University of Southern Mississippi: From Teachers College to Brett Favre

The University of Southern Mississippi sits on the south edge of Hattiesburg, and its origin story is one of persistence against a reluctant legislature. The movement to establish a state teachers college in south Mississippi began as early as eighteen seventy-seven, but two separate normal college bills failed before advocates finally broke through. On March thirtieth, nineteen ten, Governor Edmond Noel signed House Bill two hundred four into law, and the Mississippi Normal College was born.

The school opened in Hattiesburg the following year with a single purpose: training teachers for a region that desperately needed them. Over the next few decades it expanded its curriculum, changed its name to Mississippi Southern College in nineteen forty, and remained Mississippi Southern College until nineteen sixty-two, when it was renamed the University of Southern Mississippi and gained university status.

What the university became is easier to explain through the people it produced. Brett Favre played quarterback here in the mid nineteen eighties, a small-town Mississippi kid from Kiln who went largely unrecruited out of high school. Southern Miss gave him a starting role, and he rewarded the program by becoming the first Golden Eagle drafted in the first round of the NFL draft, going thirty-third overall to the Atlanta Falcons in nineteen ninety-one. He would go on to win a Super Bowl, throw for more touchdowns than anyone in NFL history at the time of his retirement, and be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Favre shares the alumni roster with country star Faith Hill, who attended Southern Miss before her recording career took hold; songwriter Jimmy Buffett, who studied at the university in the nineteen sixties before heading to Nashville and then the tropics; and Ray Guy, the punter so dominant that some analysts still consider him the best ever to play that position, enshrined in Canton in twenty fourteen.

Today Southern Miss enrolls around fourteen thousand students, operates a research enterprise spanning coastal ecology, polymer science, and Gulf of Mexico studies, and remains the anchor institution for the pine-belt region of south Mississippi. It was a long road from those two failed bills in the eighteen seventies.