Nine days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks rocked the nation, Mississippi State hosted one of the most important football games in American history. This simple act of playing a game would help the country and its people start down the pathway of recovery.

“9/20,” an MSU Films documentary about the 2001 Southeastern Conference football game between MSU and the University of South Carolina Gamecocks—the first major post-9/11 sporting event held in the U.S.—makes its national television debut on SEC Network at 7 p.m. CDT on Sept. 11 and will be immediately available for streaming at films.msstate.edu following the broadcast.

Told through archival footage and interviews of those who made the game happen both on and off the field, MSU filmmakers examine a watershed moment when Americans turned to sports as a momentary escape from tragedy and a return to normalcy.

“There was a great deal of enthusiasm moving into the 2001 football season. MSU had beaten Texas A&M in the ‘Snow Bowl,’ an all-time classic Independence Bowl game. We were on the national radar as a program on the rise, and we won our first game that year. Then, you get to the morning of Sept. 11, and everything related to athletics is no longer important,” said David Garraway, University Television Center director and coproducer of “9/20.”

A lot was riding on the game outside of the SEC standings and the two top-20 teams’ rankings. Americans, unsure of how to proceed with life as usual, needed some sort of restart, and the White House contacted then-SEC Commissioner Roy Kramer, urging him to move forward with the game after sporting events—and most large-scale public gatherings—had been canceled since the attack. To ease Americans’ anxiety, security at Davis Wade Stadium and the entire MSU campus was heightened to new levels. The Bulldogs and Gamecocks would play under a no-fly zone.

“In the very first days after 9/11—those days of uncertainty and fear—we find a society looking for normalcy. Sports are such an indelible part of the American experience, and they became a refuge,” Garraway said. “When America needed competitive sports to move forward from this tragedy, Mississippi State rose to the occasion.”

More than 40,000 people filled Davis Wade Stadium on Sept. 20, 2001, and ESPN’s national broadcast captured numerous moments of patriotism and solidarity, from chants of “U-S-A!” and the Famous Maroon Band’s rendition of “America the Beautiful” to Bulldog and Gamecock players unveiling a large American Flag spanning the width of the field.

“Once you actually got on that field and held that enormous American Flag … nobody cared if you were a Republican or a Democrat, or a Mississippi State fan or South Carolina fan,” said former Bulldog quarterback Wayne Madkin. “At that particular time, it was bigger than all of us. And we were Americans.”

The University Television Center, along with the MSU Films initiative, has won 24 Emmy Awards in the last four years, including seven Emmys from 13 nominations this summer, making it the most Emmy-awarded organization in the Magnolia State. Learn more about MSU Films at www.films.msstate.edu.

Mississippi State University is taking care of what matters. Learn more at www.msstate.edu.