STARKVILLE — Bill Vaughn wanted to get away — though not in the traditional sense.
A student at Mississippi State in the fall of 1986, Vaughn had a houseboat docked on the banks of the nearby Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway.
Just a short drive from campus, he and a handful of his Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity brothers hatched a plan. If they hopped on the boat early in the week, they would have just enough time to navigate the Tennessee-Tombigbee, head east on the Tennessee River, pass Chattanooga and reach Knoxville before kick off that Saturday before MSU took on Tennessee at Neyland Stadium.
“I think they left on Tuesday and started drinking on Monday,” William French, a defensive end on the 1986 football team and a fraternity brother of Vaughn, quipped.
“And if I wasn’t playing football, I would’ve been on the boat,” he added through a hearty laugh.
What French, Vaughn and the other liquored-up SAE’s aboard the houseboat didn’t know ahead of the roughly 400-mile trek was that it would coincide with one of the most monumental upsets in MSU football history.
“I’m surprised they remember it,” French said of the voyage and MSU’s 27-23 upset of then-No. 8 Tennessee. “But of course, winning made the trip back all the more fun.”
Now 33 years on from the impromptu boating expedition, the 2019 MSU football team heads back to Knoxville Saturday for a date with Tennessee.
And while the Bulldogs will travel by plane rather than houseboat, the 1986 win still stands as the last time MSU won in Knoxville.
“To win the game the way we won it was something you don’t forget,” then-first-year MSU coach Rockey Felker told The Dispatch.
‘Y’all are from Ole Miss, right?’
There were perhaps 80-90 people in the country who believed MSU could waltz into Rocky Top on Sept. 14, 1986 and take down coach Johnny Majors’ highly-ranked Volunteers. Coincidentally, the vast majority of them lived in McCarthur Hall — MSU’s athletic dorm.
“Whether we were country dumb or what, we didn’t care who we played,” former defensive back Brian Hutson told The Dispatch. “Nobody intimidated us.”
After eeking out a 24-17 win Week One against Syracuse in the Carrier Dome, the Bulldogs headed to Knoxville riding high.
“We had a great practice that week because we came back from New York with a big win,” former defensive back Johnny Gussio recounted.
While the MSU players boasted belief in an upset, it was anything but from the Tennessee faithful.
As offensive lineman Tom Goode Jr. entered the elevator at the team hotel, a gaggle of Volunteer fans hopped on.
“Y’all are from Ole Miss right?” one of the Tennessee sympathizers posited.
“No, we’re not,” Goode retorted.
While it’s spot amongst college football’s elite venues has teetered due to nearly 20 years of on-field ineptitude, Neyland Stadium stood firmly as a cathedral of college football in 1986.
With almost 100,000 orange and white-clad fans towering over the field, the sight was something to behold as the Bulldogs took to the blazing hot astroturf.
“I couldn’t even hear my heartbeat — it was that loud in the stadium that day,” 1986 MSU quarterback Don Smith said.
Airing it out
Trailing 23-14 with under six minutes to play, a Bulldog upset appeared to be an impossibility — at least momentarily.
Taking a snap at the Volunteers’ five-yard-line, Smith dropped back to pass.
As Tennessee’s vaunted defensive line burst through the MSU offensive front, Smith took a few wayward steps to his left and floated a pass to the back left corner of the end zone.
Tracking the ball, tight end Louis Clark split two Tennessee defenders and corralled it for his second touchdown of the day.
MSU trailed 23-20 with just over five minutes to play.
‘They’re not going to catch him’
Smith had run the play hundreds of times.
“Fourteen” as it was called in Felker’s playbook, was a triple option. First came a read on the interior. If the defender crashed toward Smith, he’d hand the ball to the fullback, if not, the play progressed to a pitch or quarterback keeper. Trailing by three with under five minutes remaining, he chose the latter.
Lined up at the left hash on the MSU 38-yard line, Smith faked his fullback. He next looked to pitch. It wasn’t there.
