Maybe Larry Fedora emerges as the next football coach at Ole Miss. Maybe.

Whether he does or not, Fedora, the Southern Mississippi coach, didn't need an SEC stage to jab Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen on Monday at his regular news conference leading up to this week's game.

That in itself probably elevated his stock with a number of Ole Miss fans.

Mullen continued his dominance of Ole Miss last week with a 31-3 win over the Rebels in Houston Nutt's final game as coach.

Afterward Mullen, whose team had to win to avoid a losing season, encouraged all Mississippi recruits to get on board.

"Hopefully all the kids in the state of Mississippi understand this is where you have to come to win championships," he said.

Fedora, whose team plays an honest-to-gooodness championship game Saturday, took note and lofted a string of firecrackers onto Mullen's porch.

"We're proud of the fact that all the great players from the state of Mississippi that we have on this football team have an opportunity to actually play for a championship," Fedora said.

Nutt didn't participate much in the verbal sparring in the rivalry series.

The last time Nutt really boasted about his program was prior to the MSU game in 2009. He was responding to questions about a Ku Klux Klan rally on the day of the LSU game and the fact that some recruits chose not to attend the game.

He didn't name anyone but said, "There's a lot of bad information going on out there," regarding what recruits were hearing about Ole Miss.

Nutt went on to say, "Right now we've got a lot of recruits swimming to the boat. One program in the state is getting very strong right now."

The Rebels lost 41-27 at MSU later that week and have won just one SEC regular season game since Nutt made those comments.

There's not a lot of good to be said on behalf of the Rebels in their rivalry with the Bulldogs of late.

Nutt said the rivalry game wasn't a job-killer, but it might as well be. If you're not competitive in that game, then you're likely not winning enough of your other games to make the regular-season finale consequential.

Losing to Mississippi State didn't get Nutt fired, but the constant inability to compete gave a view to problems like attrition and discipline that did.

The banter among coaches makes for entertaining reading.

The next Ole Miss coach, whether Fedora or someone else, needs to get back in the rivalry game and score a few for the Oxford team.

If he wants to talk about it along the way, that's fine. It'll excite the masses.

But the new coach needs to be able to let the scoreboard talk with him as well.

Parrish Alford (parrish.alford@ journalinc.com) covers Ole Miss for the Daily Journal. He blogs daily about Ole Miss athletics at NEMS360.com.