It's time to start thinking CSpire Conerly

As always, Mississippi football has produced several candidates worthy of consideration for the CSpire Wireless Conerly Trophy, which goes annually to the Magnolia State's most outstanding collegiate football player.

The C Spire Conerly Trophy will be presented at a banquet Nov. 27 at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Museum. Each of the 10 football-playing senior colleges in Mississippi will select a finalist and voting will be done by a statewide panel of sports media. Southern Miss quarterback Austin Davis won the CSpire Conerly in 2011.

What follows is a 2012 CSpire Conerly Trophy watch list, in alphabetical order:

• Mississippi College wide receiver Alex Archer: The senior has caught 34 passes for 674 yards and five touchdowns. His 82 yards per game receiving ranks him second in the American Southwest Conference.

• Mississippi State cornerback Johnthan Banks: The senior All America candidate has intercepted four passes, bringing his career total to 16. His 320 yards of pass interception returns ranks him first among active college players.

• Southern Miss defensive end Jamie Collins: Collins, a senior, leads USM with 64 tackles, 12 tackles for losses and six sacks.

• Jackson State defensive end Joseph LeBeau: A senior from New Orleans, LeBeau ranks fourth in the NCAA Football Championship division with 14.5 tackles for loss, including six sacks and a forced fumble.

Big game, great cause Saturday

Bulldog Sports Radio is throwing a party for Mississippi State fans and for a good cause.

The on-line network will host a State-Bama watch party starting at 6:30 p.m. Saturday at Burger and Blues Restaurant in Ridgeland to raise money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Mississippi.

Bulldog fans and friends are invited to come cheer the Bulldogs as they face the No. 1-ranked Alabama Crimson Tide.

The game will be shown on a big screen in the dining room and throughout the restaurant, and 10 per cent of sales of all food ordered during the game will go to Make-A-Wish. That’s not all. Raffle tickets will be available for great prizes at just $5 each, and 100% of the raffle sales will go to Make-A-Wish.

Prizes include a pair of tickets to the Nov. 17 Arkansas-Mississippi State game, as well as a helmet and football autographed by Dan Mullen, and a baseball autographed by John Cohen. Gift certificates from several Jackson-area restaurants and businesses also will be available.

Make-A-Wish grants the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions. The late Kent Hull, the Bulldog great and Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer, was a long-time supporter of Make-A-Wish Foundation.

For more information, visit VSporto.com.

Orley Hood: Special night, special man

The boys got together Tuesday night — his boys — to give the old guy grief.

The yelling and hollering, the twisting of the face masks, the attention to detail that marked so vividly a 60-year career trying to grind concentration and dedication into locker rooms filled with kids.

It was Jack Carlisle Night at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Museum, the first of many annual roasts to come of Mississippi Hall of Fame greats. And it was wonderful. The Murrah years. Jackson Prep. Ole Miss. East Tennessee State. MRA.

His guys showed up en masse, some old, many older than old, filled with memories and laughter — and terror, more than one roaster said.

Happy Jack is the guy whose track teams at Murrah didn’t lose a meet for seven straight seasons, whose football teams won umpteen championships, who went to the wall that autumn afternoon in 1977 at Memorial Stadium to get Ken Cooper to put in substitute quarterback Tim Ellis, who immediately led Ole Miss on a game-winning drive against Notre Dame, which won the national title that year.

“He told me if I threw an interception that we’d both be fired,” Tim said. Carlisle wasn’t kidding. But Tim Ellis’ coach believed in him 100 percent.

There was one story after another, all the Carlisle eras overlapped into one, the MRA guys with the Prep guys with the Murrah guys with the Ole Miss guys, everybody nodding in recognition at every story. That’s because the players may have changed, the schools may have changed, but Jack Carlisle never did, not for a second.

Jack Carlisle: So many stories . . .

You will see on the front page of this website and on the "news and updates" page where the Hall of Fame will be holding a first annual Roast on Oct. 16. The first honoree — or victim — is legendary coach Jack Carlisle, Happy Jack to his legion of admirers. Folks, we are going to have some fun with this and we're going to make some money to make some badly needed improvements here at the museum.

For those who may not know about Happy Jack, here's a column I wrote about him years ago for The Clarion-Ledger:

You coach football for 50 years, mostly in Mississippi, you see some stuff. Jack Carlisle, retired and living in Brandon, has seen plenty. This is really his column. These are his stories. I'll do the typing. We start with Carlisle's first coaching job at Lula-Rich High School, north of Clarksdale. This was in 1954 and tiny Lula-Rich had only 14 players. One night they were playing at Oakland High, south of Batesville. There was no money for a bus — and with 14 players and a manager — no bus was necessary. The team made the trip in five separate cars. "Well, it got to be 8 o'clock, gametime, and one of the cars hadn't made it," Carlisle says. "Turns out, it broke down on some backwater road in the Delta. It was carrying the left side of my line." Carlisle was down to 11 players and the manager, a kid named Harris. Carlisle asked Harris to dress out. Harris said they'd have to ask his mom. So Carlisle asked the mother, whom he knew as Miss Polly, a science teacher. Miss Polly wasn't keen on the idea, but she reluctantly agreed. Sure enough, Carlisle's best player got hurt and was carried off the field. "So I tell my manager to go in the game and just stand off to the side and stay out of the way," Carlisle says. "I didn't want Miss Polly on me if the boy got hurt." First play: Lula-Rich was on defense and the smallish manager, draped in a uniform several sizes too large, stood 40 yards down the field. You've heard of the lonesome end? Harris was a lonesome safety. Of course, an Oakland runner broke through the line and barreled down the field with blockers ahead of him. One of those blockers took dead aim at Harris and knocked him head over heels into next week.

Orley Hood: Our pal, Duff . . .

Decades ago it was, a smashup between sports and music, a reminder that the best nights often start with one purpose and finish with another.

Something was happening with Ole Miss football. I forget what. It was 30 years ago. After covering a basketball game at Tad Smith, Rick and I wandered over to The Gin (may it rest in peace). “The Tangents are playing,” he said. “Bound to be some football players there.”

I don’t remember whether we got anything on Ole Miss football for the paper that night. I do remember the band — Winter time? What wintertime? — and he drank a lot of beer and they played a lot of songs I dearly loved then and still love today.

That was my introduction to Duff Dorrough, one of the all-time great guys. Duff died today after a long and Duff-like weirdly cheerful battle with liver cancer. He was to get a liver transplant a couple of weeks ago. Duff was the Pied Piper at the hospital, one doctor told a friend, playing his guitar and charming the other patients into random moments of care-free fun. But the cancer had spread out of control and the liver went to someone else, who, to my way of thinking, is now responsible to squeeze as much life as possible out of that organ.

You know, the way Duff would have.

There are a thousand stories about a guy who had thousands of friends and spread music and happiness around like they were peanut butter and jelly on Wonder bread.

Here’s one more:

Long time ago, we’re sitting on Lallah Perry’s porch in Sleepy Hollow at the Neshoba County Fair, Lallah and me and Duff. She taught him art at Delta State. It was late morning, lazy time, no where to be and nothing to do. Coffee. A roll. Maybe a thought to the day’s first beer, Lallah telling stories about Duff.

He goes inside, maybe to find a top to pop. Lallah said, “You know, Duff is a deeply talented painter. The soul of a poet.” I nod like I know what she’s talking about.

“He’s good at everything,” she said. “Especially at being a human being.”