100 Day Bulldog Countdown: 85 Days - The Allyn McKeen 'Error'

Jeff Lebby’s era of Mississippi State football has arrived.

The Bulldogs are on their third coach in as many years as Mike Leach’s tragic passing opened the door for defensive coordinator Zach Arnett’s debut as head coach last year. That experiment failed before the year even ended for State and now it’s Lebby’s turn to take the wheel.

While there is always a risk in hiring first time head coaches, Lebby brings to Starkville an exciting offensive scheme that has been productive everywhere he’s been. The coach has also brought with him some swagger that has the fanbase ready to see what’s next.

Over the course of the next 100 days, we will take a look at Lebby’s roster and even some fun historical rewinds that will bring back memories for Dawg fans of all ages.

Today, we look back at arguably the greatest coach in MSU history and the error in judgement that came from the University during his tenure.

100 Day Bulldog Countdown: 85 Days – The Allyn McKeen “Error”

The Southeastern Conference was fairly new – having been an entity for six years in 1939 – but Mississippi A&M wasn’t gaining much traction in the form of consistency on the gridiron.

In the previous 40 years that football had existed in Starkville, 19 coaches came and went. Only once had a team won eight games, and A&M had three winning seasons in the first six years in the SEC.

After Spike Nelson put up a 4-6 season in his one and only year during the 1938 season, Athletic Director Dudy Noble and president George Duke Humphrey were looking for someone to stabilize the program and take it to new heights in the SEC. McKeen was who they selected and the former multi-sport star athlete, attorney and pilot was ready for the challenge.

A product of general Robert Neyland at Tennessee, McKeen had the pedigree that Noble and Humphrey were looking for in a coach and he would exemplify that in his time in Starkville. For the second school history, A&M won eight games in year one as McKeen improved the win total by four from the season prior. He also won three SEC games with the only two losses to Alabama and Auburn, both 7-0 losses. The toughest loss of the year, however, was the death of the first live Bulldog mascot at A&M, Ptolemy.

Brought to Starkville just a few years prior by coach Ralph Sasse, the dog was hit by a bus and killed late in the season. The death of the school’s first Bulldog sparked the people of Starkville and students to rally around its mascot with a public funeral at Scott Field where Ptolemy would ultimately rest at the 50 yard line.

The tragic death of the mascot did not represent the direction that McKeen’s program was headed. McKeen wasn’t shy about how good he felt his team would be, even predicting an undefeated season in 1940. A&M won the first two games against Florida and Louisiana Lafayette and tied against Auburn in Birmingham. After that tie, they rolled through the rest of the schedule with three shutouts, including a win over Alabama.

In 1941, McKeen’s crew went 8-1-1 with another 4-0-1 record in the SEC. This time, they would bring home the school’s first, and only, SEC title and they finished inside the top 20 for the second year in a row after not finishing inside the top 25 the 40 years prior.

McKeen even navigated a war in 1943, as there was no season and most of the team was off fighting in World War II. He came back the next season and went 6-2. After his first season without a winning record in 1948 with a 4-4 finish, alumni began to turn on McKeen more so due to political reasons than pure wins and losses and McKeen was fired in one of the most egregious errors of judgement by the university in its history.

McKeen left Starkville with a record of 65-19-3 – the only consistently productive coach in school history to that point. His 65 wins were more than the Aggies had in the first 17 years as a program combined. He produced 29 NFL draft picks, the first two All-Americans in school history in Hunter Cohern and Buddy Elrod and 28 All-SEC players like Tom “Shorty” McWilliams and Harper Davis.

He set the stage for MSU to be a contender for years to come, but the firing acted almost as a curse on the program. They went 0-8 the very next season and didn’t have eight or more wins again until 1974. It took half a century before MSU would find another coach that had similar success to McKeen when Jackie Sherrill was hired in 1991 and even Sherrill just broke even when his career was said and done.

There’s been some good times since, but there’s no way of knowing just how successful McKeen would have been and for how long and how different the program might have been seen had he stayed.