Ole Miss protest could damage football program

Paul Myerberg, USA TODAY Sports | USATODAY

A racist disturbance on the Ole Miss campus could have a long-term impact not only on the university but also on its football program.

Late Tuesday night, a crowd of roughly 200 Ole Miss students were heard using racist terms and epithets while protesting the re-election of President Barack Obama, who defeated the Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, to earn a second term in office.

"The University leadership strongly condemns this kind of behavior and is embarrassed that any students associated with the university would use this kind of language," said Ole Miss chancellor Daniel W. Jones. "Our university creed calls for the respect of each individual and for fairness and civility."

While on a substantially smaller scale, the racially charged rally brought reminders of the 1962 riots on Ole Miss' campus after the integration of a black student, James Meredith, into the school's all-white student body. For coach Hugh Freeze and his 5-4 football team, which has been one of the SEC's great surprises in 2012, the potential ramifications from the rally underline an issue that has defined the program's recruiting efforts for generations: How do we recruit black student-athletes to a university with our racially charged background?

Former Ole Miss running back Deuce McAllister, who went on to be a first-round pick of the New Orleans Saints, understands well how the university's past – and now, its present – impacts the football program's recruiting efforts.

"I feel strongly for the university," he said. "I mean, I'm embarrassed. I'm embarrassed as an alumni, I'm embarrassed as a former athlete. Because I know how hard it is to get minority players to come to the university. That's the stigma that they have to fight. That's the stigma that the staff has to fight.

"It makes it tough on Coach Freeze. It makes it tougher," McAllister said. "That does not put the school in the best light. And the biggest thing that they fight a lot of the time is how much they've got to deal with the past, how much they need to prove and show how much they have changed.

"So when you have a situation where you're telling kids, 'It's not like that anymore,' that Ole Miss has changed, then you have an incident like this occur, then that hurts. That hurts you with recruiting minority students. It hurts you with recruiting minority athletes."

Ole Miss must also deal with the potential that opposing coaches will use the rally as ammunition to recruit negatively against Freeze and the Rebels. "No about it, they'll use it in negative recruiting," McAllister said. "Whether it's them getting the paper and showing it, whether it's them using that negative film, negative image, they'll use it.

It's a point echoed by 247sports.com's Keith Nieburh, who covers the SEC for the recruiting-centric web site. While Nieburh doesn't believe that going negative is any worse now than ever before, he acknowledges that it's part of the dog-eat-dog recruiting aspect of the coaching profession. "I always say, 'All's fair in love, war and politics'? You might as well make recruiting your fourth thing in that."

As a rival would do with any other potential advantage, Ole Miss' opponents on the recruiting trail could use Tuesday night's rally to paint the Rebels in a negative light – and, in turn, boost their own chances with a must-have recruit. "It has nothing to do with football," McAllister said, "but at the same time, that's the negative perception that opposing coaches will set out as far as, 'This is what's happening at the university. This is what they're still doing.' "

Ole Miss scheduled a candlelight walk Wednesday night, where at the end participants were encouraged to recite the university's creed, which includes the sentence, "I believe in respect for the dignity of each person. I believe in fairness and civility."

McAllister said that as a freshman in 1997, he was one of several players who asked then-coach Tommy Tuberville to petition the school's chancellor to remove the use of the Confederate flag at the Rebels' games. Although some people might view the flag as part of Mississippi's "heritage," said McAllister, he, like many blacks in the state, saw it as a "symbol of hatred and hurt."

"I could not honestly say that I could go out there and perform my job as a football player seeing that, knowing that's being waved and being cheered for," McAllister said. "That hurt me as an athlete."

Even if a similar incident to the one at Ole Miss on Tuesday night could happen elsewhere, on another campus, McAllister knows that the university's history serves as a lightning rod. "There might be an issue at any school," he said. "But because of the university's past, because of Mississippi's past, the racial history that it does have, it's amplified times 12."