Dan Mullen recalls intense rivalry with Hugh Freeze in Egg Bowl

Dan Mullen recalled some intense battles with Hugh Freeze when the two men coached Mississippi State and Ole Miss.

The Egg Bowl is a wild rivalry and Mullen knew he and Freeze escalated the back-and-forth game to game. It got wild to a point where it was “out of control,” per Mullen.

Mullen described the tussles with Freeze, now at Auburn, when the two squared off for Mississippi supremacy.

“I mean, there’s the cordial hello,” Mullen said on The Matt Barrie Show. “I think the one thing that that changed that that made it tricky, I think both of us within the Egg Bowl when I got to Mississippi State, there wasn’t a lot that you’re building off of. The program was winning, they weren’t doing well. There’s not this massive tradition. And so it kind of went of ‘Alright, let’s start with the Egg Bowl. And how do we make this game bigger than life?’

“You know, not that it wasn’t already. We’re gonna start by just, I mean, we are stoking the fire on this. I think Hugh came in and then we started having success. Hugh came in and said hey, we gotta do the same thing.” 

Ole Miss won three of the five meetings between the two schools when Mullen and Freeze coached against each other. However, the 2012 and ‘14 wins by the Rebels were vacated after recruiting scandals were discovered. 

“Unfortunately it became like an out of control blaze,” Mullen said of the rivalry. “And I think you’ve seen it over the last couple years. And hopefully it gets toned down. Then all of a sudden, you know, we’re playing a game where we’re both top five teams in the country, at which point you don’t need the Egg Bowl fire anymore, because you’ve legitimized both programs as national names and national top 25 teams … We use this to build the programs to this level. I think unfortunately, the fire was a little out of control at that point. So we couldn’t control it.”

Mullen looked back on the battles with Freeze and noted how it set the tone for future matchups in the Egg Bowl. As he said, it got out of control unnecessarily.

“At the back end of my term there, it started to get a little antsy,” Mullen said. “We never had the antics, right. There were some at the very, very end I remember there was like one I think that really caused issues there was in my last game there, Nick Fitzgerald gets hurt with a gruesome injury and their guys are standing and taunting when you could see it was a gruesome injury. And I think that lit a fire and that was my last year there and I think, you know, the next year there’s the you know, unfortunately an antics by players … 

“And then there’s brawls during the game … We use this thing to build the programs up and then the young guys coming in saw this fire and really kind of took it out of control.”