The audio version of this story is AI generated and is not human reviewed. It may contain errors or inaccuracies. Editor’s note: The following is part of a series examining how the success of the Ole Mis football team could provide some solutions to Mississippi’s brain drain. College fo otball fans in Mississippi will be talking about the 2025-26 season for a long time, no matter what team they support. Ole Miss’s record-setting 13-2 season came to an end in the semifinals of the College Football Playoff. In a state where potential has historically outstripped performance, the Rebels accomplished what few imagined was possible at the beginning of the season – if ever. The first playoff appearance for a team from Mississippi. The most wins in a season. The highest final regular season ranking since 1962. And – one can only assume – the most Trinidad and Tobago flags ever sold outside of the Caribbean.  But this season will also be remembered for the topic that has dominated conversation for months among fans and non-fans alike: Mississippi’s brain drain.  Two days after the Egg Bowl win against rival Mississippi State, Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin left Mississippi to take the head job at LSU. Despite six years of tweeting #ComeToTheSip, Kiffin felt that Baton Rouge, Louisiana, offered him more opportunity and prestige than Oxford, Mississippi. Nobody has ever departed the state with so much sound and fury, but plenty before him have moved away for similar reasons. In the past 12 years, Mississippi has lost more people to other states than the 68,251 who filled Vaught-Hemingway Stadium for the first-round playoff game against Tulane.   Kiffin’s departure dramatized the relationship that has always existed between college football and the brain drain. The state’s first intercollegiate game was played in 1893, around the time that Mississippi began losing population to other states. Since that time, Mississippi’s migration history includes long stretches of losing years, punctuated by a few brief periods of success – similar to the records of Mississippi’s major football programs.   Like the brain drain, college football is a prism for a place’s people, culture and economy. It is a national sport built on local pride, and its symbols and traditions are expressions of communal identity. Cowbells, the Grove, the Sonic Boom and the Fighting Okra encapsulate Mississippi culture as well as whole books written on the subject.  But beneath the pageantry, college football boils down to a multibillion-dollar competition for talent. The best teams at the end of the season are almost always the teams that recruited the most talent before the season. It is an open competition, but it is not an equal one. Each school’s recruiting ability is determined by the economic and social structures that surround the university: schools with large fanbases and wealthy donors located in talent-rich regions usually draw the best players. Mississippi is a small state that produces prodigious football talent, but it is divided between two SEC programs and another in the Sun Belt, as well as a trio of SWAC programs. Schools in Mississippi have rarely been able to amass as much talent as their larger and wealthier rivals from more populous states.  In other words, college football is the brain drain in microcosm. Since most Mississippians follow college football as a matter of birthright, it is the best way to understand why Mississippi loses the talent competition with other states – and what it will take to win. Top programs and places corner the market on talent The 136 schools that play at the highest Division I-FBS level work year-round to recruit and retain as much talent as possible from a limited pool of 18-to-22-year-old players. It is not uncommon for teams to replace half their rosters between seasons while most coaches last only three to four years at the same school. Despite the rapid personnel turnover, college football is the most hierarchical major American sport. Every program has good and bad years, but most have stayed in the same echelon since the era of leather helmets. The eight schools with the best records since the turn of the 20th century (using Sports Reference’s Simple Rating System, which takes into account strength of schedule and point differential) have won eight of the 11 national championships since the playoff began in 2014. All eight finished in the top 18 of this year’s final regular season rankings. Even in a year that is poised to produce an improbable national champion, a school’s historical performance is the best predictor of how its 2025 team played.  Places are similarly stratified, even as the people who live in them are changing constantly. Almost two in three people live in a different city than where they grew up, and roughly one-third live in a different state. Yet most of the wealthiest places half a century ago sit atop of the economic hierarchy today, while most of the poorest places remain on the bottom today. The distribution of places by past and present per capita income resembles the ranking of college football programs.  a The top programs and places maintain their preeminence – and prevent the rise of rivals from lower tiers – because the competition for talent is biased in their favor. Five-star prospects go to Ohio State and Alabama for the same reason that the top financiers go to New York and computer scientists go to Silicon Valley: that’s where the best in their fields have always gone. Over time, they have accumulated institutional advantages – more wealth, higher professional ceilings, greater national recognition – that make them attractive destinations for the next generation. You don’t have to like Kiffin’s decision to acknowledge that it is easier to follow the well-worn path to success than to try to create it where it has not previously existed. Mississippi excels at producing talent, not recruiting it You’ll find Mississippians in the top ranks of nearly every profession, but most had to leave the state to get there.  Football is the clearest example, in part because it affords us the most complete data. Mississippi produces football talent at a higher rate than any state in the country. Mississippi ranks first per capita in professional football players all-time, active NFL players, Hall of Famers and professional games played.  By default, every professional football player who grew up in Mississippi left the state for their career. The outmigration of NFL players mirrors the brain drain in other fields. In both cases, Mississippi’s universities are often the launchpad for out-of-state job opportunities. A college education is hardly the only marker of talent, but it is the sharpest dividing line between who stays in Mississippi and who leaves.  