Peyton Manning to Rick Barnes: Tennessee Vols expose worst of Rebel fans

The Tennessee Vols’ men’s basketball win over the Ole Miss Rebels Wednesday was another time the Volunteers exposed the ugly side of Mississippi fans.

All fan bases have an ugly side, and that’s especially true in the SEC. But for some reason, the Tennessee Vols are the one team that manage to bring out the ugliest side of the Ole Miss Rebels, and it happened again Wednesday night.

Tennessee basketball’s team scored a hard-fought victory in Oxford thanks to a late bucket by Grant Williams to put their team up 72-71. On Ole Miss’s next possession, Admiral Schofield drew a charge at the top of the key.

Every replay showed that Schofield was clearly set. Anybody in real time would’ve seen that. But Rebels head coach Kermit Davis still didn’t agree with an accurate call against his team, so he threw down his jacket and drew a technical. UT hit one of two free throws. Then, on the inbounds pass, they traveled, but the clock clearly ran out before the travel happened.

As a result, the Tennessee Vols had an ugly finish but won the game 73-71. How did Ole Miss Rebels fans respond to these 100 percent accurate calls? They began throwing trash on the court and had to be told to stop by Davis.

Look, trash has been thrown onto courts and fields before when fans were really angry about calls. But there was nothing to be angry about in this game. The refs made two perfect calls down the stretch of the game, and they were able to confirm their final call with video evidence. But don’t tell that to Ole Miss fans.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Ole Miss has had it out for the Tennessee Vols and had the worst of themselves exposed as a result. All you have to do is go back to 1994 in one of the biggest recruiting heists to know that.

Phillip Fulmer and David Cutcliffe lured Peyton Manning to Tennessee football despite Manning’s older brother, Cooper, being at Ole Miss, his mother, Olivia, being homecoming queen there, and his father, Archie, obviously being a huge legend. It seemed like a given that Manning would go there until health issues ended his older brother’s football career.

Ole Miss fans didn’t care that Manning would be going to a school about to hit probation while turning down a chance to join a national program on the rise. They didn’t care that Manning was a much higher-profile player than anybody else was in the family. In their mind, he owed them by going to school there and not doing what’s best for himself.

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The backlash has been notorious all these years later. Rebel Nation turned on Archie Manning and blamed him for not steering his son to Oxford, to the point that he was asked not to stop at a gas station in Mississippi. It got really ugly, but again, this is what the Tennessee Vols seem to do with the Rebels.

Don’t forget what happened with Michael Oher, as was documented in ‘The Blind Side,’ a decade later. One way to look at that story is that a family of Ole Miss boosters in Memphis literally used all of their pull to steer an elite football talent away from Tennessee and Phillip Fulmer and instead to Ole Miss.

Maybe that’s how they got their revenge for Manning, but the Tuohys actually had to steer Oher to Ole Miss. Peyton Manning chose Tennessee because his father did the right thing and let him make his own decision.

After those two incidents, it’s no surprise that the Tennessee Vols know how to raise lots of resentment in Oxford. Don’t forget that this was once a football rivalry of the highest order, one that involved Archie Manning blowing out a national title hopeful UT team in 1969 after UT fans spent all week saying, “Archie Who?”

It seems like ever since that moment, Ole Miss fans have reserved their worst antics for the Tennessee Vols, not even the Mississippi State Bulldogs or Alabama Crimson Tide. On Wednesday night, Rick Barnes and Grant Williams joined Peyton Manning in bringing out the ugliest side of the Ole Miss Rebels fan base. Oh, let’s also present the laughable side of the fan base: They actually think Eli Manning is better than Peyton Manning.