Mississippi

When does Mississippi State football start spring practice? What’s new for 2026

Published

1 hour ago

March 15, 2026

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When does Mississippi State football start spring practice? What’s new for 2026

STARKVILLE — Mississippi State football spring practices are beginning soon.

The Bulldogs open spring practice March 17.

MSU is looking to build off its 5-8 record from coach Jeff Lebby’s second season with Kamario Taylor as the new starting quarterback. Success in 2026 could hinge on the defense though with Zach Arnett rehired as the new coordinator.

Here’s what to know about Mississippi State before the Bulldogs begin spring practice.

When does Mississippi State start spring practice?

Mississippi State will hold its first spring practice on Tuesday, March 17.

When is Mississippi State football spring game?

Mississippi State has not announced details about a spring game.

When is Mississippi State’s Pro Day?

Mississippi State’s Pro Day is scheduled for March 27.

Mississippi State football spring practice schedule

Mississippi State has not announced a spring practice schedule, other than that it starts on March 17.

What coaches did Jeff Lebby hire, fire and promote for 2026

Here are Mississippi State’s primary assistants in 2026.

Defensive coordinator Zach Arnett (hired from Florida State to replace Coleman Hutzler, who was fired)
Co-defensive coordinator/LB coach Matt Brock (hired from UConn)
Associate head coach for offense/WR coach Phillip Montgomery (hired from Virgina Tech to replace Chad Bumphis, who was fired)
Assistant head coach/pass game coordinator/RB coach Anthony Tucker
QB coach Kevin Johns (hired from Oklahoma State to replace Matt Holecek, who was not retained)
Run game coordinator/TE coach Jon Cooper
OL coach Phil Loadholt
CB coach Corey Bell
DE and OLB coach Vincent Dancy
DB and nickelbacks coach Kevie Thompson
DL coach Ty Warren
Special teams coordinator Cliff Odom
Strength and conditioning coach Shaud Williams

Mississippi State football returning starters in 2026

RB Fluff Bothwell
WR Anthony Evans III
C Cannon Boone
DT Kalvin Dinkins
DE Trevion Williams
LB Zakari Tillman
LB/S Isaac Smith
CB Kelley Jones
K Kyle Ferrie
P Ethan Pulliam

Mississippi State football starters lost from 2025

QB Blake Shapen
WR Brenen Thompson
TE Seydou Traore
OT Albert Reese IV
OG Jacoby Jackson
OG Zack Owens
OT Jayvin Q. James
DE Branden Jennings
DT Kedrick Bingley-Jones
LB Nic Mitchell
CB DeAgo Brumfield
S Brylan Lanier
S Jahron Manning
LS Ethan Myers

Who Mississippi State, Jeff Lebby added, lost in transfer portal for 2026

Additions:

Missouri WR Marquis Johnson
Florida State edge Jayson Jenkins
Appalachian State QB AJ Swann
Iowa State CB Quentin Taylor Jr.
Syracuse CB Kaylib Singleton
Florida State OT Mario Nash Jr.
Florida CB Jamroc Grimsley
Rice S Marcus Williams
Florida State OT Ja’Elyne Matthews
Florida State edge Amaree Williams
Arkansas IOL LJ Prudhomme
Southern Cal edge Gus Cordova
Oregon State TE Riley Williams
Oklahoma WR Zion Ragins
LSU OT DJ Chester
Oklahoma OT Isaiah Dent
Oklahoma S Kendel Dolby
LSU S Jardin Gilbert
Texas A&M DL Dealyn Evans
LSU OT Tyler Miller
LSU OT Miles McVay
Florida State LB Gav Holman
Sacramento State QB Jaden Rashada

Departures:

S Stonka Burnside (Memphis)
DL Terrance Hibbler Jr. (Jackson State)
WR Markus Allen (Middle Tennessee State)
K Marlon Hauck (Tulsa)
WR Jordan Mosley (Colorado State)
Edge Joseph Head Jr. (Memphis)
WR Cam Thompson (Northern Illinois)
OT Alex Lopez (Western Kentucky)
S Tony Mitchell (Ole Miss)
OT Jaekwon Bouldin (Jackson State)
TE Max Reese (North Texas)
IOL Brennan Smith (TBD)
WR Jaron Glover (South Florida)
OT Jimothy Lewis Jr. (Cal)
S Lo’Kavion Jackson (TBD)
WR Ferzell Shepard (TBD)
TE Emeka Iloh (TBD)
TE Cam Ball (West Virginia)
QB Luke Kromenhoek (South Florida)
S Tyler Woodard (Coastal Carolina)
CB Dwight Lewis III (TBD)
DL Ashun Shepphard (Cal)
WR Davian Jackson (Texas State)
P Nathan Tiyce (Penn State)
DL Corey Clark (Florida Atlantic)
RB Jonnie Daniels (Tulane)
S Cyrus Reyes (Kentucky)
CB Elijah Cannon (Kansas)
OT Luke Work (Missouri)
RB Seth Davis (Tulsa)
IOL Koby Keenum (Memphis)
LB Montrell Chapman (Old Dominion)
DL Kedrick Bingley-Jones (Alabama)
CB Jayven Williams (BYU)
CB DK McGruder (TBD)
DL Kai McClendon (Washington)
IOL Zack Owens (Missouri)
WR Ricky Johnson (Utah)
OT Jayvin Q. James (Alabama)

Mississippi State football 2026 recruiting class

The Bulldogs signed 30 players to the 2026 recruiting class. The class ranks 23rd nationally by the 247Sports Composite.