Almost half of Mississippi natives move away after earning a bachelor’s degree, compared to only 30% of Mississippians without a four-year degree. University graduates account for all of the net outmigration from Mississippi since 2010. If football is the rite of fall on campus, the rite of spring is newly-minted graduates packing up to leave Mississippi. It is no coincidence that the most popular destinations are cities with pro football teams like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Nashville. Other top employers are located in those cities for the same reasons as the NFL: that’s where the people and money are.  Nevertheless, Mississippians are only slightly more likely to leave their home state than other Southerners. What separates Mississippi from nearby states is the ability to recruit newcomers to replace them. For every 100 people born in the average Southern state, 28 move away while 59 move in. Mississippi loses 36 but gains only 26.  College students are the primary exception. The state’s universities are the best recruiters of talent to the state – in part because of the national exposure from their college football teams. Approximately 4,500 more college students move to Mississippi each year than move away, the 15th-highest rate of net in-migration in the country. In total, about 38% of the enrollment at Mississippi’s eight public universities has come from outside the state. The football rosters are even more geographically diverse than the campuses at large. Nearly three-quarters of Ole Miss’s team moved from another state, and about 60% of the teams at MSU and USM. More than half of the 77 active NFL players who played at one of Mississippi’s D1 programs were born outside of Mississippi. Most of them chose to play college ball in Mississippi over offers around the country. Twice in the past 13 years, the top high school recruit in the country chose to sign with a Mississippi school: Robert Nkemdiche came to Ole Miss from Georgia in 2013 and Travis Hunter came to JSU from Florida in 2021.  Student-athletes enroll at Mississippi’s universities for the same reasons as other students: because they offer quality professional development, vibrant social atmospheres and competitive financial packages. Their recruiting success proves that Mississippi is capable of attracting talent from anywhere – as long as it can match the opportunities that exist in other places.  The brain drain occurs because the opportunities in Mississippi dry up as soon as students graduate. The state ranks last in the share of jobs that require a bachelor’s degree or more. The cost of living is low, but the pay is even lower: college grads take home 10% less in Mississippi than in other Southeastern states even after accounting for price differences. Most of the population lives in rural areas or small towns, which do not appeal to young people seeking big-city amenities or cultural diversity.  As a result, approximately 95% of out-of-state students leave within five years of graduation, to go along with the nearly half of Mississippi natives. Only two graduates move in from another state for every three who leave. From 2010 to 2020, Mississippi’s colleges and universities jumped from 43rd to 29th in the number of bachelor’s degrees granted per capita, but the share of college-educated 25-to-34-year-olds living in Mississippi dropped from 49th to 50th over the same period.  A changing recruiting landscape is creating unlikely winners Only six schools have won national championships in the playoff era. This year will produce the seventh.  The final four contenders were Indiana, Oregon, Miami and Ole Miss. Only Indiana and Oregon had made a playoff prior to this season, but neither has won a national championship in school history. Miami won its most recent title in 2001, before any of the players on its current team were born. Ole Miss’s last championship (claimed by the school, though not recognized by the NCAA) came in 1962, another season overshadowed by off-field events.  The common thread among the four semifinalists is that they have aggressively adapted to the changing recruiting landscape. On the heels of a Supreme Court decision, the NCAA granted players the ability to be paid for their name, image and likeness (NIL) in 2020, followed by the lifting of restrictions on transferring between schools. Revenue sharing now allows schools to pay players directly.  Players can now move around the country and compare financial offers, just as workers in other sectors have always been able to do. In the new era, recruiting talent has less to do with a program’s pedigree than its budget. The four semifinalists all have well-funded and well-organized NIL collectives that have allowed them to land talented transfers. While blue-bloods Georgia, Ohio State, Alabama still build their rosters through the high school ranks, more than half of the starters at Miami, Indiana and Ole Miss have come out of the portal. In the first two rounds of this year’s playoff, the team that started more transfers was 6-1 (Oregon and James Madison had an equal share).  The changing landscape has not upended the established hierarchy – after all, blue-blood programs typically still have the largest fan bases and deepest pockets – but it has created new opportunities for upward mobility among programs that can raise enough money and invest it wisely.   Broader societal and economic changes in wake of the pandemic have also shifted the migration of talent among the general population. Many of the largest and wealthiest cities began losing residents in 2020 as knowledge workers took advantage of their newfound ability to work remotely. Housing costs had been growing for decades in the nation’s top talent hubs, and COVID-era inflation brought affordability to a breaking point. In response, young professionals have flocked to smaller cities that offer many of the same urban amenities at a fraction of the price.  According to Zillow, the nation’s hottest housing markets in 2025 were Buffalo, New York; Indianapolis, Indiana; Providence, Rhode Island; and Hartford, Connecticut. All have historically been second- or third-tier cities in their regions. Three of the four had lost population since 1970.  As in college football, the established hierarchy remains intact, but with more potential for upward mobility. Talent still tends to flow in the direction of the cities with the biggest economies and highest-paid jobs, but the changes since 2020 have created opportunities to redirect more talent to places that previous generations had left behind.  Ole Miss built one of the nation’s best football teams because it figured out how to use the changing landscape to its advantage. As a state, Mississippi has not yet followed suit.  Jake McGraw leads the Rethink Mississippi initiative at Working Together Mississippi, a nonpartisan civic engagement organization of nonprofits and religious institutions across the state. He began researching and writing about the brain drain when he moved back to Mississippi more than a decade ago. A native of Oxford, he studied public policy and economics at the University of Mississippi and economic history at Oxford University. You can reach him at [email protected].  ...read more read less