Breaking an arm tackle, Smith — who later spent three years as an NFL running back — hit the open field.
“I saw Don running down the sideline and I thought, ‘Well, they’re not going to catch him at this point,'” Goode, who was buried under a Tennessee linebacker at the time, recalled.
Soaring down numbers, Smith bolted 62-yards to pay dirt for the go ahead score.
“It’s a play that, if you were there, you remember seeing it,” Felker said.
Hold the line
Tennessee was knocking on the door.
Following Smith’s iconic run, the Volunteers raced across the 50-yard-line and into MSU territory with ease. The Bulldog defense dug in.
“There were 96,000 people in there that had no doubt that last drive was going to succeed,” French said. “There were 11 guys that thought otherwise. And out of that 11, several of us — myself included — probably had doubts when they crossed midfield as easily as they did.”
On first and 10 from the 11-yard line, Tennessee running William Howard — who torched MSU for 195 yards and three touchdowns that afternoon — took a pitch for a quick gain of three yards.
Tennessee quarterback Randy Sanders looked to have the dagger on third down but overshot a wide-open Terence Cleveland in the end zone.
Facing a 4th-and-16, Sanders again dropped back into the pocket. With the ball lofted toward the back left pylon, MSU defensive back Bruce Plummer whipped his head around.
“When I looked up the ball was in my hands,” he told The Dispatch. “End of the game.”
Homeward bound
As a deafening silence fell over Neyland Stadium after Plummer’s interception, camera crews in the locker rooms began a mad scramble.
Expecting Tennessee to come through, the gathered television stations had set up their equipment in the Volunteer locker room. They promptly began the beleaguering process of resetting their varying machinery.
As the postgame press conferences wrapped up and MSU boarded its bus, players began to feel the effects of the agonizingly hot day. One-by-one, players leapt from their seats with cramps. Meanwhile the Bulldog training staff clambered over bodies like a naval corpsman on the battlefield seeking their next patient.
Back in Starkville, Golden Triangle Regional Airport was flooded with an estimated 2-3,000 maroon and white-clad fans.
“It was just a mob of folks and they were just screaming when we got off the plane,” Stan Sims said.
With the clanging of cowbells echoing all along the highway between Columbus and Starkville, the team was greeted at McCarthur Hall by an impromptu mass of students and alumni who gathered to celebrate the historic victory.
After the win at Neyland, MSU peaked at No. 13 in the Associated Press Top-25 on Oct. 21, before suffering through the “November Nightmare” — four-straight losses in its final four games against No. 7 Auburn, No. 8 Alabama, No. 12 LSU and Ole Miss by a combined score of 144-12.
Shortcomings aside, the win in Knoxville remains a seminal day in MSU football history.
“That’s what you play college football for,” Smith said of the victory. “For those types of moments.”
Buried memories
Clark was swimming in a sea of boxes, when a flood of memories surfaced.
Having just moved to a new home in Orange County, California a few months back, the seven-year NFL veteran and Senior Director of Pro Personnel for the Los Angeles Chargers worked methodically through the pile. As if by magic, one box forced its way to the top.
Peeling back the folds, the game ball from the 1986 win over Tennessee revealed itself.
“It put me back at the university, it put me back in that game,” Clark told The Dispatch. “A lot of things flash across your mind. You see see your teammates; you see the coaching staff; you see the big crowd at Tennessee; you see how we silenced that crowd once we went up and scored and took the lead and won the game — those were the memories that flashed in front of my face.”
And while the glimmering memories of that scorching September day have begun to fade, those remaining players and coaches still vividly remember the enchanting upset on Rocky Top — even if those memories physically reside in a moving box in Orange County.
“I just thought about my teammates,” Clark said of finding the game ball. “We lived together; we ate together; we showered together; we did everything together, as a team. That was just a great, great time for all of us and it’s up there as one of the best wins I’ve ever been a part of.”
Ben Portnoy reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @bportnoy15.
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