Chicago Bears Hall of Fame running back Walter Payton (34) runs upfield during an NFL game against the Washington Redskins in Chicago, on Sept. 29, 1985. Credit: Jim Biever, AP
Mississippi produces more NFL players per capita than any other state, and it’s not really that close.
A new, thorough study confirms what I have long contended to be true. That is, the Magnolia State, relatively small and poor in so many ways, kicks tail when it comes to producing football talent. Always has.
That’s right, Mississippi, for its population, produces more pro football players than Texas, Florida, California and more than Louisiana and Alabama, as well. Remember, we’re talking about per capita here.
Since 1936, when the NFL began to keep accurate roster records, Mississippi has produced 788 NFL players. When you factor in population, the state produces 26.6 pro football players for every 100,000 people.
The research was done by Sidelines, a sports technology and digital media company, which also found that Texas has produced the most NFL players (2,515) of any state. But the Texas total computes to only 8.5 players per 100,000, about one-third of what Mississippi has produced.
Nebraska (21.3 per 100,000), Oklahoma (also 21.3), and Louisiana (21.2) were the three states closest to Mississippi in NFL players per capita. Alabama (17) was a distant fifth. You might mention that the next time the Crimson Tide kicks your favorite team’s butt, as it has done to Southern Miss (63-14), Ole Miss (42-21) and Mississippi State (49-9) this season.
Ousmane Diallo, a data analyst for Rise at Seven, led a team of five that did the research and tallied the results. That Mississippi led all other states, said Diallo, “was the part we found super interesting.”
This map, produced by Sidelines, shows how Mississippi leads in producing NFL players per capita.
“You’d probably expect huge numbers from the likes of Texas, California and Pennsylvania, but when you take into account population, it completely changes the outlook,” Diallo said.
It’s not just quantity we’re talking about either. It’s quality, as well. The NFL’s all-time leading receiver and touchdown scorer is Jerry Rice, from Crawford and Mississippi Valley State. Walter Payton, from Columbia and Jackson State, is the NFL’s second all-time leading rusher. Brett Favre, from Kiln and Southern Miss, is No. 4 on the league’s all-time passing yardage list.
“Mississippi not only produces the most NFL players per capita, but not only that, the state also produced the most Pro Football Hall of Famers per capita, as well,” Diallo said.
Again, it’s not even close. In 2016, Favre became the ninth native Mississippian inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. That’s more than much larger states such as New York (7) and New Jersey (6). The population of New York State is nearly 20 million, compared to Mississippi’s fewer than 3 million.
And that Mississippi number doesn’t count such NFL legends as Ray Guy, Robert Brazile and Gene Hickerson, who played their college ball in Mississippi after growing up in nearby states. It also doesn’t count, for instance, a player such as Peyton Manning whose roots are firmly in Mississippi soil and who spent much of his childhood in the Magnolia State.
Nor does that number reflect on native Mississippians who should be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame such as Charlie Conerly, Kent Hull and Jimmie Giles.
Another amazing fact: Jackson State, alone, has produced four Hall of Famers, three of them native Mississippians. That’s as many Pro Football Hall of Famers as both Florida State and Georgia have and twice as many as Auburn, Ole Miss and Southern Miss have produced. Mississippi State has no former players the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Yes, Bulldogs Dak Prescott and perhaps Fletcher Cox are future Hall of Famers but that’s a few years away. Their time will come. Or should.
Meanwhile, the Magnolia State has plenty to celebrate when it comes to football — or writers and entertainers, for that matter. We just don’t have available stats on the authors and musicians. Would we Mississippians rather be ranked No. 1 in health, wealth and education? That’s a no-brainer. Or should be. But we’ll take what we can get.
Keronique Davis, a mom of four, bounced from gig to gig for years while she finished two degrees from Coahoma Community College.
The 29-year-old often struggled to juggle a job, online school and caring for her children. At around $2,000-a-month, according to costs compiled in the recent market rate survey, child care for her four children is well out of reach.
