This weekend is the second annual True Maroon game. In case you’re not sure, this means you should wear maroon to the football game. Unfortunately, getting fans to wear maroon to a Mississippi State football game isn’t as easy as MSU could hope. Apparently, it takes nothing short of charity to make this happen. Regardless of the reason, I’m glad there’s finally some push to encourage fanhood.
I’ve had the opportunity to go to plenty of college football games. It’s a game that has no equal compared to almost all professional sports, and this is more true in the SEC. Having gone to games at more than half of the SEC’s schools, I always see the same things: passionate fans, exciting atmosphere and unquestioned support. But, the most obvious representation of support is wearing your school’s colors. When you go to Georgia, everyone wears black and red; when you go to Florida, everyone wears blue and orange; when you go to Kentucky, it’s blue and white. This is pretty straightforward.
When I’ve gone to any particular Mississippi State game, I can’t help but notice the hodge-podge of random colors – yellow, green even pink mixed with a few spots of maroon and white in the stadium. This seems strange considering it doesn’t seem to be a problem for any other schools in the conference to wear their colors on a regular basis to six or seven home games. Are maroon and white rare, off-putting colors that no one can find? I don’t think so – particularly since in Starkville, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a person with a “maroon is all that matters” T-shirt. But then again, you also can’t throw a rock without hitting a pink MSU hat or T-shirt either.
I’ve asked around for years why people don’t just wear their school colors to games. After all, it’s not like you have to make your entire wardrobe only maroon and white and burn everything else. The most common response I get is, “I don’t want to wear the same thing to every football game,” “There just aren’t that many cute maroon outfits” or “I’m not wearing white to a football game.” The truth is there’s no reason that these should keep anybody from wearing something that at least resembles a connection to MSU. Girls can still look like they walked from the cotillion ball and into Davis Wade Stadium without sacrificing team spirit.
To look at this, we just need to consider schemes, not play schemes like the spread or the wishbone, but color schemes.
Maroon and white are ridiculously common colors, and honestly our maroon is more of a burgundy than anything else. So look, you could wear black, white, dark purple, tan, just anything besides some completely non-sequitor primary color (or even the other team’s colors). As I recall, our basketball team once even had grey jerseys for a game or two in the ’90s: wear that.
I understand it’s a tradition in the South to dress nicely for football games, and I honestly have no problem with that. Fine Southern ladies and gentlemen in their cocktail dresses and blazers are an interesting tradition, but why not opt for the maroon blazer instead of the Jackson State-blue one you have on. If all else fails, wear a maroon poncho, or the traditional MSU headgear: a brown paper bag.
Luckily, there are steps being made to put MSU fans in the right direction. Ideas like this year’s promotion to wear maroon on Fridays and the SA’s Maroon and White program which encourages clothiers to provide discounts on maroon and white clothing to MSU students will hopefully get some people into their school colors.
Unfortunately, the problem has nothing to do with clothing options and everything to do with team pride. I can hardly justify someone going out of their way to wear the colors of a team who wins an average of three out of 12 games. The people who you see in their hot pink party dresses at State games probably do wear their colors in three out of 12 games.
I still can’t help but imagine how disheartening it is to step up to the line of scrimmage and look up to a disinterested stadium of fans wearing their hodge-podge of colors like they just walked in from the grocery store.
If MSU fans try just a little harder to wear something even slightly resembling the team colors, maybe our athletes will think the crowds are there to support the team instead of to buy overpriced hot dogs and sit around for four hours.
Kyle Wrather is the news editor of The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected].