Whenever college football analysts, both the official and couch variety, discuss Mississippi State football head coach Dan Mullen, they talk about how well he has done his second season persuading his players to buy into his program. In fact, second-year success has been a recurring theme throughout Mullen’s coaching career.
Ten games into his second season in Starkville, there is no question that Mullen’s team has exceeded expectations, and the excitement generated has translated into games airing on ESPN every week and sold-out stadiums at home. The announcers always speak highly of Starkville as a community and relatively small college town, and the exposure MSU gives the city should be worth its weight in gold.
But is it really? Well, that depends on who you ask.
Certainly, the economic impact of having over 55,000 fans in town for a day or more is a positive for most businesses in Starkville. The success of the football program could make all the difference between a sold-out stadium and just a respectable showing of 40,000. An extra 15,000 fans means big bucks for the bottom lines of local retailers, restauranteurs and other businesses.
But surprisingly, one other variable can have an even more dramatic effect on the economy during football season: the kickoff time. During good times or bad, the kickoff time of any particular game can go a long way toward making an economically good game day for Starkville, or the city’s best approximation of a Super Bowl weekend.
In the retail sector, a kickoff time that gets people into town spending money all day is obviously the ideal situation, especially when that retailer sells Mississippi State Bulldog-themed items.
With the exception of the conveniently-located Barnes & Noble, the most extensive collection of fan gear and MSU specialty items can be found at The Lodge.
So it comes as no surprise that general manager John Hendricks said the retailer has seen sharply increased sales in 2010.
“With the sellouts and the stadium bringing more people into town, that’s more people that will shop and spend time and spend money,” he said. “So everybody benefits, and we do as well with the specialty fan shop. There may be a few merchants that don’t see as dramatic influx, but with that many people in town, it’s their opportunity to advertise at that time and maybe get a bit of that business.”
Hendricks said he believes nearly every business feels the boom when the Bulldogs are hosting at Davis Wade Stadium.
“In addition to that, there’s more people to eat at the restaurants,” he said. “Hotels are full, people buy gas at gas stations, the grocery stores are selling tailgate food and ice, and it just benefits the entire community.”
Hendricks, who has been at The Lodge since 1978, said the success of the football team is very important to his business in particular, a trend he’s noticed for many years.
“It’s significantly better [this year] than Croom’s last year,” he said. “Last year was good, with Mullen and the excitement we started selling out the stadium. This year and last year have both been pretty good and comparable. It’s just numbers, people. Hopefully, if we get the stadium enlarged, it will increase even more.”
However, he said the kickoff time and even the day of the week still make all the difference when totaling up receipts after the open sign is turned.
“With us, the 6 p.m. kickoff times make a dramatic difference because it gives people more time to shop,” he said. “If kickoff is at 11:30 a.m. or 2:30 p.m., we lose half the day and almost half the potential business. The Thursday night game is a non-event. They’re in and out; there’s not much tailgating. It’s a work day and school day the next day, and it’s just very quick.”
Hendricks said the number of Saturday night games this season has made the 2010 football season very profitable for The Lodge.
However, the same cannot necessarily be said for the dining sector around Starkville. If 55,000 people are in Starkville watching the Bulldogs play on Scott Field, restaurants would rather see them in the sun, working up an appetite and ready to find a place to eat when they stow their cowbells away after the game.
Mark Sheffer, general manager of local franchise restaurant Ruby Tuesday, said he managed a restaurant in Tuscaloosa before moving to Starkville and is very familiar with the dynamics of hungry diners on game day.
“I’ve been here three years in this restaurant, and I was in Tuscaloosa before I came here,” he said. “So I know how that bears upon a business. I agree with the fact that [the success of the team] does have a huge impact on our business. You can take it through the whole dichotomy of the Croom era, with a lot of excitement the first year, and that momentum carried us through that first year. After the second year, it dropped off. Usually the expectations of a new season really help the business. Depending on what happens, then you see it taper off.”
However, he said kickoff time is what really drives his business. If visitors are in the stands during dinner, instead of seated in booths at local restaurants, the profits simply are not the same.
“A.m. kickoff, we probably double our sales,” he said. “Alcorn, we were jam-packed. The 7 o’clock kickoff really hurt us. Six o’clock still hurts us. Particularly with the 11 o’clock kickoffs, as soon as that game is over, people are lining the roads. Two-thirty kickoff, same thing, people come out and enjoy themselves before they travel back. Some of them stay in town. But I can show you sales trends from years in times of kickoffs, the a.m. kickoffs benefit us the most.”
Sheffer said with the games being shown by ESPN instead of another broadcaster, an indicator of how well the Bulldogs have done this year, TBD on the schedule has usually meant a hit to his business.
“You really don’t know, with a lot of them ‘to be determined,'” he said. “If they don’t win, let’s say the SEC network has open weeks where they pick up games. Someone will pick that game up, and usually it’s earlier games. If they don’t do quite what they’re supposed to, and RayCompicks that game up, that’s an eleven o’clock kickoff. That’s huge for us. Whenever I see a TBD, I’m very skeptical, and that all depends on how they’re doing. Had we been on CBS, with 2:30 p.m. kickoffs, no question we would have done better than we did.”
Sheffer said he believes other managers feel the same way, and would like to get together with the university to see if the schedule could be more balanced in future seasons, to benefit more businesses in Starkville.
Of course if you really want to look at the impact of a football season on the local economy, the best place to see that is on the city’s ledgers. Greater Starkville Development Partnership provided The Reflectorwith sales tax data reaching back to 1988, to examine the monthly impact of football on Starkville.
While the general feeling among businesses may be that positive seasons lead to positive economics in Starkville, the data in recent years does not exactly bear that out and shows mixed results, at best.
For example, one of the largest increases from one year to the next in recent years happened during the 2005 season, when Sylvester Croom’s Bulldogs posted a 3-8 record. For the year, the city posted a 10.02 percent overall increase compared to 2004, with no fall football month dipping below 14.51 percent. However, the next season, sales fell off, even showing a net decrease of −2.72 percent for October 2006, and the 2007 bowl season showed only minimal growth.
In the Dan Mullen era, Starkville posted an increase of almost 15 percent in November 2009 over the previous year. Most other months showed a net decrease, which could also be attributed to the overall gloomy economy last year. Data during the 2010 season is not yet available.
However, during the 1999 season when Jackie Sherrill’s 10-2 Bulldogs won the Peach Bowl, Starkville posted all positive growth, including a 15.72 percent increase in August, 10 percent higher than the month before.
The Sherrill era, which began with a rush of excitement in 1991, kicked off an enormous period of growth for Starkville. Long-time residents who remember Starkville before coach Sherrill say both the university and the town have changed significantly since then. Whether that growth is directly attributable to the successes of the Sherrill years is debatable, but that the two went hand in hand is not.
While we will not know the impact of the Mullen era for years to come, Starkville businesses say it feels like good times are here again.
But having to apply a little sunscreen in Davis Wade Stadium would not hurt, either.