QB Brode McWhorter
RB Cooper Crosby
RB Jaeden Hill
WR Jayden Cration
WR Zion Crumpton
WR Camden Capehart
WR Keymian Henderson Jr.
WR Matt Mayfield
TE Zayion Cotton
TE Adam Land
TE Luke Hutchinson
OL Dalton Toothman
OL Leon Noil Jr.
OL Jayden Ross
OL Kison Shepard
OL Dylan Steen
Edge Micah Nickerson
Edge Chris Addison
DL Tico Crittendon
DL Kaleb Morris
DL Davon Young
CB Camron Brown
CB Terrell Johnson Jr.
S Bralan Womack
S Dre Riley
S Kolby Barrett
S Antavius Watts
ATH Jaiden Taylor
K Hayden Chambers
LS Kyle Rushing

Mississippi State football 2026 schedule

Conference games are bolded.

Sept. 5: vs. Louisana-Monroe
Sept. 12: at Minnesota
Sept. 19: at South Carolina
Sept. 26: vs. Missouri
Oct. 3: vs. Alabama
Oct. 10: Open
Oct. 17: at LSU
Oct. 24: vs. Oklahoma
Oct. 31: at Texas
Nov. 7: vs. Vanderbilt
Nov. 14: vs. Auburn
Nov. 21: vs. Tennessee Tech
Nov. 27: at Ole Miss

Sam Sklar is the Mississippi State beat reporter for The Clarion Ledger. Email him at ssklar@usatodayco.com and follow him on X @sklarsam_.

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Mississippi

A Mississippi bill will ban abortion pill prescriptions or sales

Published

13 hours ago

March 15, 2026

Press Room

A Mississippi bill will ban abortion pill prescriptions or sales

A Mississippi bill would make prescribing abortion-inducing medication illegal, with violators facing up to 10 years in prison.
The legislation was added as an amendment to a bill originally focused on trafficking illegal drugs.

A House bill is one step away from making it illegal for doctors to prescribe abortion-inducing medication to Mississippians. People who violate the provision could face up to 10 years in prison.

The bill originally focused on the trafficking of illegal drugs such as marijuana and scheduled controlled substances. It added a single phrase to existing Mississippi law, clarifying the number of dosage units of a scheduled drug that someone needs to transport in order to charge them with aggravated trafficking.

Rep. Celeste Hurst, R-Sandhill, seized the opportunity to add abortion-inducing drugs to the bill when it was heard on the House floor in early February. Her amendment would allow the prosecution of people who knowingly dispense, sell or prescribe the medications.

She clarified on the floor that her intention is to require an in-person visit with a patient before a doctor can issue the medication, which is most frequently prescribed when someone is going through a miscarriage. Neither the text of her amendment nor the Senate version that passed March 11 mention a doctor’s visit.

The bill cleared the hurdle of a full House vote on Feb. 11 easily, passing with support from nearly two-thirds of the chamber. It crossed the aisle to the Senate, where first a committee, then the full chamber, also approved the bill’s new language.

Unlike with all of the other drugs mentioned, the bill doesn’t specify the amount of abortion-inducing medication that would warrant prosecution, nor does it clarify how many units would classify the crime as a felony.

Additionally, the bill allows the Attorney General to sue a person who is accused of violating the law and recover a financial penalty. Being acquitted of the criminal charge, the bill states, is not a defense in a civil case, so someone who is determined to be innocent can still face civil litigation.

The bill joins Mississippi’s existing abortion laws, which ban the practice in nearly every circumstance, barring a proven case of rape or a situation where an abortion is needed to save someone’s life. Medical providers can also face a minimum of one year and maximum of 10 years in prison for performing an illegal abortion.

Neither the House nor the Senate bill would punish people who receive or use the abortion-inducing medication illegally. This policy is meant to protect women in vulnerable situations, said Grace Bailey, a domestic violence counselor, but the impact on their wellbeing is the same as if they could be prosecuted for abortions.

Bailey, who provides counseling at women’s shelters throughout Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, said the strict abortion laws in these states have presented significant roadblocks for many women trying to leave abusive relationships.

