One has to wonder if Parker Dykes will watch Mississippi Bowl VII at 2 p.m. Sunday.

That’s when No. 1 East Mississippi Community College (11-0) will play No. 2 Iowa Western College (11-0) at Biloxi High School for the National Junior College Athletic Association national championship.

EMCC coach Buddy Stephens embraces the label “JUCO lifer.” After all, Stephens played in the Mississippi Association of Community and Junior Colleges at Pearl River C.C. A lengthy stint as an assistant coach followed before his head coaching stint at EMCC.

In seven seasons at EMCC, Stephens has carried the Lions to four MACJC state championships. On Sunday, he will play for a third national championship that would move EMCC past Mississippi Gulf Coast C.C. and Northwest Mississippi C.C. and help it become the first MACJC institution with three national titles.

Before Stephens arrived, coaches such as Dykes held the prestigious label. A standout performer at Bay Springs High School, Dykes played at Jones Junior College. A handful of stints as an assistant coach followed before Dykes returned for 14 seasons as the head man at Jones.

In the late 1990s, three organizations chose a junior college national champion. With future Super Bowl Most Valuable Player Deion Branch and future NFL player Javon Walker in the starting lineup, Jones finished 12-0 and was awarded one of the junior college national championships in 1998.

Dykes remains my favorite coach to cover in more than two decades of following junior college football. However, Stephens is entrenched in second.

In 1993, while with the Hattiesburg American, I started a nine-year working relationship with Dykes. He was in his second season with the Bobcats and was on the verge of restoring the glory to one of the state’s most tradition-rich programs.

My favorite memory of covering Dykes was his obsession with the Warner Brothers cartoon character the Road Runner. Former Jones quarterback Charles Hales told me that the team watched countless cartoon clips of the Road Runner and his longtime nemesis Wile E. Coyote.

The message was simple. No matter what happened the Road Runner always persevered and outsmarted Wile E. Coyote. Dykes hoped to impress upon his players that they should be like the Road Runner and have a “whatever-it-takes” and “never-be-denied” mentality.

Another memory involved a manila folder that sat on his desk back in that first season I covered the team in 1993. In one of the weekly visits to his office, Dykes said he wanted to bring a bowl game to Mississippi.

“Junior college football is too good in this state for this state to not have a bowl game,” Dykes said. “It will be incredible. We have the best football. We will have the best game.”

The preliminary plans for a bowl game hosted somewhere in the state of Mississippi were first written down on a legal pad. As the weeks mounted, the legal pad was replaced by a manila folder. As 1993 became 1994, the folder became thicker and then became two.

Dykes called businesses and asked for money. He called senior colleges and asked for their cooperation with facilities to host such an event. Other coaches were lukewarm and didn’t want to extend the extra time and energy to make the project work. Dykes had help but not much.

Back then, each of the three national championships were awarded on popularity more than anything. Flashier opponents helped teams get to the top of the mountain top. Bells and whistles mattered, as did the ability to wow voters.

Dykes was convinced the ability to play a bowl game on home turf would enhance the national championship hopes of the powers at that time — Northwest, Jones, Gulf Coast, and Hinds C.C.

It appeared everything had fallen into place in the mid 1990s. However, last-second snags prevented the game from being launched. A couple of years later, the first NJCAA-sanctioned bowl game in Mississippi finally launched. It had a brief run and was stymied by lack of corporate sponsors.

The administration at Gulf Coast took notes. It needed a redesign and a major financial backing upfront. However, with the right amount of nurturing and thought invested on the front end, a Magnolia-state based bowl game could work.

In 2008, the Mississippi Bowl in its present form was reborn. The game began the slow trek to build a niche. Sponsors were needed. Fans were needed. Promotion was needed. A willingness to take some short-term lumps to achieve long-term success also was needed.

The bowl game now has its legs. Like anything getting started, a major break was needed. That happened last season when EMCC played Georgia Military College. Even though GMC was rated No. 1 in the nation, it wasn’t locked into a bowl game. EMCC had the automatic bid to the Mississippi Bowl as state champion and earned the right to play host to the national championship game.

With a capacity crowd on hand and the entire NJCAA brass in town, EMCC beat GMC 52-32 to win the first football national championship played in the state.

For one day, the bowl game worked. The bowl game overachieved. The bowl game was everything Dykes had wanted. If you go back and find the legal pad from two decades ago, all of his notes probably bore out, with the exception of Jones winning the title, instead of EMCC.

A junior college bowl game in Mississippi sounded foreign at one time. However, it was a good idea. Two decades later, it is a great idea.

Scott Walters is a sports writer for The Dispatch. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @dispatchscott

Scott was sports editor for The Dispatch.

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