Mississippi State owns their country attitude: cowbells in the stands, a buttoned-down gameday decor, and that entire section of the stands reserved for those who've lost limbs in gruesome farm injuries. (Not true! That's actually a section in Kinnick Stadium in Iowa.)
How much do they really own it, though? So much so that the flyover for the Alabama game was done by what appears to be a crop duster or the Baron Von Richtofen himself flying all the way from Hell for the game.
Gadzooks! Was that the dashing Wiley Post? Or the rakish Jimmy Doolittle? Or perhaps Amelia Earhart, who overcomes the crippling handicap of having a vagina every time she bravely enters an aircraft! O, those wily aviators! Someday, might they fly to sun?
The little hysterical WOOO! at the end may be one of the most nuanced crowd noises we've ever heard: part shame, part acceptance, and part ironic barbaric yawp. Whatever--they can tie weather balloons to pigs and let the recreational shooting crowd loose on them as long as Mississippi State keeps winning. Bowl-eligible means you can fly whatever you want over the stadium, even if it does sound like a motorized go-cart with wings.
A clarification: From reader Bulldog, who invites us to eat him.
That was our President, retired Air Force commander Gen. Robert H. "Doc" Foglesong. It is his Mississippi State biplane. He always buzzes over the stadium before the game. So eat me and the rest of the bulldog nation.
Their president buzzes the stadium in his own biplane? Is he a botanist/humanitarian with a penchant for archaeology, arctic exploration, and jujitsu? Does this man have limits, we ask?