi Today he believed his termination was politically motivated.

On Saturday, a day after Mississippi Today broke news of Pigott’s firing, MDHS released a statement saying Pigott had “made decisions about the litigation and filed pleadings without any prior dialogue with officials at MDHS.”

“Although USM Athletic Foundation is not yet a party in this case, Brad Pigott issued an extensive subpoena to that entity without any prior discussion of the matter with MDHS,” Anderson said in his statement. “Attorneys represent clients, and MDHS is the client in this case. I hope I don’t need to explain that an attorney needs to remain in close communication with his client at all times. Any review of complaints filed with the Mississippi Bar will reveal that communication— or lack thereof— is at the center of many of those complaints. When it becomes apparent that the client and the lawyer are not on the same page, the client has every right to find another attorney.”

Anderson’s statement appears to confirm Pigott’s suspicion that he was terminated because of his subpoena on the athletic foundation and his attempts to answer how $5 million in federal funds from an anti-poverty program were converted to build a volleyball stadium. This was a project Bryant was aware of, Mississippi Today previously reported.

“All I did, and I believe all that caused me to be terminated from representing the department or having anything to do with the litigation, was to try to get the truth about all of that,” Pigott told Mississippi Today hours after his firing Friday. “People are going to go to jail over this, at least the state should be willing to find out the truth of what happened.”

State Auditor Shad White, who initially investigated the welfare scheme, reacted to the news of Pigott’s termination on social media Saturday morning.

“Firing Pigott is a mistake,” White wrote. “From the beginning of this case, I said having a bipartisan team look at this case is important. That’s one of the many reasons I gave our findings to the DA of Hinds Co, who’s a Democrat. I’ve also, of course, given everything to the FBI. Pigott worked well with my office, communicating regularly with us about the status of the case and how we could share information. I hope Pigott’s firing doesn’t delay the recovery of the millions of misspent welfare money that we identified in our audits.”

The MDHS statement said the agency will retain new counsel and that this decision does not change its commitment to recouping misspent TANF funds.

“I am sure they can find a loyal Republican lawyer to do the work,” Pigott said Friday.

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Sheldon Timothy Herrington Jr., a recent graduate of University of Mississippi, has been charged with murder in the case of Jimmie “Jay” Lee, a 20-year-old Black student who was well-known in Oxford’s LGBTQ community.

The Oxford Police Department announced the arrest in a press release Friday night. OPD did not provide the date or time that Harrington was booked or a motive. A bond has not yet been set. Harrington’s charges are not yet posted to Lafayette County’s online court records database. 

OPD asked anyone with information to contact police, who are “still working to locate Lee’s body.” 

“This is still an ongoing investigation and updates will be given at a later date,” the press release states. 

Lee’s disappearance 14 days ago had spurred his friends and family to conduct search parties across Oxford and post flyers pleading for information. On Wednesday, his classmates in the UM Department of Social Work held a rally for Lee.

Many people describe Lee as an open, confident person who broke barriers for UM’s LGBTQ community and was drawn to social work because he wanted to help people. He had just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in social work and was already accepted to pursue his master’s this fall. 

“This is a loving, caring person that would give you the shirt off his back if you need it,” Tayla Carey, Lee’s sister, told Mississippi Today last week. 

Lee was last seen at 5:58 a.m. on Friday, July 8, sitting in his car at Campus Walk Apartments, where he lived. The 20-year-old was reported missing to the University of Mississippi Police Department that evening after he did not show up to a donation drive for baby formula that he had organized as part of a summer internship. 

Three days later, police found Lee’s car in the impound lot of a local towing company, which had taken it from Molly Barr Trails, a student housing complex, that Friday afternoon. In its press release, the Oxford Police Department had stated it believed Lee was at Molly Barr Trails to visit someone. 

It’s not clear if Lee was visiting Harrington. 

Social media accounts belonging to Harrington show that he had just graduated from UM with a bachelor’s degree in real estate. His family is from Grenada, and his uncle is Carlos Moore, who was president of the National Bar Association last year. 

The 22-year-old appears to have been involved on campus, serving on the executive boards for several student organizations during the 2020-2021 school year. He is also the owner of T&T Moving, a student-run moving company. 

Harrington’s most recent Instagram post, on May 5, shows him standing in front of a construction site in a powder-blue suit, celebrating his recent graduation.

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The state welfare department has fired Brad Pigott, the former U.S. attorney it contracted to claw back millions in misspent federal funds from dozens of people in Mississippi’s sprawling welfare scandal.

The termination comes about a week after Pigott filed a subpoena on the University of Southern Mississippi Athletic Foundation for its communication with several notable people, including former Gov. Phil Bryant, to get to the bottom of why it received $5 million in welfare funds to build a volleyball stadium.

“All I did, and I believe all that caused me to be terminated from representing the department or having anything to do with the litigation, was to try to get the truth about all of that,” Pigott told Mississippi Today hours after his firing on Friday. “People are going to go to jail over this, at least the state should be willing to find out the truth of what happened.”

It is unclear how Pigott’s termination will affect the welfare agency’s civil lawsuit, which promised to probe players in the welfare scheme and answer questions that current criminal proceedings wouldn’t. Just last week, Pigott had scheduled depositions with key players in the scheme, including former NFL quarterback Brett Favre.

Pigott said he was not given a reason for his termination, but that Mississippi Department of Human Services officials told him it was not related to the quality of his legal work.

Officials at the Mississippi Department of Human Services and the Attorney General’s Office, which had to sign off on Pigott’s contract and is included on the civil lawsuit, did not return calls Friday. Pigott said both agencies were aware of his intent to subpoena the athletic foundation days before he filed.