It wasn’t until last year that Davis secured some much needed relief through the state’s Child Care Development Fund, which provides child care vouchers to low-income parents. Mississippi’s federally-funded program recently received a $200 million boost from the American Recovery Plan Act.
Davis spoke with Mississippi Today in April and her story illustrated how much the state’s assistance meant to her, how the state would be able to help even more like her because of the increase in federal funding.
Then came her “redetermination” for the assistance. She was between jobs and didn’t have a check stub readily available to provide to caseworkers.
The state kicked her off the program, making it even harder to secure a new job. Once she did, she reapplied.
“Once I received the check stub, I went back in to reenroll. So that means I had to do the process all over again. And once I did the process all over again, they still denied me. They said I didn’t send all the information in,” Davis said in October. “So it was kinda hard this time around to actually get accepted into the program.”
Advocates for working parents say the seemingly endless red tape in the child care voucher application process has prevented countless women from receiving the support.
On top of that, Mississippi Department of Human Services is now saying it does not plan to use the extra $200 million to expand the voucher program. (This $200 million supplement to the Child Care Development Fund is separate from the $319 million the federal government gave to Mississippi for child care center stabilization grants, which the state has yet to administer. When the application opens in coming weeks, it will appear at this link).
Mississippi Today spoke with the case managers overseeing the four regions for the Initiative’s Employment Equity for Single Moms project. The program helps single moms secure higher-paying jobs by helping them navigate childcare, adult education and workforce training. When a mother signs up, the program provides her with three months of childcare.
In the meantime, it’s often the case manager’s first goal to guide the mom through the voucher program to secure consistent childcare for the future.
“The first barrier is it’s absolutely too long and too difficult. It should be on a — I believe a sixth grade level is the norm. And it’s not. It’s very lengthy. It took me an hour and 15 minutes the first time I did it,” said Zaffron King, the case manager for the state’s northeastern region.
Pamela Reynolds, the case manager for the Delta, said that after her clients upload all their paperwork to the online application portal, the agency workers don’t review the material until three or four days before the application’s completion deadline. Then, Reynolds said, they’ll tell the applicant that paperwork is missing — even if she submitted it.
“They’ll say, ‘The check stub looks old.’ But you didn’t look until 30 days, so of course the check stub is going to be old.” Reynolds said. “So they’ll kick that out and say, ‘We need a new check stub.’ OK. But they actually don’t do it until three or four days before the case ends up being closed. They don’t give them enough time to get the new check stubs in.”
Reynolds said her clients have difficulty reaching anyone on the phone in the centralized state office where childcare applications are processed. There are no childcare representatives in the local MDHS offices. Reynolds said employee turnover in the office is great, so a mom might get a different case manager, unfamiliar with her application, every time she calls.
“Some of the moms just say, ‘Well, forget it.’ They get tired and they just, like, give up,” Reynolds said.
Mississippi Today submitted a public records request to Mississippi Department of Human Services for voucher application data in September. Instead of supplying the periodic reports that agency officials said they generate for internal review, the department created an original report for the news organization. (The agency attempted to charge Mississippi Today $400 for the report before the news organization objected and it waived the cost).
The report showed that out of 16,562 total applications the agency received from the beginning of 2021 to mid-September, it approved less than half. But the agency only actually “denied” 4% of the applicants, the report shows.
Most of the remaining applications fall under a category the agency calls “applications abandoned by applicant.”
There are over 4,600 of these applications, which reflect the parents who never made it through the process before their application timed out at 60 days.
“For them to say that a parent abandoned the application, when what really happened is that DHS just threw up so many obstacles and barriers and boulders and obstructions that they didn’t meet the deadline, that’s not abandonment,” said Carol Burnett, director of the Low-Income Child Care Initiative. “And that word is so offensive as a descriptor for what happened to the parents.”
The total applications in the report include new parent applications, those who did not currently have a voucher, redetermination applications for parents already on the voucher and applications to add a child to an existing case.
