Tailgating in the Grove has been a tradition at Ole Miss since the 1950s, its rituals closely attended to. This is not a land of face- and chest-painters. Many male students wear coats, ties and loafers; female students mostly wear brightly colored cocktail dresses and more makeup than one is accustomed to seeing on a human face in daylight. The polite din is shattered, every so often, when a hoarse voice cries out, “Are you ready?” This is the beginning of the Ole Miss cheer, known as “Hotty Toddy.” Everyone within earshot yells back: “Helllll yes! Daaamn Right!” The batty, but catchy, cheer rolls on:

Hotty Toddy, Gosh almighty

Who the hell are we, Hey!

Flim Flam, Bim Bam

OLE MISS BY DAMN!

Otherwise sane adults are unembarrassed to holler this out every 10 minutes or so.

Amid the crowd, if you look hard enough, you can find a semi-legendary tent that belongs to the writer and former Boston Globe correspondent Curtis Wilkie, who graduated from Ole Miss in 1963. “Tailgating in the Grove is a combination of so many things that are dear to hearts in Oxford,” Mr. Wilkie said. “There’s football, of course. But there’s also this sense of a family reunion, a gathering of friends, a class reunion. College football is unimaginably big in the South. In all the years I lived up north on the East Coast, you know, I never even went to a college football game.”

Amid the crowd, too, you might catch a glimpse of the University of Mississippi’s greatest sports legend, Archie Manning, a kind of secular saint in Oxford. He was Ole Miss’s starting quarterback for three years in the late 1960s and early ’70s — Bear Bryant called him the best college quarterback he’d ever seen — and he is the head of a football dynasty: his sons Peyton and Eli are, respectively, Super Bowl-winning starting quarterbacks for the Indianapolis Colts and the New York Giants. Like his father, Eli was a starting quarterback at Ole Miss; Peyton attended the University of Tennessee.

How much does Oxford love Archie Manning? Photos of his clan are everywhere, as are bumper stickers that read simply: “Thanks, Archie.” A pulled-pork sandwich that’s sold at Vaught-Hemingway, the Ole Miss football stadium, is called the Archie Hamming. On the Ole Miss campus, the speed limit is a stately 18 miles per hour in honor of his old jersey number.

I didn’t spot Mr. Manning in the Grove, but I did sit one table away from him and his wife and some friends in City Grocery, a venerable Oxford restaurant, on the Thursday night before the Georgia game. (I had a notebook, an iPhone, a furtive look and no Southern accent. I fear he thought I was a spy from the Oakland Raiders, or whomever his sons were playing that Sunday.) After being interrupted many times by beaming well-wishers — “I just wanted to say ‘Hey,’ ” most said — Mr. Manning finally stood up and, like a self-effacing senator, began to slowly work the room. Oxford is small enough that he knew just about everyone by name.