Recent revelations about the welfare scandal, originally investigated by former Bryant campaign manager and Bryant appointee State Auditor Shad White, inspired former state and federal officials to question whether White’s close political ties to Bryant could have jeopardized an impartial investigation.

“I am sure they can find a loyal Republican lawyer to do the work,” said Pigott, a former President Bill Clinton appointee.

Pigott’s firing comes just days after he filed legal documents zoning in on high-profile players in the scheme — including Bryant and Favre — that have so far escaped legal scrutiny for their involvement.

Mississippi Today uncovered in April that Bryant began assisting Favre with a venture called Prevacus just days before the company received a commitment of $2 million in welfare funds. The money came from a nonprofit run by then-First Lady Deborah Bryant’s friend Nancy New, who was given authority to spend tens of millions of funds from MDHS. Texts showed the former governor was poised to accept shares in Prevacus after he left office, until the February 2020 arrests derailed the arrangement.

READ MORE: Phil Bryant had his sights on a payout as welfare funds flowed to Brett Favre

New, a defendant in the civil suit who also pleaded guilty to charges of bribery and fraud, also recently alleged for the first time publicly that Gov. Bryant directed her to make a $1.1 million welfare payment to Favre.

In early May, Pigott filed a civil suit against 38 people or companies in an attempt to recoup roughly $24 million in welfare money the state says they squandered. These funds were supposed to address poverty in the poorest state in the nation.

Pigott was blocked, however, from including in his initial complaint anything about the $5 million in welfare funds that went to build the USM volleyball stadium — a payment inspired by Favre.

“I was forbidden to do so by political operatives who regard themselves as higher up than the director of the MDHS,” he told Mississippi Today.

MDHS is an agency directly overseen by Gov. Tate Reeves’ office. Reeves appointed the current MDHS director tasked with cleaning up the scandal, Bob Anderson, who worked with Pigott in the local U.S. attorneys office in the 1990s and informed Pigott of his termination Friday.

Before Favre connected with New to fund Prevacus, the pharmaceutical start he was investing in, he had sought her help on the volleyball project.

“She has strong connections and gave me 5 million for Vball facility via grant money,” he texted Jake Vanlandingham, founder of Prevacus, in late 2018.

To justify the payments, New’s nonprofit Mississippi Community Education Center disguised the $5 million agreement with the athletic foundation as a lease of the university’s athletic facilities, according to the indictment against Nancy New’s son Zach New. The nonprofit claimed it would use campus property to host events and programs for the area’s “underserved population,” a nod to the actual purpose of the grant funds it was using. In exchange, the athletic foundation would build the volleyball stadium, which it called a “wellness center,” and include offices in the building where the nonprofit could host anti-poverty programs. This never occurred.

READ MORE: ‘You stuck your neck out for me’: Brett Favre used fame and favors to pull welfare dollars

Auditor White questioned the $5 million payment in his explosive 2020 audit of the Mississippi Department of Human Services. Alfred Rankins, commissioner of the Institutions of Higher Learning, denied in a letter to White that the board had any involvement in this scheme, to which White responded, “Instead of quibbling, perhaps your time could be better spent providing the public with a plan for the Wellness Center to be used by the at-risk community in Hattiesburg and providing that to me in a letter. This way, the TANF money that was paid for the Center might be used to benefit the community it was intended to benefit.”

Pigott argues the lease agreement was intentionally deceitful.

“It’s obvious from published information that Brett Favre admitted in a text that that $5 million in Department of Human Services grant money was, in his mind, a gift to him, which he made clear was to absolve him of paying that money himself to his alma mater to build such a volleyball facility,” Pigott told Mississippi Today. “That was wrong and it was against the law and it cost the TANF program $5 million.”

“And it’s also obvious from public information,” he continued, “that the USM Athletic Foundation knew all of this and agreed to and signed a sham, fraudulent, so-called lease agreement with Nancy New’s entity pretending that the $5 million was to allow Nancy New’s entity to use the football stadium at USM, and the basketball arena at USM, and the baseball arena at USM, and the parking lots associated therewith, all of which was a lie, as the USM athletic foundation well knew.”

Bryant told Mississippi Today in April that he was aware of Favre’s USM volleyball vision.

“That volleyball thing kept coming up, and popping up, and then it’d go away,” he said. 

In the fall of 2019, after the auditor’s investigation had begun, Bryant hosted a meeting at his office with Favre, Nancy New and Bryant’s newly appointed welfare director Christopher Freeze. Favre had been complaining that he “owed” over $1 million on the volleyball stadium. Bryant said New asked in the meeting for more money for the building, which was under construction, and Bryant said he told her “no.”

Pigott subpoenaed communication between USM athletic foundation board members or employees and Phil Bryant, Deborah Bryant, Favre, Nancy New, her sons Zach New and Jess New, former welfare department director John Davis and retired wrestler Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr. 

“It is also obvious from published information that the number of lies that the USM Athletic Foundation told on a lease agreement is a larger number than perhaps anybody else told on paper in the course of this entire pathetic story of misuse of money intended not to go as gifts to famous celebrities or to athletic programs of universities but instead to go to the neediest families in the state,” Pigott said.

Pigott had also filed a notice of depositions that he scheduled between August and November for the following individuals: Zach New, Jess New, Nicholas Coughlin, Adam Such, Nancy New, Christi Webb, Paul LaCoste, Jacob VanLandingham, Brett Favre, Teddy DiBiase Jr., Brian Smith, Ted DiBiase Sr. and Heart of David Ministries, and Austin Smith. It’s unclear if the state will move forward with these hearings without Pigott.

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