Many of the “new parent applications” probably reflect applicants like Davis, who actually had a voucher but had to begin the process over because of a denial during redetermination.
The state doesn’t currently have a good way to actually track this occurrence.
“If an application is abandoned, that doesn’t mean that that parent doesn’t go in and start a new application,” said Chad Allgood, director of MDHS’s Division of Early Childhood Care and Development. “And so one of the other things that we really would like to take a look at is, if a parent abandons an application, are they going back in and starting a new application? Or are they abandoning the application and just abandoning seeking the assistance?”
As for the division’s performance, Allgood could say that once the caseworkers receive all documentation, the turnaround time for when an application is approved is usually same-day or no more than eight days.
“We do monitor those numbers pretty closely,” Allgood said.
But that’s not the point of the application process most advocates are worried about.
Debbie Ellis, owner of child care center The Learning Tree in Greenwood and leader of a coalition of providers in the Delta, said it seems as though the agency prioritizes the computer system over the people.
“They are showing more consideration for their IT division and maintaining the built-in processes — the time sensitive calendars built into their software system — then they have for the working families who require child care assistance,” said Debbie Ellis, owner of child care center The Learning Tree in Greenwood. “They’ve shown more consideration for IT than they have for Walmart, Target, Kroger and these employers who are screaming for applicants.”
“They’ve made it easier for themselves and hard for the economy,” she added.
Allgood said that the department is in early stages of improving these systems to better serve applicants.
“We do know that the documentation submission process is somewhat of a holdup. And we do know that that’s something, we’re looking at some ways that parents could upload their documentation in other ways. We live in the technology age. We’ve even talked about looking at making it where parents could fill out the entire application, including document submission, via their smart phone,” Allgood said.
Many of the issues applicants face can be traced back to Mississippi’s outdated computer programs. Child care applicants must, for example, secure a physical letter from the child support office to prove they are in cooperation, even though both programs are run by the same state agency, which should conceivably be able to automate that portion of eligibility determination.
Last year, the Legislature gave Mississippi Department of Human Services a $5 million capital expense appropriation “to begin to look at these old, old, old data systems that we have,” MDHS Director Bob Anderson said at a recent budget hearing.
Anderson told lawmakers that the agency had hired a government consulting firm called BerryDunn to evaluate and assess the state’s antiquated eligibility verification systems and offer recommendations for improvements. BerryDunn, a Portland, Maine-based company, used to employ a former director of the Mississippi Division of Medicaid and the program manager for the state child support program’s Centralized Receipting and Disbursement Unit.
“We have four basic eligibility data systems, none of which are interoperable. They don’t talk to each other at all. They’re written in COBOL, which is essentially an extinct computer language,” Anderson said.
COBOL, one of the oldest programming languages invented in 1959, is characterized by a black screen with lime green lettering.
“We expect to get a report from them in early January about the cost of replacing all of our data systems. We anticipate that cost to be anywhere between $40 and $60 million, but we need to complete this study to know what’s in front of us,” Anderson told lawmakers.
In the meantime, Allgood encourages parents who are struggling with their applications to reach out to the agency, even request to talk to him.
“I can’t imagine being a parent right now. I can’t imagine how difficult that is,” Allgood said. “I absolutely respect and admire, especially these single working moms. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes.”
“If there are issues, please call our call center. It’s not perfect. We are expanding, but please reach out to us, email us,” he continued. “If they’re having a lot of difficulty getting through, they can send an email. They can request to speak to one of the supervisors. They can request to speak to someone all the way up to me if they’re not getting the help that they need.”
Northern District Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley is urging state, county and city officials to wisely spend billions in federal pandemic stimulus to tackle Mississippi’s most pressing needs. These, he said, given the federal rules on spending the money, needs are clear: water, sewerage and broadband projects. He noted more than 380,000 rural Mississippians do not have community water service.
