With Assistant Athletics Director of Sports Medicine Pat Jernigan flanked to his left, Matt Corral emerged from the tunnel in the southeast corner of Jordan-Hare Stadium and onto the playing surface.
Keith Carter loomed behind the two and watched as Corral gripped a helmet in his left hand and walked with a purpose despite his compromised gait.
It was the night before Halloween. Corral had entered the visiting locker room a few minutes prior for an x-ray to determine whether his already-battered left ankle had given out. Corral said he heard a pop and then couldn't feel much of anything. He required a golf cart ride to get into the locker room.
"If nothing's broken, I am going back into the game," Corral declared just before the x-ray began.
So then he hobbled back out into the arena, his head down and his face stoic, a stark contrast from the defeated expression on Lane Kiffin's face shortly after Corral initially disappeared into that tunnel. The television camera panned to the second-year head coach crouched down on the sideline with his hands crossed, eyes closed and head down in a pose that could be mistaken for praying.
"I thought it was bad, that it was broken, so I had already gone to that place," Kiffin said. "I was surprised that he came back."
Perhaps everyone was, except Corral himself. He, like Kiffin, knew his team's short and long-term fate if he was unable to continue. That's why he seemed to care very little that his top two receivers were out and he was soon to be without his third in a game his team already trailed 14-3.
Ole Miss lost that night but didn't come completely unglued, and a compromised Corral battling to give the Rebels a chance was the sole reason for it. That moment, maybe more so than any other, encapsulates what Corral became at Ole Miss -- tough, mature, and a relentlessly loyal superstar that carried a program out of a half-decade haze of dysfunction and back to prominence.
Corral delivered one more titan-like performance in a 31-21 Egg Bowl victory last night. It was the final regular season chapter of his legendary career and it came on the very same field in which his story at Ole Miss could've ended two years ago, in far more gloomy fashion.
That's what makes the tale of Matt Corral becoming the hero Ole Miss needed but didn't deserve as fascinating as it is improbable. Think back to November of 2019 for a moment. The Rebels lost their second consecutive Egg Bowl, 21-20, in embarrassing fashion due to Elijah Moore's dog-pee celebration backing up an extra point that tormented a kicker who was already in his own head.
The urination simulation and ensuing missed PAT spoiled a remarkable, game-tying drive orchestrated by Corral in which he shirked play calls from the offensive coordinator that undermined him while trying to save the job of a head coach who failed him.
In a strange way, it almost seemed fitting. Corral had every right to leave that offseason, and it's still a little baffling that he didn't. He arrived at Ole Miss in January of 2018, a few weeks after he signed with the Rebels. It was a marriage that made sense. Corral needed Ole Miss and Ole Miss needed Corral.
He'd just been dropped by his second school because Dan Mullen chose Emory Jones over him. USC dropped him prior to that because of a drastically exaggerated altercation with Wayne Gretzky's son. Matt Luke needed Corral because he needed a spark, something to tangibly point to as evidence that he was in fact up to a job most thought he wasn't equipped for. At the time, the two mens’ futures seemed attached, whether that meant success or failure.
Corral sat behind Jordan Ta'amu throughout the 2018 season. Ole Miss spent that entire next offseason painting him as the face of the program. Corral went to SEC Media Days as a freshman. He was peppered with questions about how he planned to drag this program out of the NCAA-induced crater.
Ole Miss sold him as the core of a nucleus of young offensive talent that would lead the Rebels back to prominence under Luke, only to have Luke and Rich Rodriguez pull the plug on all of that four games into the season, using a rib injury Corral suffered in a home loss to Cal as an opportunity to go with John Rhys Plumlee, a guy who Rodriguez felt fit his system better and looked like more of what he wanted his group's offensive identity to be.
Maybe the greatest irony in all of this is that this remarkable 2021 campaign Corral authored proved him to be the more efficient runner.
In one final, desperate move, Rodriguez and Luke went back to Corral with seven minutes to remaining in the season finale that Thanksgiving night in 2019, trailing 21-14, banking on him to clean up the mess created by their incompetence.
Corral delivered in the form of a 12-play, 82-yard drive in two minutes. Maybe it's fitting that Ole Miss's longest drive of that night came with the 'backup' quarterback under center, shirking play calls from the sideline and ad-libbing on his own.
Corral sought stability when he signed with Ole Miss and was handed dysfunction instead. He was asked a question last week about the 2019 season and his answer began with a pause, "was that the Rich Rod year?" insinuating that he keeps track of time by the different coordinators he's had rather than years.
In this day and age of the transfer portal, players leave programs for far fewer reasons than Corral had. Yet, he stuck with Ole Miss even after it didn't stick with him and fueled a remarkable ascent to stardom as he lugged a program back to relevance.
Lane Kiffin and Jeff Lebby deserve credit in this, too -- for convincing Corral to stay and surrounding him with an improved defense -- but this meteoric rise in two short years does not happen without Corral.
He's the best player on the football team at the most important position and he's done anything and everything asked of him. Ole Miss doesn't go 5-5 and win the Outback Bowl with the worst defense in the Power Five without Corral. Ole Miss doesn't win at Tennessee without Corral. His 30 carries willed the Rebels to a win and were the first time anyone has run the ball 30 times in an Ole Miss uniform since BenJarvus Green-Ellis -- a running back -- in 2007.
Ole Miss might not have beaten LSU the next week had he not gutted out a performance despite his ailing ankle and the ridiculous workload he absorbed seven days prior. And Ole Miss certainly does not notch its first 10-win regular season in history without its unflappably loyal signal caller on the field.
Where Corral ranks on the list of quarterbacks in program history is subjective. But he just might be the most important, given the time at which he played and the state of the program upon his departure contrasted with when he arrived.
He's certainly the one Ole Miss deserved the least. It's sort of fitting that his maturation at Ole Miss can be chronicled through four Egg Bowls. The fight in 2018 showed both the hot-headedness that made other programs question him and the unwavering loyalty to his team and program.
"Remember this and let it fuel you. We're about to go build something big," Luke told Corral as the two shared an embrace caught on camera in the moments after that game.
The 2019 Egg Bowl proved just how hollow those words eventually rang and underscored the incompetence that failed him. The 2020 Egg Bowl showed flashes of what he was gradually becoming and the 2021 edition validated what he is -- a bonafide superstar, the best player on the field and the single biggest difference between victory and defeat.
Maybe it's all fitting, the dysfunction, the coaching turnover, the fall and the rise. Maybe it's fitting that a guy who bounced around to different high schools and was committed to two other programs, had to persevere a little longer to find the stability he needed to become a star.
Fitting, that once he found that stability, he made good on it by evolving from a prospect with generational arm talent and a tendency to make poor decisions to a guy who entered the game last night tied for the fewest interceptions of any Power Five quarterback. Perhaps it is fitting that the apex of Corral's Ole Miss career came in the same building in which it could've feebly ended two years ago.
And maybe it's fitting that the hero Ole Miss needed but didn't quite deserve fueled the ascent of a program to a regular-season win total it had never reached.
