NCAA Desk · Ole Miss · The Blueprint Rankings · Article 021 · By Cash Emerson Roper · October 31, 2026 · 10:47 AM ET

The 6 Most Famous People to Visit the Grove

Ten acres of oaks stand at the center of the Ole Miss campus. On a football weekend, the grass beneath them disappears. White tents rise in straight rows. Silver trays come out. Fried chicken gets served on good china. Chandeliers hang from the branches. Twenty-five thousand people fill the shade.

They dress like it is a wedding. They eat like it is a family reunion. In the Grove, it is both. Nobody does this anywhere else in America. Nobody even tries. This is the most famous tailgate in the country, and it is not close.

Here is the part visitors never expect. The Grove has no velvet rope. There is no better grass for famous people. There is no quiet corner behind a fence. A movie star waits in the same line as a freshman. A governor eats the same chicken. Everybody gets a plate. Everybody gets treated like family.

People fly in from everywhere to see it. They come from other coasts. They come from rival schools. They plan whole falls around one morning under these trees. Then they go home and tell everybody it was better than the stories. It always is.

For four years, this was my front yard. My classroom sat in Croft Hall, a building that served as a hospital during the Civil War. I took Chinese there at eight in the morning. Through the window, I watched the tents go up.

Lee Fitting ran College GameDay for two decades. I met him on a ferry the year after I graduated. He told me the show had wanted Oxford for twenty-seven years. When it finally came, he said, it "blew everybody's expectations out of the water." He was talking about the Grove. Everybody who comes here says some version of the same thing.

No. 6 — Charlie Day

Charlie Day did not visit the Grove. He kept showing up in it.

I saw him again and again when I was a student there. He was simply part of the scenery on a Saturday.

His wife is Mary Elizabeth Ellis. She grew up in Laurel, Mississippi, in an Ole Miss family. Oxford is her home turf. That is why Day kept coming back. He married into the Grove, and the Grove kept him.

Ellis plays the Waitress on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Day co-created that show, and he plays Charlie Kelly. My roommate and best friend and I were obsessed with it. We quoted it until it became a second language in our apartment.

I got to say hi to him in Oxford. There was no barrier. No handler stepped in. He was a guy walking to a football game with his family. That is exactly how the Grove treats everybody.

The whole Sunny family became Grove people. They came because this is where their people are. Famous folks pass through a lot of towns and forget them by Tuesday. Day never had that option. His family lives here.

No. 5 — Danny DeVito

Danny DeVito has been famous for fifty years. Taxi made him a star. Twins and Batman Returns and Matilda made him a legend. He is one of the most recognizable faces on earth. Then he came to Oxford with the Sunny cast, and Mississippi treated him like a neighbor.

He walked around town talking to fans. No rope line. No handlers clearing a path. No perimeter at all. Just Danny DeVito, on a sidewalk, having ordinary conversations with strangers.

Think about the rooms this man has stood in. Premieres in Los Angeles. Award shows in New York. Half a century of red carpets. In Oxford, he got a plate of fried chicken on good china. He got a crowd that folded him into the family. He looked right at home. Everybody does.

That is the Grove's whole trick. Show up as a person, and you get received as one. DeVito showed up as a person. Fifty years of stardom never bought him a separate entrance, because the Grove does not sell one. It just hands you a plate and points you toward the shade.

No. 4 — Matthew McConaughey

Let me tell you what I saw with my own eyes.

I saw Matthew McConaughey in the Grove again and again. Texas games. LSU games. The biggest weekends on the calendar, and there he was, under our oaks.

Everybody knows whose fan he is. His heart belongs to Texas, and he has never hidden it. He is the most famous football fan in America. His Saturdays are a storyline all by themselves, every single fall.

And still he came to Oxford. Not once, as a novelty. Again and again, as a habit.

