Ole Miss and Texas have played football eight times in 114 years, and almost none of it looks like a normal series. Three regular-season games before 1926, three bowl games in nine years under two Hall of Fame coaches, a 46-year silence, and a two-game home-and-home that ended with the Rebels winning in Austin. Tonight is the ninth meeting. Texas leads the series 6-2, per the Ole Miss game notes.
The early years: three trips west
The first meeting came in Houston in 1912, a 53-14 Texas win. The next two were in Austin: 66-7 in 1914 and 25-0 in 1925. Then the schools did not play for more than three decades.
Vaught vs. Royal: three bowls in nine years
The series that matters started on Jan. 1, 1958, in the Sugar Bowl at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans. Johnny Vaught’s Ole Miss team beat Darrell Royal’s first Texas team 39-7 in front of 82,000. Raymond Brown ran for 157 yards on 15 carries, including a 92-yard touchdown run in the third quarter, and also threw a touchdown pass. Ole Miss led 19-0 at halftime and finished the season 9-1-1.
The game came with a grudge. Royal had coached Mississippi State earlier in the decade, and Vaught wrote in his 1971 book Rebel Coach that Royal and State coach Wade Walker arranged for a State assistant, Leonard McCullough, to go to Austin and help Texas prepare for Ole Miss. Vaught wrote that Royal would step over “conference ties and ethics” to win, as Oxford historian Jack Mayfield recounted in the Oxford Eagle. The scouting help did not show up on the scoreboard.
Royal got his revenge four years later. In the Cotton Bowl on Jan. 1, 1962, No. 5 Ole Miss met No. 3 Texas, and both teams had been ranked No. 1 earlier that season. Texas led 12-0 at halftime on a James Saxton touchdown run and a Mike Cotten touchdown pass. Glynn Griffing hit Reed Davis for a 20-yard score in the third quarter to make it 12-7, but Texas end Bob Moses sacked Griffing on fourth down at the Ole Miss 23 to end the last real threat. It was Royal’s first bowl win at Texas.
The third bowl meeting, the Bluebonnet Bowl at Rice Stadium in Houston on Dec. 17, 1966, was all Texas. The Longhorns won 19-0 behind 156 rushing yards from Chris Gilbert and two touchdown runs from Bill Bradley, and they stopped Ole Miss on fourth down at the Texas 8.
The Manning revival
After 1966 the series went quiet for 46 years. According to longtime Texas historian Bill Little, writing in 2013, it came back because Archie Manning and Mack Brown started talking about renewing it.
The first game of the home-and-home did not go Ole Miss’s way. On Sept. 15, 2012, in Hugh Freeze’s first season, No. 14 Texas came to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium and won 66-31.
The return trip a year later is the last time Ole Miss played in Austin. On Sept. 14, 2013, No. 25 Ole Miss trailed 23-17 at halftime in front of 101,474, the third-largest crowd in the stadium’s history at the time. The Rebels then outscored Texas 27-0 in the second half and won 44-23. Jeff Scott ran for a career-high 164 yards and returned a punt 73 yards for a touchdown, Bo Wallace threw touchdown passes to Donte Moncrief and Evan Engram and ran for another, and Ole Miss ran for 272 yards to Texas’s 124.
Tonight: another Manning
The series that Archie Manning helped bring back now has his grandson in the middle of it. Arch Manning is Texas’s starting quarterback. On the other side is Trinidad Chambliss, who passed Archie Manning on the Ole Miss career total offense list this season.
No. 7 Ole Miss (5-1, 3-1 SEC) plays No. 19 Texas (4-2, 1-2 SEC) at 6:30 p.m. CT on ABC at DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium. It is Ole Miss’s first trip to Austin since that 2013 second half, and its first meeting with Texas as a fellow member of the Southeastern Conference.
Photo: Trinidad Chambliss, July 22, 2026, at SEC Football Kickoff Media Days in Tampa. Mandatory Credit: Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images.
Sources: Ole Miss Athletics game notes and 2013 game recap; Texas Athletics (Bill Little, 2013); Oxford Eagle (Jack Mayfield, 2016); game records for the 1958 Sugar Bowl, 1962 Cotton Bowl and 1966 Bluebonnet Bowl.