Sooner or later, someone who did not go to Ole Miss is going to sit down at a table set with The Grove Collection, pick up a joker, and ask why there is a squirrel on it.
I have been looking forward to that question since the day I drew him. Because the honest answer is a little long, and a little ridiculous, and it only makes sense if you have spent time walking under the trees on campus. The football players, anybody can understand. Trash cans in school colors are a little simpler to explain. But the squirrel is different. The squirrel is ours. He is the one design in the whole collection that holds no meaning for anyone on the outside, and that is exactly why I put him there.
The squirrels
The Grove is ten acres of oak, elm, and magnolia in the middle of campus, and it is full of squirrels. There seem to be an unusual number of them, and there is certainly an unusual relationship between them and us. Grove squirrels are not shy. They are anything but. They have been fed from fifty thousand tailgates every Saturday of every fall for seventy years, and it shows. They eat Cane's fries. They raid the red and blue trash cans before the cleanup crew can get to them. They will sit three feet from your sandwich and look up at you with those little eyes until you feel sorry for them, when they are, in fact, anything but hungry. I fall for those greedy little manipulators every time. Every Ole Miss student has a squirrel story, most of us have a squirrel photo, and some of us have a squirrel sticker on a laptop, or even a squirrel game day button.
For a long time that was the whole thing. The squirrels were a campus joke, the kind of thing you only find out about once you are part of the Ole Miss family. And then, on a Saturday in October of 2024, the joke ran onto the field.
Ole Miss was playing Oklahoma. Late in the first quarter, during an injury timeout, a squirrel came out of nowhere and stopped at the seventeen-yard line, and play stopped with him. When the field crew came to shoo him off, he did what any Grove squirrel would do under pressure. He ran fifteen yards right into the end zone. Vaught-Hemingway came apart. The SEC Network posted the clip before the quarter was over, and by Sunday the whole country had seen a squirrel score a touchdown in Oxford. Now, I do not want to mistake correlation for causation, but Ole Miss did win that game, 26 to 14. Just saying.
Two weeks later Georgia came to town, and a squirrel ran onto the field again. This time he went straight for the Georgia sideline. The luck of the squirrel held, and Ole Miss won that one too.
The landscaping crew, the same people who set out the trash cans every Friday, were asked for a theory. They offered several. He was after popcorn. He wanted attention. He had been trained by a rival school. He only came out during live play and never during commercials, which, if true, would suggest a squirrel with a sense of timing. Nobody on that crew mentioned that Ole Miss was undefeated in games he attended, or that he ran toward the end zone the first time and toward the other team's bench the second, or that both of those are exactly where you would want a good luck charm to go. I am not going to tell you which of these theories I believe, as I try my best as a writer to maintain a completely unbiased point of view at all times.
The squirrel is ours.
The mascot we never voted on
Here is a piece of Ole Miss history you can tell at a tailgate. The university has changed its mascot three times in my lifetime, and every single time, people argued. Colonel Reb was retired. The Rebel Black Bear came and went. Tony the Landshark arrived in 2017, named for a beloved linebacker, and has mostly stayed home since. Students have been divided on all of it for decades. Last fall the student newspaper ran an opinion piece under the headline "Change the university mascot one last time, please." The author's candidate was the squirrel.
That piece was a joke, and it was also not a joke, which is the exact register the squirrel lives in. Nobody has ever held a vote. Nobody has ever needed to. While the school spent years deciding what to put on the sideline, the squirrels kept showing up in The Grove every Saturday, eating our food, getting their pictures taken, and even occasionally scoring. The Alumni Association sells a Rally Squirrel plush. There is an adopt-a-squirrel fundraiser. The official university social accounts post squirrel content all the time, and it is always a hit. He is the mascot the family picked without ever being asked.
It is the same thing we did with the trash cans. Something small and ordinary that nobody planned, made into something that belongs to us and could only be Ole Miss. We cannot seem to help ourselves. Give Ole Miss an ordinary thing and leave it alone long enough, and we will eventually make it a tradition.
Give Ole Miss an ordinary thing and leave it alone long enough, and we will eventually make it a tradition.
Why the jokers
In American mahjong, the joker is the tile that can be anything. Say your hand needs one more Five Crak and you don't have it. You put a joker in its place, and the hand is complete. It stands in for whatever is missing. It is the one tile in the set with no fixed identity, the one that fills the gap.
So the squirrel was always going to be the joker. The school has never truly settled on a mascot, and for a lot of us, the squirrel has subtly filled that gap. The joker has no suit of its own, and the squirrel has no official anything. So I put the stand-in on the stand-in. It was one of the most fun and most satisfying design decisions I got to make in the whole collection, and it took me about four seconds to officially choose.
There is a simpler reason too. He is cute as can be. I drew a real Grove squirrel, soft gray and brown, up on his haunches with his tail curled behind him and that look on his face, the one that means your sandwich is being considered. Then I tied a red Ole Miss bandana around his neck, because how adorable is that. The tiles are built in layers and the art is embossed, so under your thumb you can feel the fold of the bandana on that very cute little squirrel. Okay, maybe not so little. But still very cute. All ten jokers have him, because in my completely unbiased opinion, you do not improve on a Grove squirrel in an Ole Miss bandana.
Members only
I have said in every one of these stories that mahjong is about who ends up across the table from you. The squirrel is my favorite proof of it. Because the first time someone from outside the family picks up a joker and asks about him, someone who already knows will lean in and say, "Okay, so," and tell them about the touchdown. And then the trash cans. And then the time a squirrel stole an entire order of fries in The Grove. And in about four minutes the person who asked will understand that there is something special about Ole Miss that no tour or brochure could have told them.
That is what the joker is for. It is a tile that starts a story.
It is a tile that starts a story.
So this one is for the squirrels, and for everybody who has ever shared a sandwich with one. Set the table. Draw a joker. And when somebody asks, make sure you tell them all about our favorite fuzzy friends.