In 2018, Lafayette Stribling, at 84, posed beside a poster created after he took Mississippi Valley State into the national basketball spotlight. (Photo by Rick Cleveland) Credit: Rick Cleveland
Lafayette Stribling, the remarkable basketball coach and stylish character who died Saturday at age 87, was most famous, at least nationally, for a miracle that didn’t quite happen.
Longtime Mississippi basketball fans surely remember. On March 14, 1986, “Strib” took his Mississippi Valley State Delta Devils to play Duke in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament. Duke was the top seed, meaning that Valley was No. 64. Duke, coached by Mike Krzyzewski and led by the great Johnny Dawkins, was a prohibitive favorite, playing a few miles from home in Greensboro, N.C., where the Blue Devils had just won the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament.
“Nobody gave us a chance,” Strib once told this writer, knowing I was among the biggest doubters. Indeed, I wrote that it was “the biggest mismatch since Poland took on Germany.”
I was so, so wrong. Valley led at halftime and by as many as seven points midway through the second half. Valley pressed and guarded the Blue Devils as they had rarely been pressed and guarded before. Strib’s guys played as if their survival — and that of their mothers — depended on the outcome. If there had been Twitter back then, Valley and Strib would have set national records for trending.
Rick Cleveland
Only after four of Valley’s five starters fouled out in the final five minutes did Duke surge ahead and win 85-78. Afterward, the largely Duke crowd gave Valley and their resplendently dressed coach a prolonged standing ovation. At his postgame press conference, a visibly relieved Coach K lavished praise on Strib.
The story becomes more amazing when you consider that Strib had taken the Valley job three years before when Mississippi lawmakers were seriously considering shutting the school down. Strib’s first Valley basketball team posted the first winning season in school history.
He turned Valley into a SWAC powerhouse, winning four championships. “They had been talking about closing us down,” Strib once told me. “After that, the Legislature brought us down to Jackson and celebrated us.”
Stribling’s career was the cause for so many celebrations. He won more than 800 high school basketball games and several state championships before ever getting chance to coach at Valley. Then, after so much success at MVSU, he came back to coach at Tougaloo where he was a smash hit, again.
That was in 2005. With 48 years in the Mississippi retirement system, Strib resigned at Valley and took a job coaching at Tougaloo, taking over another losing program. After one losing season — the only one of Strib’s entire career — Tougaloo had six straight winners, won five conference championships and went to the NAIA national tournament five times.
In 2011, at the age of 76, he took a team of seven Tougaloo players to a conference championship and the national tournament. “The Magnificent Seven,” the team was called.
“We didn’t have nearly enough players to scrimmage,” Stribling once told me. But they finished 27-4.
Lafayette Stribling and columnist Rick Cleveland at the MHSAA State Championship games in 2015. Credit: Keith Warren/MHSAA
The fact is, Strib would have been a success at any level of the sport. He knew basketball and he knew people. He knew how to motivate. His players would have climbed a mountain barefoot for him.
But even with all the victories, Strib was known as much for his friendly manner and legendary wardrobe as for his basketball success. He had as many colorful suits, pairs of shoes and top hats as he had victories.
There’s a poignant story behind the wardrobe. When he graduated from tiny Harmony Vocational High School in 1950, he had no suit to wear to his graduation. Actually, Strib had very little, period, including just one pair of shoes that he wore for basketball and everything else. He was the son of dirt-poor sharecroppers. His daddy had no education and signed his name with an X.
Strib once told me: “I borrowed a suit from a first cousin in Detroit who was tall and about my size. He sent it in the mail, a nice blue suede suit. So I wore that suit to my graduation, but I promised myself right then and there, when I went off to college and made some money, I was never going to have to wear somebody else’s clothes. I was going to have my own suits — and they were going to be nice.”
Strib kept his promise. He was a beauty, Strib was, a vital chapter in Mississippi basketball history.
