In his 11 years as the head football coach at Ole Miss, Columbus native Billy Brewer had some pretty good teams.
The 1988 team was not among them. That team finished with a 5-6 record that included a pair of three-game losing streaks.
Yet, Saturday when No. 15 Ole Miss heads to Tuscaloosa to play No. 2 Alabama, the current Rebels will be seeking to duplicate a feat that only that otherwise forgettable 1988 Rebel team has achieved.
The Rebels have played the Tide on Alabama soil 33 times. But on Oct. 9, 1988, the Ole Miss team did something no other Rebel team has ever done: Defeat Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The score was 22-12.
“Oh, yeah, I had better teams go over there,” Brewer, 79, recalled Thursday during a phone interview from his Oxford home. “But for whatever reason, none of those teams could get it done.”
This year, Ole Miss travels to Tuscaloosa and while the Rebels will be an underdog, an Ole Miss victory would not be considered a shocker. With a solid defense and an offensive that is, at least through two games, on an historic pace under former East Mississippi Community College quarterback Chad Kelly, no one takes the Rebels lightly. Ole Miss has outscored its first two opponents by a 149-24 margin. By comparison, it took the 1988 Rebels eight games to score that many points.
Count Brewer among those who believe the Rebels will win Saturday and in doing so, make their own history.
“Ole Miss has never beaten Alabama two times in a row,” Brewer observed. “I think they have the team to do it. I really do. It’s probably the best Ole Miss team to ever go over there.”
Last year, Ole Miss beat Alabama, 23-17, in a game that immediately became part of Rebel folklore.
A stunner
Even a win Saturday probably won’t achieve the same shock value as the Rebel team that beat the Tide 27 years ago.
Viewed from the perspective that time affords, that game seems very much like a fluke now. While Ole Miss, one year removed from probation and depleted of depth, went on to finish with a mediocre record, Alabama managed a 9-3 record and a No. 17 final ranking, not great by Alabama standards, but respectable.
The Rebels had won their opener against Memphis, but had lost three straight as they headed to Tuscaloosa to take on a 3-0 and 12th-ranked Tide team. As if that weren’t enough, emotions were high in Tuscaloosa. It was homecoming at the newly-expanded Bryant-Denny Stadium and Alabama had chosen the occasion to celebrate the grand opening of the Bear Bryant Museum.
“I remember going over there on the bus,” Brewer said. “We stopped in Columbus at the old Holiday Inn to let the players get out walk around and stretch their legs. When we got back on the bus, soon as we hit that state line, all you could see was signs on the side of Highway 82 that said, ‘Beat Ole Miss’ and ‘Roll Tide’ all the way to Tuscaloosa. We knew right then what a big deal it was to Alabama people.”
Still, Brewer thought, the Rebels had a shot.
“We had a pretty good defense,” Brewer said. “On offense, we thought we had a good plan. They had a great player named Derrick Thomas (Thomas would be inducted to both the college and NFL halls of fame). Our plan was, whatever side he lined up on, we ran the other way. And I mean, we did that every single time.”
Through the first half, only part of Brewer’s plan paid dividends. The defense, indeed, gave Alabama fits.
“One of the things about that game is that we didn’t give up a single pass completion,” Brewer said. “They didn’t have a great quarterback that year and they only threw 11 passes. But they didn’t complete a single one. That will never, ever happen again.”
It was on the other side of the ball that Brewer’s plan seemed to be failing. It was scoreless at halftime, but in the third quarter Alabama struck quickly, returning the second-half kickoff for a touchdown, sacking Ole Miss quarterback Mark Young in the end zone for a safety on the next possession and adding a field goal. Halfway through the third quarter, Alabama led 12-0. The game seemed well in hand.
’42 Trap’
With a two-score lead, Alabama’s defense began to zero in on stopping the Rebels’ passing game. That tactic, Brewer said, opened up a window of opportunity.
“We felt like we could pop a run against their defense because they were so focused on getting a pass rush,” Brewer said.
He was right.
With about five minutes left in the third quarter, the Rebels’ called a running play — 42 Trap — an inside run. Rebel running back Shawn Sykes, from West Point, took the ball up the middle and sprang loose for a 52-yard touchdown, cutting the Tide lead to 12-7.
It stayed that way until late in the fourth quarter, when a Rebel drive appeared to have stalled at the Alabama 12, with Ole Miss facing a third-and-10 play with a little more than two minutes left.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the situation calls for a pass.
This time, Brewer played a hunch, Ole Miss called for another run — a 42 Trap.
“We knew they would be coming hard to stop the pass,” Brewer said. “They were scattered out. If (Sykes) broke it, it was going to be a foot race and we’d see if they could catch him.”
They didn’t.
Sykes’ 12-yard run and a two-point conversion gave Ole Miss a 15-12 lead. The Rebels applied the coup de grace with 15 seconds left when fullback Joe Mickles scored on an 18-yard run following an Alabama turnover.
The Alabama fans in the capacity crowd sat in stunned silence as a small band of Rebel fans went berserk in the corner of the stadium.
Brick Bowl
It was a memorable afternoon, and not just for Ole Miss.
Hours after the game, someone threw a brick through the window of Alabama coach Billy Curry’s office. A year later, Curry was fired after thee seasons in Tuscaloosa. Even today, the “Brick Bowl” — as it is known among Tide fans — is a date that lives in infamy.
Late that October afternoon, the jubilant Ole Miss players boarded their buses for the trip home to Oxford, west on Highway 82 through Gordo and Reform and into Columbus. The route was the same, but the scenery had changed, Brewer remembered.
“All those signs we saw coming over had been turned around,” Brewer said. “And they all said, ‘Go Rebels!'”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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