The Gunslinger knew that this was it: This was going to be the year Mississippi Valley State got over that big hump in Jackson.
Archie Cooley just knew that the 1982 season was going to be when his Mississippi Valley program finally knocked the smirk off the familiar faces of his alma mater.
Valley entered the 1982 matchup with Jackson State down bad. JSU held a 27-1-1 record in the series. Valley had managed a slim win in 1954 and a tie in 1956. Other than that, the series was heavily lopsided.
No one knew this better than Cooley. He was keenly aware of who had been the dominant power between the two schools. Cooley played at JSU in the 1950s and 60s for legendary head coach John Merritt. Merritt, of course, would leave Jackson for the Tennessee State job, where he would become one of the all-time greats.
Merritt would later hire Cooley away from Alcorn State and Marino Casem. He stayed at TSU for seven years before coming to take over the cellar-dwelling Delta Devils in 1980. By this point it was clear that the standard in Mississippi, and in the SWAC, was W.C. Gorden and JSU.
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Sure, Eddie Robinson was still around and getting talent, but his Tigers weren’t quite as fierce as the ones in the capital of the Magnolia State. Marino Casem and Alcorn State were never to be taken lightly, but ASU had only won one title since 1976, and was a middle-of-the-road program at the time.
Valley had been the doormat of the state, and often the SWAC for most of its time in the league. Located in tiny Ita Bena, Mississippi it made Lorman, Miss. look like an emerging Metropolis.
Cooley’s task when he was hired at the start of the decade was to build a program that could compete and give his alma mater hell. He was aware of the challenges– and he made sure everyone else did too – but he was up to the challenge.
“Coach Gorden’s got all the money and he’s got all the players,” Cooley said in August of 1982 during the SWAC Football Press Tour– forerunner to today’s Media Days. “Why he’s the only coach in the SWAC who tried to recruit Marcus Dupree.”
“I’ve never had athletes before,” Cooley said. “But I got ‘em now, and they’re hungry.”
Among those athletes was a freshman quarterback named Willie Totten. His top target was a sophomore receiver named Jerry Rice. Gorden, a Tennessee State grad that had played against Merritt, was aware that little brother was making moves.
“They appear to be much better than a year ago,” Gorden said. “They’re explosive. They have some guys who can make big plays.”
The end result of the 1982 game was a 44-17 loss for Valley. Totten threw the ball 56 times that day. But Cooley knew he had something special on his hands.
“We have 47 sophomores coming back next year. Jackson State is losing 35 seniors,” he said. “This thing can’t go on forever.”
A few days after the loss, Cooley got a two-year extension, giving him until at least 1985 to figure things out.
The 1983 matchup looked like the moment Mississippi Valley had been waiting nearly three decades. The Delta Devils came into the late September game averaging a blistering 56 points and 600 yards of total offense a game after two contests, both wins. Totten was a sophomore now, Rice a junior. Cooley promised he’d pass the ball 80 times before the game.
The offensive explosion happened that day in the Vet– it just came from Jackson State instead of Mississippi Valley. Valley went into halftime up 13-6. It would lose 33-19.
“Nobody can say the Delta Devils weren’t flashy,” Clarion-Ledger reporter Roscoe Nance wrote. “But no matter how flashy a team may be, it still has to settle down and play old-fashioned get-after-em football at some point. Valley never did.”
Reading between the lines, the verdict on Valley was that it was “soft.” And everybody knew it.
“I don’t want to say anything negative about Valley,” JSU quarterback John McKenzie told Nance. “But I knew if we kept the pressure on ‘em, they’d give up. That’s true in anything. Pressure will burst a pipe.”