Jackson Free Press

The University of Mississippi is one of a few SEC football teams in a unique position going into this season. The Rebels have a proven starter at quarterback while most of the conference is looking for answers in that position.

Rebels quarterback Chad Kelly and University of Tennessee quarterback Joshua Dobbs are the only returning starters who were ranked in the top five in passing yards. The rest of the top five, Dak Prescott, Brandon Allen and Jake Coker, are all in the NFL now.

Former Texas A&M University quarterback Kyle Allen, who was sixth in passing yards, is now at the University of Houston. Louisiana State University quarterback Brandon Harris, seventh in passing, might be the starter for the Tigers, but his performance was up and down at best last season.

Patrick Towles, eighth in passing, transferred from the University of Kentucky to Boston College after Drew Parker replaced him as the starter. University of Georgia quarterback Greyson Lambert, ninth in passing, and University of South Carolina quarterback Perry Orth, 10th in passing, are locked in a battle for the starting job at their respective programs.

Auburn University is trying to find a starter out of a trio of quarterbacks, including two who earned playing time last season and a junior-college transfer. The University of Alabama is also working with three quarterbacks, trying to find out who will separate himself from the others.

The University of Florida has named Luke Del Rio as its new starter since both starters from last season have left the school to play elsewhere. The University of Arkansas has named Austin Allen as the player to replace Brandon Allen under center.

Texas A&M will start transfer Trevor Knight at quarterback after Kyle Allen left for Houston. The University of Missouri will have quarterback Drew Lock, who won four games in four starts last season.

Vanderbilt University will go with Kyle Shurmur at quarterback after limited playing time last season. Shurmer joins Austin Allen at Arkansas, Del Rio at Florida, and Lock at Missouri on the list of quarterbacks who have little or no starts for their respective programs.

Mississippi State University might go into the season looking for a starter between Nick Fitzgerald, Damian Williams and Nick Tiano. Bulldogs head coach Dan Mullen has gone with multiple quarterbacks before, as with Chris Leak and Tim Tebow at Florida and Tyler Russell and Prescott at MSU.

Kelly and Dobbs will have a chance to lead their teams to division titles as the rest of the conference works to figure out who will take the reins at quarterback. The rare exceptions are Alabama and LSU, who both have strong defenses and powerful running games, and just need quarterbacks who won’t lose them games.

The rest of the SEC could see their bowl hopes go down in flames if they can’t find the right player under center. MSU is one of those teams …

It's convenient to presume that Mississippi will bleed red on Election Day, but if that's true, then a fair question follows. Why would Donald Trump waste time and resources stopping in Jackson, Miss., this evening for a $1,000 per ticket fundraiser and rally?

Polling done in Mississippi this presidential year might help explain why. An April Mason-Dixon poll only favored Trump to Hillary Clinton by three percentage points, a slim margin for a candidate who won the primary election in Mississippi with an 11-point advantage over Ted Cruz, Politico reports. A second poll, conducted by Magellan Strategies and commissioned by Y'all Politics, revealed a larger gap between the two candidates, with Trump leading by 13 percentage points.

One question in the Magellan poll gave Mississippians three options: Trump, Clinton or Undecided. Fifty-four percent chose Trump; 39 percent chose Clinton; and 7 percent were undecided.

FiveThirtyEight gives Clinton only a 14-percent chance of winning Mississippi's six electoral votes, but that number is a result of the weighted analysis of only two polls: the Mason-Dixon and Magellan polls.

November has the potential to be a competitive election, depending on which poll you believe, and as NewsMax pointed out: "The last time a Democrat presidential candidate won the state was Jimmy Carter in 1976," but it's likely too early to confidently project a solid winner.

Nearly everyone this preseason has gone gaga over Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott’s performance this NFL preseason by. Well, unless you’re Fox Sports radio personality Colin Cowherd.

Unless you’re Cowherd or thinks like he does, it is hard not to be impressed with the way Prescott has played in two games. It is the preseason, after all, but with each throw and each play, the budding legend of Dak grows.

In his first start in his first game, Prescott went 10 of 12 passing for 139 yards with two touchdown passes. The two incompletions were drops from a backup tight end against the Los Angeles Rams.

