 A lot of people outside of Mississippi, they don't really know about that Mississippi State and Ole Miss rivalry, but being a player up in the coach, being from Mississippi, you know that people in Mississippi only really care about that game. I can't get this man to miss right now, but. That game got a little messy, you know, off the field, on the field, 11-bar corner pocket. To be an Ole Miss Rebel requires a certain level of passion. I'm not sure there's ever been a student athlete that is a greater example of an Ole Miss Rebel than AJ Brown. His passion for the game, how he approached it, the swagger, the confidence was just infectious. If you play on a football team in the SEC and at Ole Miss, you know, you have to have a certain standard. You know, AJ was just so physical out on the field, you know, that first guy was never going to tackle him. You always remember that. He left a lot of defenders looking silly a lot of times with, you know, crossing them over and getting around them and all the moves that he had. Oh, what a move by AJ Brown. Touchdown, Ole Miss. For him, it didn't matter if he played the slot and he played out wide. He always produced. And it was funny because defenses knew what Ole Miss was going to do. Back then offensively, Ole Miss wasn't particularly hard to scheme against. And AJ still busted coverage over and over and over again. He's the best wide receiver Ole Miss has ever produced. Hands down. AJ's shattered records here. And you knew that was going to happen after his first year. You just saw how physical he plays. Remember the name. This a bad man. Remember the name. Are we in the ball, baby? It's real now. It's real now. Is there all-time leader in receiving yards? That's a mark that people will be looking to forever. 100-yard games, touchdowns on a single season. He's an all-American, two-times, a political semi-finalist. So as far as record-setting receivers, it was AJ. He was the record-setter. What makes him so fun to watch is that he knows he's the best and he backs it up. I mean, everybody in football has got to have confidence, right? Everybody in football has to believe they're the best. But only a few of them, only the greatest of them, can actually show you why they're the best every single time they play. And that's AJ Brown. What it means to be a bulldog and especially what it means to be a Mississippi State bulldog is bulldogs are tough, they're tenacious, but they're also one of the most loving dogs there are. Do you think that kind of symbolizes what Jeffrey is like on and off the field? You know, the bulldog mentality is Jeffrey Simmons. In the first ever game that Jeffrey Simmons played in the Mississippi State Uniform, he was named South Eastern Conference defensive lineman of the week. That just doesn't happen. You know, I've seen a lot of great players who had a lot of talent that didn't make it the way Jeffrey did because they just didn't go all out every play. I think that's what Jeffrey brought to the table is the fact that he knew everything he did every day determine the outcome of his career. Jeffrey flips a switch, like the great ones do. They're one person off the field and they're another person on the field. Someone who would attack the game every single day. I just don't remember him ever having bad practices, much less bad games. I don't know that I ever remember looking down on the field and thinking, man, Jeffrey took that playoff. I don't think I ever had that thought. With Mississippi State, their defense was built on the front seven, they were built on heavy pressure, they wanted to get people in the backfield and they had the perfect monster in the middle because Jeffrey demanded so much attention that he was able to free up rushers, put up one-on-one match-ups on the edge that guys could win. Not only could he just take on a double team and still get into the backfield and create havoc, he was fast enough that if a team ran a swing pass or they tried to run a stretch play on a handoff, he could get off that double team and get to the perimeter and make plays. And when you think about a guy who's playing nose tackle, you don't think about a guy getting out to the edge all the time and making plays in college, but he did it on a regular basis. Watching Jeffrey in college, it was the same as high school, but it was way more exciting because he was way more explosive. Because he got in his mode, you could not stop him. Now when you go to Mississippi State, it's, well, here comes a freshman, he's a defensive lineman. Is he like Jeffrey? Because people want the next Jeffrey Simmons, they want the next AJ Brown on campus just because those guys made those universities so much better the minute they step foot on campus. A lot of people outside of Mississippi, they didn't really know about the Mississippi State and Ole Miss, Rob and the Egg Bowl. They thought it was just, oh, it's the Egg Bowl, but the two team in Mississippi took that game serious. Yeah. When we got ready to play Alabama, it was okay, let's beat Alabama. Yeah. And we got to play Ole Miss. Yeah. Let's beat the hell out of Ole Miss. You know, it was like one of them games. Keep your trophy here at Mississippi State, and that's how I was. What a trophy I know. Man. Okay. I know what it was. Okay, okay, okay. We're going to get it back. It's all good. What did I say? When it came to Mississippi State and Ole Miss, it was who won the Egg Bowl. That's all that mattered. So to say the Egg Bowl is one of the most heated rivalries is kind of an understatement. I think if you take that word heat and you adjust the letters around a little bit to hate, I think that's probably a little bit more of what we're talking about. And certainly a player like AJ coming from Starkville and playing at Ole Miss amplified that. There's real hatred here between these two schools. They hate each other. It's not healthy to be honest with you. I mean, you've seen fights before the Egg Bowl. In this state where there is no professional sports, you're either an Ole Miss fan or a Mississippi State fan. So that Egg Bowl matters. The Egg Bowl rivalry is unlike any other rivalry in college sports. It's unfortunate. It's unhealthy. But it's just a fact of life. So being from Starkville, we all knew that the Egg Bowl was going to be a big game for AJ. AJ came back to Starkville for the first time after signing with Ole Miss and had one of the games of his life. So you knew Starkville was going to be humming. Jordan was going to want to have their fair shake and fair say at AJ for coming back home and the man dropped six catches for 160 in a touchdown on his hometown's university. At one point, he told the fans that this was his city. He garnered the nickname for Ole Miss fans as the mayor of Starkville. Where is my Egg Bowl? Jeffrey took the 18 game incredibly personal. It reminded me of the way he took the game against Starkville and AJ personal his senior year in high school when he took that game over. They had just came off Ole Miss beating them in Starkville the year before so you could tell that there was a little extra juice on the Mississippi State side to get the Golden Egg back to Starkville. Corral drops, looking left hit, 7 just got to 45. Jeffrey gets a strip sack, forces a fumble, Mississippi State recovers and the Bulldogs went on to dominate that game. It was just so fun to see Jeffrey and AJ right back in the middle of a big time rivalry. If there is an extra level to Jeffrey Simmons, I think it came out on Egg Bowl 9. For AJ scoring a touchdown in Starkville, that made people curled their lips a little bit and then for Jeffrey to get a strip sack to set the tone for the Egg Bowl in his final Egg Bowl, both fan bases were probably really happy to see those guys get trapped into the NFL so they didn't have to torment their college teams anymore. Everybody was either a diehard AJ Brown fan or a diehard Jeffrey Simmons fan and so you get to the NFL Draft and it's like, wait, these guys, they're going to coexist now. Maybe Draft Night was as close as state and Ole Miss fans will ever come to be able to join hands, give each other a high five. With the 19th pick in the 2019 NFL Draft, the Tennessee Titans select