7/25/2023 0 Comments Tad jones last chance road![]() Over the years, more than 200 kids from the Mississippi league have gone on to NFL teams: at least fifty from Hinds, in tiny Raymond forty from Northwest Mississippi, in Senatobia twenty-five from Mississippi Gulf Coast, in Perkinston. So did five players who were in NFL camps this summer. This year’s starting quarterback at Ole Miss, nickelback at Nebraska, defensive linemen at Alabama and Florida-as well as early commits to Florida State and Oklahoma-all bubbled up from Scooba. Twenty-two of the Lions’ twenty-four graduating sophomores last season signed with Division I schools. This lonesome outpost of 1,200 students near the Alabama line has also become an unlikely pipeline to the teams that millions of fans watch on Saturdays and Sundays. It’s the home of the East Mississippi Community College Lions, junior-college national champions two of the past three years and current center of the juco football universe. Wrapped across the team’s equipment truck, parked nearby for anyone rolling past on Highway 16 to see: your story starts here. The 6,000-seat stadium features artificial turf, a double-decker press box, and a giant video scoreboard. Yet less than a mile west of that blown-away vista, a spick-and-span football complex rises taller and shinier than anything you’ll find between here and the nearest Walmart, forty miles away. All of which makes the little Mississippi town of Scooba-population 732, per capita income $11,355-an improbable center of anything. Drive by most days and the only open business is a working Coke machine on the sidewalk. Five brick buildings still stand another four are gone, just disappeared, as if by cremation-nothing left but rubble and little piles of red dust. What passes for the old downtown is one side of one block. Piney woods run deep enough to hide whatever you don’t want found. The landscape is drunk Faulkner: small and spooky and piss-poor.
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