No rivalry here

Saturday's match-up between Southern Miss and Tulane is  known along the I-59 corridor as the Battle for the Liberty Bell.

It's unknown throughout the rest of the country, probably because there isn't much of a rivalry.

Dictionary.com defines the word rival as a person or thing in a position to dispute another's pre-eminence or superiority. If we're using that definition, I'm sorry, but Tulane doesn't qualify.

Southern Miss leads the series with 21 wins and seven losses, but the Eagles have won 13 of the last 15 meetings and outscored the Green Wave 429-188 during that stretch.

One of those losses came in 1998, when the Green Wave went undefeated and won the Liberty Bowl

Tulane followed that great season up with a 3-8 debacle in 1999 and it's been downhill ever since.

The last time the two met in 2006, – a 31-3 romp for Southern Miss – Tulane started punting on third down in the fourth quarter to avoid moving backward down the field. I think we can excuse that since it was the first season since the tragic events of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

While you can bet Golden Eagle coach Larry Fedora won't let his team take Saturday's game lightly, it has to be in the back of everyone's mind that this rivalry isn't much of a contest.

"I don't know (about the player's feelings about a rivalry)," Fedora said. "We talked last night as a team. We want to be 1-0 after this week. Our season started last week. Our goal was to be 1-0; now, we want to be 1-0 this week. It's more about focusing on ourselves more than anything. We will game plan for Tulane and prepare ourselves for Tulane. I can't tell you if the kids feel like it's a rivalry or not. I just don't know."

OK, so maybe that's not a searing indictment of how dominant USM has been in this series, but I would contend we have other regulars on our schedule who fit the definition of  "rival" much better.

While the Eagles have continued the consecutive-winning seasons streak to 15 seasons, the Green Wave has fallen off. Tulane hasn't had a winning season since 2002, and hasn't won more than four games since 2004, when they finished 5-7.

Head coach Bob Toledo has done well everywhere he's been, with a better than .600 record at UCLA and a .750 mark at New Mexico. But it's hard to overcome years of turmoil and poor recruiting.

A quick trip to Rivals.com will show Tulane hasn't ranked higher than ninth in Conference USA in recruiting since 2004, while Southern Miss ranked at the top on the same list five of the last six seasons.

For some perspective, in 2008 Southern Miss signed the best of any non-BCS team. The class included the school's highest-rated recruit in history, DeAndre Brown, along with starters like Kyle Burkhart, Andre Watson and Rolando Barragan. Tulane's 2008 class ranked dead last in the conference and did not feature one signee rated over two (out of five) stars.

This weekend's matchup ought to be another installment of the ownage.

But hey, you never know, it is after all a rivalry game.