That tells you what the Grove is. It is bigger than the rivalry on the field. It does not check your colors at the tree line. It hands you a plate and a drink and a place to stand. Then it lets the best tailgate in America make its own argument.

McConaughey heard that argument over and over during my four years there. He kept coming back for more of it. So did everybody else who ever made the trip once. The Grove does not do one-time visitors. It does regulars.

No. 3 — Katy Perry

October 4, 2014. I will put that date against any day in Ole Miss history.

College GameDay came to the Grove for the first time that morning. The set stood right there among the tents. Katy Perry was the guest picker. It was the first college football game she had ever attended. She picked Ole Miss. She was the only person on the panel who did.

Then the Rebels went out and beat Alabama, 23–17. Number one in the country, beaten in our stadium. The field stormed. The goalposts came down.

I helped carry one of those goalposts to the Square. My hands were on the metal. My friends were beside me. Students hauled it through the streets like a trophy from a war we had finally won.

That night, Katy Perry crowd-surfed at Funky's, a bar on the Square. The biggest pop star on earth, passed hand over hand above a room full of students. Nobody treated her like a visiting celebrity. They treated her like she belonged there. By then, she did.

ESPN later named her the best celebrity guest picker in GameDay history. She earned it in one morning. She picked the home team. Then she stayed for the party.

No. 2 — Bill Clinton

A President of the United States came to the Grove. Let that sit for a second.

Bill Clinton stood under these oaks and spoke to thousands of students. I was there, during my years at Ole Miss. The lawn filled up the way it fills on a Saturday. Students stood shoulder to shoulder on the same grass where the tents go up.

He did not need a stadium. He did not need an arena. When the most famous politician in the world needed a room in Mississippi, he chose ten acres of oak trees.

That is what the Grove is to this state. It is Mississippi's front porch. It is the room where the state receives its guests. It holds a crowd for a speech the way it holds one for a tailgate. Completely. With everybody standing on the same grass.

Famous people get offered every room in America. A president picked this one. He stood where freshmen eat fried chicken on china. He talked to us like the place was built for it. Maybe it was.

No. 1 — Morgan Freeman

Morgan Freeman is not a visitor in Oxford. He is a fixture. In the Grove, that is the highest title there is.

When I was a student, he was on campus all the time. I saw him courtside at basketball games, again and again. A visiting player once hit a three and pointed at him in the crowd. Nobody made a fuss about any of it. The most decorated actor of his generation was simply there, the way he was always there.

He co-owns the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, up the road in the Delta. Twice in college, I went to his club as a date to a sorority formal. Her formal. Her invitation. His club. The most famous voice in American film ran a blues room where sophomores took their dates. Both towns treated it as completely normal. That is what a fixture means.

And he is still coming. This September, GameDay came back to the Grove for the LSU game. The guest picker was Morgan Freeman. He wore an Ole Miss cap. He picked the Rebels.

Plenty of famous people visited the Grove once and told the story forever. Freeman never left the story. He is part of the furniture of the place. He is part of its memory. He is part of its family. That is why he is number one.

The names will keep changing. The chandeliers will keep going up at seven. I picked this school on the Grove's worst day, in freezing sleet, and I have never second-guessed it. Neither has anybody else who ever made the trip.

Sources

ESPN and College GameDay — Katy Perry, guest picker in 2014, later named the best in the show's history.

ESPN and College GameDay — Morgan Freeman, guest picker in the Grove, September 2026.

Clarion Ledger — GameDay in the Grove coverage, 2014 and 2026.

UWire — coverage of Bill Clinton speaking in the Grove, 2010.

Firsthand accounts of the author, from his years at Ole Miss.

Cash Emerson Roper hosts Front Office Blueprint, a daily sports-business show based in Orlando. His background is coaching and the building: head varsity baseball, football, and basketball coach, strength-and-conditioning work with college and pro athletes, and two seasons (2016–18) running game-night promotions for the ECHL’s South Carolina Stingrays.

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