Laquon Treadwell, Ole Miss, and the matter of ghosts

That screen play’s design does not read, “Win the game and save the season, no matter what.”

Laquon Treadwell could’ve let himself be tackled inside No. 3 Auburn’s 5-yard line and taken more time away from Gus Malzahn’s response to the No. 4 Rebels likely going up, 38-35, with seconds left. He decided to win it all.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, no one thinks about whether to fall forward or not. But hindsight says it was a decision.

Via ESPN

That’s a decision only questionable in hindsight, but it’s one that produced a series of instant, lasting horrors: another loss to Auburn, a game-losing fumble, the sickening break of his leg and ankle at the goal line, and the foreseeable end of Ole Miss’ dream run to a national, conference or even division title.

I decided to write about sports professionally when the second of two missed Jonathan Nichols field goals went wide in a 17-14 LSU win over Ole Miss in 2003. That game was Eli Manning’s senior season, and it was the closest Ole Miss would come to modern relevance until 2014. I was standing under the goal posts for Nichols’ kick. To watch grown men weep, formerly sensible human beings beating their chests at an invisible curse? I wanted to follow that folly.

This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen happen to Ole Miss. But it’s also one of the worst things I’ve ever seen happen in sports. We’ve never seen anything like this in college football. In the Playoff’s first year of existence, a program of no importance during the BCS, Bowl Alliance, or computer era (not just the computers that rank college football teams, mind you; the period of time in which computers have been part of daily life) was in a single step pulled from behind, stripped, and broken backwards.

Ole Miss is a culture adept at dressing failures with ghosts and curses. That’s the great secret of Ole Miss. All the pageantry -- the frittering over chafing dishes and chandeliers, the talk of blaming shadows and history -- are not celebrations. They’re tics. Byproducts.

The Grove’s writ-large Southern opulence is what happens when Mississippi, a place with limited resources and its own bad decisions, decides it’s going to save face and make the best of a few decades. Or six. When you’re awful at doing what you love most for so long, you find ways to distract yourself from that reality.

Laquon Treadwell’s broken fumble needs no ghost. I’d like to assume the dead follow our lives, but in Oxford just as much as any other place, and that late Saturday night, the ghosts of Mississippi were leaning against a metal tailgate tent pole, muttering, “I mean … goddamn, why?” with the rest of the living.

I have never seen a ghost in Mississippi. 1865 didn’t dislocate Treadwell’s ankle, and 1962 didn’t recover the fumble. The Colonel didn’t curse this, and neither did an angry God.

It’s harder to accept that Ole Miss is not haunted. After Saturday night, it will remain just a place filled with mostly nice people, getting dressed up and excited in spite of their own horrors.