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Watch: Fight Erupts in NCAA Football Rivalry Game, 4 Players Kicked Out

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You know you’ve got a good college football brawl when the referee calls unsportsmanlike conduct on every player on both teams.

For Mississippi State, it wasn’t enough to beat the snot out of Ole Miss 35-3 Thursday in the annual Egg Bowl rivalry game in Oxford. They also got to mix it up with their rivals in a fracas in the end zone after Ole Miss appeared to score a touchdown that would’ve brought to score to 28-9 before it got called back on replay review.

If you like a good old-fashioned football donnybrook, this is an even better Thanksgiving leftover than the turkey-and-cranberry-sauce sandwich Black Friday lunch:

For their part in the festivities, Mississippi State players Wille Gay Jr., Jamal Peters, and Cameron Dantzler got themselves ejected, and they were joined by the Rebels’ C.J. Moore.

Gay was tossed not because he’d committed a particularly flagrant violation but because he had an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty earlier in the game and two such penalties in the same game bring an automatic ejection.

While the Rebels’ season is over, Mississippi State, still nationally ranked despite four losses, will lose those three players for the first half of its bowl game under NCAA rules.

If you think that put a damper on the enthusiasm of Bulldogs coach Joe Moorhead, he disabused anyone of such thoughts in the postgame press conference.

Do you find sports brawls entertaining?

“I’m happy as a lark right now,” he said. “Certainly, you don’t want to see that stuff. I really can’t comment on everything that happened because I didn’t see it, and I was trying to keep guys on the sideline. We’ll look at the film and see what happened.

“But certainly, we want our play to be between the whistles, and we want our execution and our effort to be what’s talked about.”

Matt Lake, coaching a disappointing Ole Miss squad that was flat-out overmatched by its cross-state rival, echoed his counterpart’s sentiment about the fight.

“Hate for our seniors to go out this way because they have been through so much,” he said. “But I’m really, really grateful to them.”

If you were surprised that there was a fight at the Egg Bowl, Yahoo’s Pat Forde thinks you must be new here.

Related:
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He also pointed out the Shakespearean idiocy — full of sound and fury, signifying nothing — of the fight.

Then again, for the kinds of people who have no other rooting interest in a football game, sometimes a bit of controversy just makes for great television.

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Boston born and raised, Fox has been writing about sports since 2011. He covered ESPN Friday Night Fights shows for The Boxing Tribune before shifting focus and launching Pace and Space, the home of "Smart NBA Talk for Smart NBA Fans", in 2015. He can often be found advocating for various NBA teams to pack up and move to his adopted hometown of Seattle.
Boston born and raised, Fox has been writing about sports since 2011. He covered ESPN Friday Night Fights shows for The Boxing Tribune before shifting focus and launching Pace and Space, the home of "Smart NBA Talk for Smart NBA Fans", in 2015. He can often be found advocating for various NBA teams to pack up and move to his adopted hometown of Seattle.
Birthplace
Boston, Massachusetts
Education
Bachelor of Science in Accounting from University of Nevada-Reno
Location
Seattle, Washington
Languages Spoken
English
Topics of Expertise
Sports




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