Mabry is the founder of Tommie Mabry Company and Best Selling Author of A Dark Journey To a Light Future and If Tommie Can Do It, We Can Do It. Born and raised in a tough, impoverished neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi, Mabry was seemingly destined to sink into a life of crime, drugs and violence. However, he was able to turn his life around and now has become an author and motivational speaker focused on uplifting kids and the educators who teach them.
Mabry mentors at-risk kids to keep them on the path to success and has now come out with a motivational album for teachers called The Educator’s Album.
Many Mississippi legislators, regardless of political party, have never been enamored with the state’s ballot initiative process. After all, the initiative process is a mechanism to allow citizens to usurp one of the Legislature’s most important powers: the power to make laws.
No group, including the Mississippi Legislature, wants to have its power usurped.
When the state Supreme Court in a May ruling made invalid the initiative process for the second time in the state’s history, key legislators pledged to fix the language the high court found unconstitutional and reinstate the initiative. Speaker Philip Gunn even asked Gov. Tate Reeves to call a special session so that legislators could immediately fix the offending language.
Reeves did not, and now most legislators say they prefer to wait until the 2022 regular session to fix the initiative process. It also appears it might be the regular session before the Legislature can try to legalize medical marijuana, which was approved by voters in a November 2020 citizen-sponsored initiative but also was thrown out by the Supreme Court on the same grounds the entire initiative process was ruled invalid.
A key question going into that 2022 session, though: Will two-thirds of the members of each chamber of the Legislature, as required, be willing to pass language to fix a process that usurps their power?
Much of the primary work in fixing the process will fall to the Legislature’s two Constitution Committee chairs: Sen. Chris Johnson, R-Hattiesburg, in the Senate, and Rep. Fred Shanks, R-Brandon, in the House. Both say their goal is to fix the process during the 2022 regular session beginning in January.
“We were ready to go on the House side, but there has not been much talk of it lately,” Shanks said recently. “But we will take care of it during the regular session.”
Johnson shared similar thoughts.
“I think we need to put time into working on the ballot initiative process before we take it up,” Johnson said.
But the two chairs must convince two-thirds of their legislative colleagues to agree to restore the initiative before it can be put on the ballot for votes to approve and to re-incorporate into the state Constitution.
In 1992, the Legislature reluctantly voted to reinstate an initiative process that had been struck down by the Mississippi Supreme Court in the 1920s. Legislators were being pressured by various groups and people, including two young and popular statewide elected officials — Attorney General Mike Moore and Secretary of State Dick Molpus — to revive the process where citizens can bypass the Legislature and place issues on the ballot.
But in reviving the initiative, legislators attached strings and placed conditions on the process that they believed would make it extremely difficult — perhaps impossible — to gather the required signatures.
Thanks in part to two term limit initiatives making the ballot in the 1990s, the Legislature proposed and voters approved a change to the initiative requiring those garnering the signatures to place a proposal on the ballot to be Mississippi residents. That change made the initiative process even more difficult. As a side note, both of the term limits proposals were defeated in part because of concerted campaigns put together by legislative leaders.
After the term limits initiatives in the 1990s, no proposal garnered enough signatures to make the ballot until 2011 when three did: personhood, voter identification and property rights.
Then in 2015, with Republicans controlling both chambers of the Legislature and the governor’s office, the next step was taken in muddying up and making the initiative process difficult. When an initiative designed to change the Constitution to place more of an emphasis on public education made the ballot, the Republican leadership for the first time in the state’s history opted to place an alternative to the initiative on the ballot, confusing voters and most likely helping lead to the defeat of the proposal.
Again in 2020, legislators tried the strategy of adding an alternative proposal to the ballot to try to defeat the citizen-sponsored medical marijuana initiative. But this time, the alternative strategy did not work. Citizens overwhelmingly approved the medical marijuana citizen-sponsored initiative.
At this point, the Supreme Court did, just as it did in the 1920s, rule in response to a lawsuit that the initiative process was invalid. This time the court ruled the process invalid because it required signatures to be gathered equally from five congressional districts and the state now has four.
