Mississippi State fans will have a chance to make history on Saturday.
Bulldog fans attending Mississippi State’s SEC home opener against Missouri and former Ole Miss quarterback Austin Simmons are encouraged to bring one or multiple cowbells to help the school reclaim the cowbell world record.
In 2015, Mississippi State claimed the official Guinness World Record for most people ringing cowbells simultaneously with 5,748 people. While the Bulldogs still currently possess the record, it was recently unofficially broken in Wisconsin.
On Sept. 26, the Bulldogs (3-0, 1-0 SEC) will host the Missouri Tigers (3-0) at Davis Wade Stadium for a 6:45 p.m. kickoff. The night game will also be the Bulldogs’ annual “white-out” game. While it will be the first SEC matchup of the year held in Starkville, it won’t be the only big event happening that day.
“We still actually hold the Guinness World Record, but recently, a hockey team in Milwaukee set the unofficial world record, so we decided we couldn’t have that; so we were going to beat the elite world record,” Mississippi State University Association President Keegan Figueroa said on Good Things with Rebecca Turner. “So if this goes how we hope it does, then we’ll hold every cowbell world record.”
The logistics of reclaiming the record are simple – show up, have your cowbell visible upon entry, and ring them when the time comes – but Figueroa doesn’t want to just beat the record. He wants to crush it.
“[Bring] as many [cowbells] as you can physically hold,” Figueroa said. “Whoever can hold the most cowbells, I might give them a personal award. If you can hold five cowbells in two hands, I’d love to see it. We want to see as many as we can. So just show up to the Missouri game, make sure you’ve got your cowbell and make sure you’re ringing it responsibly.”
When fans arrive at Davis Wade Stadium before kickoff, volunteers in bright green shirts will officially count every cowbell, so Figueroa is asking fans to arrive early and be patient when entering the stadium.
“Whenever you walk into the stadium, they ask you to hold your cowbell above your head whenever you’re walking through the magnetometers, and we’ll have team members at each of those to click the button,” Figueroa explained. “We will have an auditor who’s going to check and verify everything, and they’re going to add all the numbers together.
“If the record’s broken – which I don’t foresee us not beating the record. I think our students and our fans are very passionate about it, and I think they’re all very excited, so I don’t foresee that being an issue. But if the record is broken, we’ll have a presentation, and we’ll get to announce to everybody that we officially hold all the records for cowbells.”
To claim the record and dethrone the current holder, Bulldog fans will have to ring their cowbells simultaneously for a designated amount of time.
“After kickoff, at some point in the first few minutes, we’ll have a 20-second period, because we have to ring them for 20 seconds simultaneously, so that’s when they’ll actually count,” Figueroa said. “So we’ll have that filmed, we’ll have aerial shots, we’ll have photographers all over the place making sure that we can actually record everything and have proper documentation to set world records.
“20 seconds, that’s all it takes. 20 seconds, and we can hold the world record.”