re: In 1998 Mississippi St. and Tennessee played for the SEC Championship.

There are two big things you have to consider about State in '98 and '99:

1. They didn't have to play Tennessee, Florida, or Georgia in the regular season either year.

2. LSU and Auburn were both bad at the time.

Those were good State teams but they absolutely benefited from a favorable schedule. And shoot, they didn't even beat all of the bad teams they played (lost badly to Okie State and LSU in '98) and other times it was a massive struggle to beat bad teams (Auburn and LSU in '99). Nostalgia has made those two teams better to State fans than they may have actually been, in my opinion Mullen had at least 2-3 teams that were probably as good or better than those two years in the late 90's.

I'm not sure the 2000 State teams wasn't the best of that era, or at least they should have been. Beat both division winners that year (Florida and Auburn) and still somehow managed to lose four games. They controlled their own destiny in the West going into the last two games and blew double digit leads in both of them.