The Internet went wild, and rightly so. Prescott’s performance was great for a guy who was picked in the fourth round and expected to sit behind Kellen Moore as the third-string guy. Instead, Moore broke his leg, and Prescott was thrust into the backup spot.

It seemed right to slow down the hype train with just one game under his belt. But Prescott went on to put on a show in his second preseason game.

When Dallas played the Miami Dolphins this past weekend, Prescott got to work with both the starters and No. 2 players on the depth chart. It might have been a new week, but it was the same performance, if not better, than week one.

Prescott went 12 for 15 passing for 199 yards and two touchdown passes and ran two more in for touchdowns. In his second game, Prescott had a four-touchdown game, has yet to throw an interception and has taken just one sack.

Cowherd wasn’t impressed, but the rest of the Internet was going bonkers for Prescott. In the preseason, Prescott has gone 22 of 27 passing for 338 yards with four touchdowns passing and two touchdowns rushing.

He has an 81.5 completion percentage and a 158.3 passer rating. The former Mississippi State University star leads all rookie quarterbacks in nearly every passing stat.

Cowherd might not be impressed yet, but maybe he can be convinced if he sees the stats.

So far in the preseason, 22 quarterbacks, including Prescott, have seen some sort of playing time. Those 22 quarterbacks include the 15 that were drafted and the rest who were signed as undrafted free agents.

During the draft, seven quarterbacks were drafted ahead of Prescott, and one was drafted just four spots behind him. One of the quarterbacks, Christian Hackenberg, who the New York Jets drafted out of Pennsylvania State University, has yet to even take one snap in the preseason.

For our purposes, only quarterbacks who have attempted 20 or more attempted passes will get a full rundown. That means Cleveland Browns quarterback Cody Kessler, drafted out of the University of Southern California in the third round, doesn’t make the list with his five pass attempts.

The first overall pick …

The House District 72 special election will head to a run-off between Debra Gibbs and Synarus Green on Sep. 13.

Election results from a Hinds County Election Commission spokeswoman are as follows:

• Synarus Green-642
• Debra Gibbs-641
• Theresa Kennedy-169
• Shae Buchanon-Williams-138

Either Gibbs or Green will replace attorney Kimberly Campbell and finish her three-year term in the Mississippi House of Representatives. To read interviews with Gibbs and Green, visit jacksonfreepress.com/elections2016.

The 2016 Olympic games are done, and the USA nearly lapped the field in the medal count. It wasn’t even close for first place in medals, but second and third place was a race.

When the Olympics ended with the closing ceremony, the U.S. had won 121 total medals. That out-did the previous best of 110 from Beijing in 2008.

The U.S. finished 51 medals ahead of China, which had 70 total medals and finished in second place. Great Britain finished in third with 67 total medals.

Team USA was comprised of 554 athletes, and 213 of those took home a medal. In the 27 sports that the U.S. had athletes competing, they brought home a medal in 20 of those sports.

Swimming and track and field are where the U.S. pulled away from the rest of the world. In those two sports, the U.S. won 65 medals, which would have been good for fourth place in total medals if the sports were their own country.

The reason the U.S. was able to dominate the Olympics was because of its women. Of the 121 medals the U.S. won, women received 61, the men received 55, and five medals were in mixed events such as equestrian and mixed-doubles tennis.

The U.S. women won 27 of the team’s 46 gold medals, and if the women were their own country, that would tie them with Great Britain second most gold medals. The 61 medals the women won would have landed them fourth on the medal count if they were their own nation.

This is the second Olympics where the women have brought home more medals than the men. In London, the women won 58 medals to 45 medals for the men, and those Olympics games were the first where the women had ever won more medals than the men.

The U.S. women won three more medals in Rio than they did in London, but the U.S. men tried to catch up by winning 10 more medals in Rio.

This has been a climb for the U.S. women since the 1970s. In 1972, congress passed Title IX, which barred sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding. At the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, the U.S. women won 23 medals, and the men won 71 medals.

Title IX led to high-school and college sports for women growing at a faster rate and eventually led to the U.S. women becoming a powerhouse on the global sports stage.

The Olympics has added more women’s sports to the games over the years such as women’s boxing. That has led to more medal opportunities for women at the games than in the past.

Like in London, the U.S. women outnumbered the men on team USA in Rio. The women made up 291 members of the 554-member team, with the U.S. men making up the other 263 members.