For the second time, thanks to the Supreme Court, legislators do not have to worry about their powers being usurped.
The question now, though, is will lawmakers agree to legislation that will restore the power to the people and give up a slice of their power, or will they choose to again not have an initiative process in Mississippi.
Bryan Loftin, 16, has a mitochondrial disease that causes intense seizures. (Photo courtesy: Christine Loftin)
Christine Loftin didn’t know what else to do.
Loftin, a Southaven resident whose 16-year-old son Bryan has a mitochondrial disease that causes intense seizures, was a passionate advocate for a ballot initiative passed in 2020 that created a medical marijuana program.
The medicine, Loftin says, is the only thing that could really help her son. Bryan has tried over a dozen pharmaceutical drugs to treat his seizures over the years, but none have worked. Loftin has been studying the use of medical marijuana to treat seizures, hoping her son would one day have access to it.
“It’s never been an option for our family to just up and relocate (to another state), so we just had to wait,” Loftin said.
Last November, Loftin was elated when more than 759,000 Mississippians voted in favor of a medical marijuana program. She thought Bryan would finally get the medicine he needed.
But that celebratory feeling is now a distant memory.
Loftin is among thousands of Mississippians who say their will is being ignored. They feel ignored by the Mississippi Supreme Court, which overturned the marijuana program on a constitutional technicality in May.
And in recent weeks, they’ve felt ignored by a governor who is preventing a legislative alternative and is not meaningfully engaging with the public about the issue — including the patients who need the relief offered by medical marijuana.
This summer, after the Supreme Court struck down the voters’ medical marijuana program, leaders in both chambers of the state Legislature reached an agreement on a bill that would create an alternative medical marijuana program. They informed Reeves on Sept. 24 they had the votes to pass it in a special legislative session, which only the governor can call.
Though Reeves had said for months that he would call a special session if lawmakers struck a deal, he has delayed calling lawmakers to Jackson. Instead of calling the special session, Reeves gave lawmakers a last-minute laundry list of things he didn’t like in the bill. Lawmakers said they conceded on many of Reeves’ concerns, but called others “unreasonable.”
The way Loftin and many Mississippi voters see it: Reeves is now the sole obstacle standing in the way of the legislation being passed.
Loftin, who has closely followed the progress of a legislative alternative to Initiative 65, says she has left more than a dozen messages for Reeves inquiring about the special session, but never heard back. So when she heard that the governor would be having lunch a mile from her home in Southaven on Wednesday, she knew it was the best chance she had to get him to listen.
So Christine loaded up her son Bryan, who is in a wheelchair, and drove to the 10th Inning Bar and Grill for Reeves’ political meet-and-greet and waited for a chance to speak with the governor.
Loftin told Mississippi Today that Reeves avoided them until she pushed Bryan in his wheelchair up to him. The long-awaited encounter was videoed and posted to social media.
Bryan can be seen tugging on Reeves’ coattails. When the governor turned toward the boy, Bryan handed him a photo of himself with a black eye he got after one of his seizures. Reeves reluctantly accepted the photo.
“We need his medicine and we need it soon,” Christine Loftin said to Reeves.
“Yes, ma’am, I’m working really hard on that,” Reeves replied.
When Loftin said she knew lawmakers had reached a deal and asked what the hold-up was, or any other question on the issue, Reeves gave the same answer.
“We’re working on it,” he said over and over again.
After a while, Christine knew the conversation wasn’t going anywhere, so she and Bryan left.
“For the first time in over a dozen years, I had hope that there was going to be something that we could do to give Bryan a better quality of life,” Loftin told Mississippi Today in an interview this week. “I can’t put into words what it’s like to have that ripped out from under you.”
“I really don’t do politics very much, one side or the other, but from where we’re standing, this is all about politics,” Loftin told Mississippi Today. “This has nothing to do with patient care. This has nothing to do with the interest of the people who need the medication. It has nothing to do with anything except for politics. And that’s infuriating.”