“One of the first signs of abuse is control. We see women whose husbands or boyfriends have forced them to stop birth control or take their IUD out, and they end up pregnant, which makes them stay in the relationship way longer than they should,” she said in a March 9 interview.

Often, Bailey said, becoming pregnant is the sudden sign that makes a woman realize that she needs to leave her abusive partner.

“Women come to us at the shelter trying to get away from a man who hurt them, who took all their money, who made them feel completely out of control of their own life,” she said. “The last thing they can handle as they’re trying to make a clean break is a baby that will connect them to their abuser for the rest of their life.”

Some women decide that an early-stage abortion, before the point of viability around 24 weeks, is the best course of action for them, Bailey said. When Mississippi outlawed abortion in 2022, she recalled a woman at a Vicksburg domestic violence shelter who chose to go back to her estranged husband because she was pregnant.

“She told me, ‘I don’t have any money, I don’t have a job, and I have no family support,’” Bailey recounted. “She felt like she had no choice, so she went back to the man who scared her more than anyone in the world. Even worse, she brought a baby into that situation.”

Bailey clarified that she supports banning abortion after 12 weeks, as opposed to Mississippi’s near-total ban, but she thinks that laws should include an exception for victims of domestic violence.

“If you can prove that you’ve gone to a women’s shelter and gotten counseling, and you’re trying to get away from an abusive relationship,” she said, “I think the compassionate thing to do is let you get a safe abortion, especially if you’re just taking a pill.”

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Mississippi

Mississippi vs Arkansas Prediction, Picks & Odds for Today’s SEC Tournament Game

Published

1 day ago

March 14, 2026

Press Room

Mississippi vs Arkansas Prediction, Picks & Odds for Today’s SEC Tournament Game

Updated:
Mar 14, 2026 , 01:06 PM ET

• 4 min read

Farmer’s Prediction: Mississippi’s rebellious run ends against Arkansas.

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Mississippi

How White South Africans Are Reshaping the Mississippi Delta

Published

2 days ago

March 14, 2026

Press Room

How White South Africans Are Reshaping the Mississippi Delta

Sometimes, Ramsden and his peers in Mississippi might hop down in the mud to lay irrigation pipe. But their work typically involves operating machinery. The region’s farms mostly grow commodity row crops such soybeans, corn and cotton, which require modern tractors running complex software; laborers monitor G.P.S.-guided equipment that automates planting depth and seed spacing. Jason Holcomb, an emeritus professor of geography and global studies at Morehead State University, told me that South African H-2A workers in the U.S. first found jobs on the Great Plains in the nineteen-nineties, working on custom harvesting crews that travelled from farm to farm, to cut crops. Historically, this work had been a rite of passage for high schoolers and college students in the region. But in the nineteen-nineties, as regulations tightened, local interest waned. Now South Africans represent the fastest-growing source of H-2A farm labor in the U.S.: from 2011 to 2024, the number of visa holders has increased by more than four hundred per cent and the number of South Africans in the program has increased fourteenfold. Ramsden told me that on a flight from Atlanta to South Africa, in November or December, at the end of the working season, you might find that two hundred and fifty of the three hundred passengers are farm workers headed home. “If this program went away tomorrow, farming would cease,” Walter King, one of the co-owners of Nelson-King Farms, said.

For the South Africans, part of the draw is money. Ramsden estimated that workers in Mississippi could make at least four times the wages they earned back home. But it’s not just the pay that sends them abroad—there’s also a feeling that they are escaping anti-white sentiment. Many of these men in the Delta are the descendants of colonists who, beginning in the eighteen-thirties, embarked on the “Great Trek,” a migration from the coast of South Africa into the region’s interior to establish farms, and, later, whole republics that were independent from the British Crown. They called themselves Afrikaners to indicate their commitment to what they saw as their homeland, unlike the Brits still tied to London.

In the twentieth century, Afrikaners seized power in South Africa. Eve Fairbanks, the author of “The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning,” told me that, in the Afrikaners’ narrative, farmers were “the total backbone of the country—the great ones, the heroes.” (The word “Boer,” which means “farmer” in Afrikaans, is sometimes used interchangeably with Afrikaner.) They talked about themselves as a people who had tamed an empty place, making nationhood possible. To maintain the illusion of democracy in a country that was majority Black, Afrikaners created the apartheid system, which, nominally, created smaller, independent states for different ethnic groups, but effectively denied citizenship to Black South Africans, stripping them of the right to participate in politics, own land, or move freely. (The architects of apartheid were inspired by the Jim Crow policies of the American South, which effectively disenfranchised much of the region’s Black majority.)

In 1992, after decades of external pressure and internal resistance, the country voted to end the system. But imbalances in property ownership persisted: today, white South Africans, who make up around seven per cent of the country’s population, still own seventy-two per cent of its private farmland. Meanwhile, millions of Black South Africans still live in informal settlements.

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