OCEAN SPRINGS, Miss. (WLOX) – The final performances of the 2024 Mississippi Songwriters Festival wrapped up the 15th annual event Sunday.

Around 130 acts from Mississippi and beyond, including a trio from Norway, performed at 12 venues in Ocean Springs and Gautier over four days. The South Mississippi festival began in 2010 and has grown larger than organizers ever expected.

“In the beginning, we didn’t want to get too big, but somewhere along the line we missed the boat on that one,” said board member Darwin Nelson. “Because we’re in so many venues, that just allows us to have more songwriters.”

The wide array of venues comes with pros and cons for the festival, Nelson explained, because it offers more chances for songwriters to get their music out to more people, but it also comes with audio engineering challenges. Still, it happens each year thanks to a dedicated group.

“It’s a pretty big four-day production, but we feel like we’ve gotten pretty good at it. There’s a lot of moving parts, but when you’re passionate about something, you just want to make it the best you can, and that’s what we try to do. We don’t want to let them down and we want to make it even better next year.”

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The scoreline would tell you that Florida Football cruised to a 45-28 victory on Saturday against an SEC opponent on the road. For a Gator squad who are looking for any kind of positive momentum heading into their first bye week, there were a lot of things to like and earlier today we wrote about “Three Green Flags” from the win.

But, one needs to keep in mind that Mississippi State is awful and lost to Toledo the week before 41-17. It’s with that in mind that we have three red flags we still are not convinced are fixed heading into the bye week.

There were some wrinkles on the day to Florida’s offense, such as a rub route on the goal line that left Arlis Boardingham wide open for a touchdown.

But if you are wondering why Florida’s offense suddenly scored 45 points and 503 yards on the day, the most simplistic answer is that Napier’s base offense is the perfect antidote to what Mississippi State was willing to give up.

Florida still only had 123 air yards on the day, in large part because Mississippi State was willing to sit a deep Cover 4 that begged Florida to run their base offense and dink it underneath.

To Florida’s credit, they took what was given to them, but teams with a better defense down the road won’t be so kind.

On the flip side, Florida also seemed determined to sit back and continued to play their version of a soft zone. The end result was Mississippi State piling up 480 yards of offense and 28 points.

The Bulldogs were one yard away from a fifth touchdown, and a couple of other drives stalled out because they missed an open receiver.

There were a couple of individual players who were a bright spot, including Jason Marshall and Pup Howard, but the deeper concern is how woefully unprepared Florida looked anytime the Bulldogs went uptempo.

If Mississippi State is able to cause havoc, imagine what UCF or Tennessee are going to do with an uptempo offense.

The final margin of 17 points will keep the noise at bay heading into the bye week, but this game was much closer than that score would indicate.

After going up 28-7, Florida allowed Mississippi State to claw back to 28-21 midway through the 3rd. Florida did respond with a touchdown to make it 35-21 before the Bulldogs marched right back down to the one yard line.

This is where Florida did manage to make a stand and had a DJ Lagway led drive put the game away at 42-21.

But…

If Mississippi State had punched it in to make it 35-28, and Austin Barber hadn’t landed on Lagway’s fumble in the endzone on that following drive, it could have been 35-28 when the Bulldogs drove down to score on their follow-up drive.

There is a universe where this game would have been 35-35 when Trey Smack kicked a 47-yard field goal with 2:34 left.