Exactly, once you’ve factored in as what would be 4-6 hour round trip you hafta add another 2 hours for game day traffic. Add in eats at the game, a meal before and after. Most would stay Friday or Saturday nights, and maybe both. You’ve just added 3 more meals eaten out (Ole Miss Softball says, “you had me a meals!”). All the sudden you can easily be looking at $1k-1.5k, that’s for one weekend. If you do 6-7 home games your looking at $10k, and that’s just football.
When you look at the population of SEC cities then putting in an average attendance of 50k is actually pretty impressive. Starkville and Oxford are the only towns with less than 60k, and they’re both less than half that. Putting 50k into a stadium literally puts twice the financial strain per ticket than any other SEC program. That’s why we’d be better off cutting seats and ramping up the game day experience, making those folks feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. Every city outside Mississippi can fill their stadiums with folks that can sleep in their own bed while only eating out once.
And yea it may hurt your Joe Sixpacks a little, but there is still enough of the Kentucky/NC State’s on the schedule to give retail, going-to-one-game-a-year fans ample opportunities to enjoy the Mississippi State game day experience as well. None of that is to say woe is us, it’s simply knowing your audience.
